About Jeff Kallman

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

Can Bob Gibson knock this opponent down?

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

MLB: Cincinnati Reds at St. Louis Cardinals

Bob Gibson (with glasses) enjoying a laugh with fellow Hall of Famers (l to r) Red Schoendienst, Whitey Herzog, and Lou Brock, while celebrating an anniversary of the Cardinals’ 1968 pennant winner.

Bob Gibson wanted the edge every time he took the mound. And in his absolute prime he got it, never mind that his reputation as an intimidating headhunter is more than slightly exaggerated, about which more to come. But what Henry Aaron, Dick Allen, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Carl Yastrzemski among others couldn’t do, one particularly pernicious opponent now just might.

Gibson sent his fellow living Hall of Famers a letter informing them that he’s battling pancreatic cancer. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says Gibson visited Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital and been hospitalised in his native Omaha for two weeks, anticipating a chemotherapy program to begin Monday. Hall of Famer Jack Morris revealed Gibson’s struggle while announcing a Twins game Saturday.

It’ll keep Gibson from attending the annual Hall of Fame induction a week from today. And it has more than just the Cardinals’ considerable fan base praying for the 83-year-old former pitcher with the whip-like delivery, the sprawling follow-through, the glare from the mound before beginning his windup that made him resemble a quiet storm about to release its full fury.

Those who remember Gibson’s follow-through and finish, in which he resembled a leaning tree with his glove resembling a hanging grapefruit at one branch’s end, may wonder how on earth he could field his position. Much as they do when remembering the late Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, whose yanking sidearm delivery yanked him almost all the way to the grass on the first base side of the mound as if he’d been knocked over by an oncoming car.

Yet Gibson won Gold Gloves for his position consecutively from 1965-73. Bunning, God rest his soul, would probably have won the Concrete Glove if they’d given one.

There was an aggressive elegance to Gibson’s attack on the mound captured best by Roger Angell, in The New Yorker, in an essay called “Distance,” republished in Late Innings: A Baseball Companion in 1982:

Everything about him looked mean and loose—arms, elbows, shoulders, even his legs—as, with a quick little shrug, he launched into his delivery. When there was no one on base, he had an old fashioned full crank-up, with the right foot turning in mid-motion to slip into its slot in fromt of the mound and his long arms coming together over his head before his backward lean, which was deep enough to require him to peer over his left shoulder at his catcher while his upraised left leg crooked and kicked. The ensuing sustained forward drive was made up of a medium-sized strike of that leg and a blurrily fast, slinglike motion of the right arm, which came over at about three-quarters height and then snapped down and (with the fastball and the slider) across his left knee. It was not a long drop-down delivery like Tom Seaver’s . . . or a tight, brisk, body-opening motion like Whitey Ford’s . . . He always looked much closer to the plate at the end than any other pitcher; he made pitching seem unfair.

Angell may have been the only baseball writer to whom Gibson’s coming election to the Hall of Fame had its disturbing side: “He seemed too impatient, too large, and too restless a figure to be stilled and put away in this particular fashion; somehow, he would shrug off the speeches and honorifics when they came, just as he had busied himself unhappily on the mound when the crowd stopped the rush of the game to cheer him at Busch Stadium that afternoon in 1968. For me, at least, Bob Gibson was still burning to pitch to the next batter.”

The writer so wrongly referred to as baseball’s Homer, when in fact Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell, referred to Game One of the 1968 World Series, the day Gibson broke Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s record for strikeouts in a World Series game. He tied Koufax when he struck out Hall of Famer Al Kaline in the top of the ninth, and his catcher Tim McCarver held onto the ball while pointing toward the center field scoreboard announcing the feat.

“Throw the goddam ball back, will you! C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” hollered the righthander who once ordered McCarver, who’d become one of his closest friends, back to his position by barking, “Get back there behind the plate where you belong. The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it!” When Gibson finally acknowledged the roaring crowd and his achievement with an uncomfortable tip of his cap, he struck out Norm Cash and Willie Horton to end the game with a Cardinals win and seventeen punchouts.

Bob Gibson striking out fellow Hall of Famer Al Kaline to tie the World Series record for single-game strikeouts that he’d break shortly after, in Game One, 1968. In that Year of the Pitcher Gibson’s regular season 1.12 ERA shone even more than Tiger pitcher Denny McLain’s 31 wins.

Watching Gibson pitch myself was like watching an assassin with the mind of Montaigne, the reflexes of a gymnast, and an arm that found the way to marry a bullwhip to a Gatling gun. The intimidating appearance and delivery sometimes masked a pitcher who applied a Warren Spahn-like intellect to his art. “Hitting is timing,” Spahn, the Hall of Fame lefthander/prankster, liked to say. “Pitching is destroying timing.” Gibson’s mind saw and raised by studying his challengers’ minds as well as their timings.

The late Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, whose plate stance Angell described memorably as “that of an impatient subway traveler leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train,” impressed Gibson as deceptive with his once-famous plate crowding, because pitchers were fooled into thinking Robinson wanted inside pitches.

Besides, they’d be afraid of hitting him and putting him on base. So they’d work him outside, and he’d hit the shit out of the ball. I always tried him inside and I got him out there—sometimes. He was like Willie Mays—if you got the ball outside to Willie at all, he’d just kill you. The same with [Hall of Famer Roberto] Clemente. I could throw him a fastball knee high on the outside corner seventeen times in a row, but if I ever got it two inches up, he’d hit it out of sight. That’s the mark of a good hitter—the tiniest mistake and he’ll punish you.

Yet this proud man, who played a major role in easing the Cardinals’ way toward complete integration earlier in his career, using his often-unheralded wit to guide white teammates out of behaviours bred into them without their even realising it, who took his own unshakeable pride in being in control on the mound and taking control of a game, could admit that he, too, had his moments when his “brains small up,” as he told Angell:

I got beat by Tommy Davis twice the same way. In one game, I’d struck him out three times on sliders away. But I saw that he’d been inching up and inching up toward that part of the plate, so I decided to fool him and come inside, and he hit a homer and beat me, one-oh. And then, in another game, I did exactly the same thing. I tried to out-think him, and he hit the inside pitch for a homer, and it was one-oh all over again. So I could get dumb, too.

Gibson’s intelligence played large in his off-field and post-baseball life. He built and opened a successful Omaha restaurant, Gibby’s, in which Angell recorded he had a direct hand in the design and construction, and for which he encouraged integrated clientele. (“A neat crowd,” Gibson once described the mixture.) He suffered no fool gladly and rejected the idea of professional sportsmen as role models. (“Why do I have to be an example for your kid?” this father of three once asked another father, gently but firmly. “You be an example for your own kid.”)

He also wittily discouraged patrons from trying to chat him about baseball when he knew they didn’t truly know the game:

You hear them say, “Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury . . . ‘ Some cab driver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cab driver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.

During his pitching career Gibson was uneasy with the press because he couldn’t grok their wanting “to put every athlete in the same category as every other athlete.” After his pitching days, stories began to come forth that Gibson’s sometimes forbidding public image masked a man who developed intense friendships, especially with those, black, white, otherwise, who accepted and respected that he wouldn’t say what he didn’t believe.

It was one reason why Gibson’s brief and mostly forgotten attempt at broadcasting (on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball) became as brief as it was. He’d interview a player who’d just achieved an unusual feat and question and banter with him as a fellow professional sharing professional truths about the game and its influences outside the park alike, and not a talking head.

Gibson also served actively on the board of an Omaha bank, invested in an Omaha radio station, served as a pitching coach for his friend Joe Torre in Torre’s three brief pre-Yankees managing turns, and once took the motor home the Cardinals presented him as a retirement gift to travel across the western United States.

When I was in the Air Force in the 1980s, I did my entire post-basic training/post-technical school hitch at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, next to Omaha. (I worked as a member of the old Strategic Air Command as an intelligence analyst.) I knew Gibson lived in Bellevue (Angell said he was handy enough to build most of the improvements on the home including a magazine-ready patio) and I knew of his restaurant, not to mention that he was usually at the restaurant at least ten hours a day.

The temptation to go there to eat and hopefully meet him even for a few moments was equaled only by my fear that he’d see me as just another witless fan, even if I wouldn’t insult him by trying to be like the cab driver whose wannabe reverie he’d deflated so deftly.

Three months ago, I guess I did the next best thing. Challenged by an online forum participant who still buys into the myth that a home run hit off Gibson one inning was meant that batter getting a shot in or near the head his next time up, I was crazy enough to look at the game logs. Every game in which Gibson pitched. To see whether and when he really did hit anyone in the same games he surrendered home runs, and whether he’d hit a home run hitter in the same game, especially the hitter’s next time up.

Well, now. That review told me:

* Thirty-six times in his 528 major league games including 482 major league starts, 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—Hall of Famer Duke Snider—the very next time the man batted in the game.

* He hit three such bombardiers not the next time up but in a later plate appearances in games in which they homered first.

* He surrendered home runs after hitting batters with pitches in fourteen lifetime games.

And, unless I missed something somewhere, Gibson’s most frequent plunk victim was Roy McMillan, a shortstop for the Braves (when he first took a Gibson driller) and the Mets, who was a study defensively but about as much of a hitter as Wilt Chamberlain was a baseball player. Gibson hit McMillan five times lifetime; McMillan could have been forgiven if the mere mention of Gibson’s name inspired lustful thoughts of first degree murder.

The fifth time was 20 August 1965, against the Mets in New York. McMillan took one in the bottom of the third. With two out in the top of the fifth Mets starter Al Jackson hit Gibson with a pitch. (The plunk hurt the Mets more than Gibson as it turned out: the Cardinals scored from there on a single, a double steal, an RBI triple, an RBI single, and another RBI triple.) McMillan must have wanted to offer to have Jackson’s children right then and there.

Right now about the only thing anybody wants to offer Bob Gibson is every prayer they can think of. He’s up against an enemy that won’t respond easily to a brushback, a knockdown, a plunk, or an elegantly violent strikeout.

I wish now that I’d taken the chance to meet him back in my Omaha days. I probably would have liked and respected him. Even more than I’d liked and respected him when he pitched. All I can do now is join those praying for him.

The Angels gave Skaggs a past-heaven home farewell

Posted on July 12, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Wearing Tyler Skaggs’s name and number, Mike Trout finishes running out the two-run bomb he launched to start the Angels’ memorial massacre Friday night.

The stricken finally returned home to start the season’s second half. And the way they did it didn’t just defy belief, it drove belief almost as far out of Angel Stadium Friday night as Mike Trout’s two-run homer flew out in the bottom of the first.

The Angels paid one more tribute to the unexpectedly late Tyler Skaggs before the home audience Friday night. On the night before Skaggs would have turned 28. With a combined no-hitter and a sinking of the Mariners all the way to Davy Jones’s Locker.

It only began with a 45-second pre-game moment of silence in Skaggs’ memory, the time in honour of his uniform number. The Angels one and all wore Skaggs’ number 45 for the moment and for the game. Some dare call that tempting the baseball demigods, others dare call it divine inspiration.

After the Angels put the 13-0 no-no squarely into the bank, nobody really knew what to call it. Assuming God was available for comment, even He Himself might have been lost for words, and His words are usually the best words any side of heaven.

“Tyler’s birthday is 7/13. Tomorrow,” said Trout following the game. “They’d tell you to rewrite this script to make it more believable if you turned this in.” Which is pretty astute coming from a guy who claimed to be speechless over what he and his mates just did.

“Absolutely incredible,” tweeted Astros pitcher Justin Verlander. “Meant to be.”

The Mariners joined the Angels, showing shiploads of class, in lining up the baselines from the plate as a Skaggs jersey was placed behind the Angel Stadium pitcher’s mound in a frame.

Skaggs’ widow, Carli, his mother Debbie, his stepfather Dan, and his stepbrother Garrett, made for the mound accompanied by Angels pitcher Andrew Heaney. Then Debbie wound up and threw a ceremonial first pitch, before embracing Heaney and Mike Trout, the Angels’ all-everything center fielder suddenly emergent as the team’s no questions asked leader in the immediate aftermath of Skaggs’ unexpected death.

And those genuinely touching moments were almost nothing compared to what happened during the actual game, played in front of a likeness of Skaggs and a circular memorial displaying number 45 large on the rear end of Trout’s office, the center field fence.

How many times can you say the Angels paid their departed pitcher the most unexpectedly appropriate tribute of all—a game in which two pitchers, Taylor Cole (two innings) and Felix Pena (seven innings) combined to surrender no hits, only one walk, and see not a single Mariner reach on an error?

How often can you say Trout himself—who wept unashamedly last week in Texas, trying to express what his friend Skaggs meant to himself and to their team—accounted admirably for almost exactly half the Angels’ commemorative destruction?

Say it as often as you like even if you’re not an Angel fan. Because seldom if ever has a team rent by in-season tragedy responded like this when finally getting to play for the home audience after their lost teammate’s death on the road, showing him the love with their fans.

First, they lined up for 45 seconds of silence in Skaggs’ memory. Then, they performed a combined no-hitter and a blowout. Who says baseball’s lost its capacity for surreality?

And even less often does it begin the way it did in the bottom of the first, after Cole retired the Mariners in order on a strikeout, a fly out, and a ground out—dropping seven on Mariners starter Mike Leake before Matt Festa struck out Justin Upton, who’d singled earlier in the inning, swinging on a 2-2 fastball.

The carnage only began when Angels leadoff man David Fletcher banged a double off the right center field wall. Trout stepped up in the number two slot and, proving it almost doesn’t matter where in the Angel lineup he hits, turned on a Leake sinker with about as much sink as a blimp and blasted it right into the rocks behind the center field fence.

Almost immediately after crossing the plate himself, Trout looked toward the Angel Stadium section where players’ wives or girl friends sit, until he caught Carli Skaggs’ eye. It looks as though he gave her a gentle affirmative nod. That one’s for your husband, Carli. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The inning from there went single (Shohei Ohtani), single (Justin Upton), swinging strikeout, RBI single (Andrelton Simmons scoring Ohtani), run-scoring error (Upton scoring as Mariners second baseman Dee Gordon misplayed a forceout), RBI single (Dustin Garneau), swinging strikeout, bases-loading single (Fletcher), and Trout’s two-run double.

And Trout wasn’t even close to finished for the night. The very next inning, a strikeout after Festa walked Simmons home, Festa hit Trout with a 2-0 slider to send home Justin Bour. Three innings and two more Mariners pitchers later, Trout squared off against Matt Wistler with Fletcher on second thanks to a single and a throwing error on the play and rifled a double to the back of left field, scoring Fletcher and making things 10-0.

All the while Pena continued keeping the Mariners from bringing their flippers to bear after Cole worked the first two spotless. About the only dicey moment he really faced, other than walking Mariners designated hitter Omar Narvaez in the fifth, was Mac Williamson smashing a grounder in the top of the sixth for which third baseman Matt Thaiss needed to make a diving stop and hard enough throw to nip Williamson.

Trout helped put another cherry atop the Angels’ sundae evening when he came home as Upton sent Mariners reliever Parker Markel’s 2-0 fastball over the center field fence. The Angel who patrols center field like a cop with acrobats in his family history did his evening’s work so well there wasn’t a baseball jury on earth who’d convict or sentence him for grounding out with the bases loaded to end the bottom of the eighth.

By then the only question left was whether Pena could finish the second combined no-no in Angels history. (The first was between Mark Langston and Mike Witt in 1990.) And, the first Angel no-hitter of any kind since Jered Weaver in 2012. Strangely enough, it was in 2012 that the Mariners themselves were last no-hit, courtesy of the White Sox’s Philip Humber’s perfect game.

The answer was Williamson flying out on the first pitch, Gordon grounding out on the second pitch, and Mallex Smith grounding out on the second pitch. Easy as 1, 2, 2.

“This,” tweeted Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman, “is unbelievable. The baseball gods.”

Nobody’s really going to care for the smaller details of the night such as the Angels going 7-20 with runners at second base or better including Trout’s 3-for-4. Nobody’s going to care (too much) that, between them, Cole and Pena threw 63 strikes out of 103 pitches, with Cole striking out a pair and Pena punching out six.

Leave those details plus the Mariners’ seven pitchers combining to surrender eight earned runs, punching out eleven, but walking seven, to the statisticians. Because other than the surrealistic final score, and the absence of Mariners hits, nobody cared about any numbers above and beyond the 45 on the Angels’ backs Friday night.

Nobody cared about anything other than one baseball team coming home from a heartbroken road trip, seeing the massive makeshift memorial to their fallen teammate outside the home plate entrances to their ballpark, and taking a little extra incentive they hardly needed considering, to suit up and give him a sendoff he couldn’t have imagined but surely hoped wouldn’t come for decades yet to be. Decades he’ll see only from heaven.

With Skaggs’ clubhouse locker fully stocked and the team intending to keep it that way the rest of the season, the Angels had one more tribute to make after the game. They went out to the mound and covered it in Skaggs jerseys. Leaving the big 45 behind the pitching rubber exposed. There was nothing more they could possibly do.

Whether the Angels go from here to the postseason, even though they now sit in rear-view enough distance five and a half games and five teams away from a wild card slot, almost doesn’t matter. On Friday night, saying one more farewell to a pitcher they loved on the mound and even more as a young man, the Angels were bigger than baseball. And baseball didn’t seem to mind one bit.

Gooden’s pitching ruin wasn’t drugs

Posted on July 12, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

The Mets tried to fix a Dwight Gooden that wasn’t broken. That’s why he was never the same pitcher starting in 1986.

Haunted and periodically haunting Mets legend Dwight Gooden incurred a June arrest for cocaine possession in New Jersey. The New York Daily News, revealing the arrest Friday morning, leads thus: “Fallen fireball pitcher Dwight Gooden, whose drug woes drove him out of a Hall of Fame career, was in trouble with the law again after a recent arrest on cocaine possession, according to court documents.”

Emphasis added, unapologetically. The myth of Gooden’s drug issues driving him out of a might-have-been Hall of Fame career was debunked long before the News‘s lede. Unfortunately, drug issues make for more bristling and enthusiastic water cooler and (today) social media talk than things like, you know, fixing what isn’t broken.

So here we go yet again. Read this very carefully. Drugs didn’t compromise Dwight Gooden’s pitching; the Mets monkeying around with a young pitcher who might have been a little overworked but still owned the game in his first two seasons and knew what he was doing on the mound did.

It’s not that Gooden was immune to dabbling with cocaine, beer, or other such substances even in his first two major league seasons, never mind before the infamous drug test failure that got him starting 1987 in the Smithers Institute. But let’s hark back to spring training 1986, and where Dwight Gooden actually was entering that spring.

	ERA	ERA+	FIP	K	BB	K/BB	K/9	BAA
Dwight Gooden ‘84-‘85	2.00	176	1.93	544	142	3.83	9.9	.201

He was the National League’s Rookie of the Year in 1984 (he smashed the rookie season strikeout record once held by Herb Score, with 276) and the pitching Triple Crown winner (24 wins, 268 strikeouts, 1.53 ERA) in 1985, the year he also won the National League’s Cy Young Award. His 2.13 fielding-independent pitching (FIP) led the majors (as had his 1.69 in 1984), so it seems a little of his winning was as dependent on his team as on himself. (His Show-leading ERA+: 229, 129 better than the average.)

Any way you see it, Gooden was major league baseball’s no questions asked best pitcher in his first two seasons. He did it with a four-seam fastball and the most voluptuous curve ball the National League saw since Sandy Koufax. (In those days a curve ball’s usual nickname was Uncle Charlie; Gooden’s became known as Lord Charles.) That’s all he had; it was all he needed. And with that .201 batting average against him, nobody could hit him.

“I never got to play behind Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax, but this was the equivalent,” then-Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez, now a Mets broadcaster, once said. “Gibson, Koufax, Gooden . . . legends, true greats. Dwight was in that class. He was so good that year that if he didn’t strike out ten batters we would joke around, ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ You expected greatness every start. It was something to see.”

“Every game,” Gooden would come to remember of 1985, especially, “I could put the ball where I wanted it.”

But in spring 1986 and someone in the Mets’ brain trust decided despite the evidence that it just wasn’t enough. It might have been the late Mel Stottlemyre, the pitching coach, whose reputation was that of a gentleman and a gentle man who preferred to teach quietly and not rant and rave as many pitching coaches did in his own pitching days. Jeff Pearlman (in The Bad Guys Won!) observed Stottlemyre viz Gooden thus: “Throughout (1985) Stottlemyre would watch Gooden perform and think, Boy, this kid is amazing, and all he throws is fastball-curveball! Imagine if he had another pitch. That’s what he set out to do—teach the best pitcher in baseball how to be even better.”

Except that, if that was right, then Stottlemyre missed his mark this time. “All through (spring 1986) Stottlemyre had Gooden toy with a changeup and a two-seam fastball, two pitches he did not throw,” Pearlman wrote. “It was hard to watch. Gooden was a trouper, but the confidence he exuded on his fastball and curve ball never attached itself to the other pitches. He felt awkward and unsure.”

Gooden with Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter: Carter knew a big mistake was made with The Doctor in spring 1986.

The spring 1986 Mets had four catchers in camp: Hall of Famer Gary Carter, the number one man, plus backups Ed Hearn, Barry Lyons, and future major league manager John Gibbons. And one and all of them thought Stottlemyre and others made a huge mistake.

Hearn: “I remember catching him one day in the bullpen and they were working with him on the two-seam. I’m thinking, What the hell is this? He was a power pitcher with tons of movement, and they’re trying to teach him movement? What the hell for?”

Carter, who came to the Mets for 1985 and caught all but three of Gooden’s 1985 starts: “I always thought they should have left Doc alone. Mel thought teaching him a third pitch would be to his advantage. But he didn’t need it. He needed someone to say, ‘Hey, you’ve been successful. Just keep going at it.’ But they didn’t’. I also think it hurt his shoulder. The pitches didn’t feel natural to Doc, and pitching was so natural to him. It just wasn’t smart.”

The Mets’ general manager at the time, Frank Cashen, urged Gooden to shorten his elegant motion and leg kick to make it harder for opponents to steal on him. (Gooden’s one flaw then was that that naturally elegant windup, kick, and delivery were a little easy to steal on—if you reached base against him at all, that is.)

Cashen’s assistant GM, Joe McIlvane, who’d once pitched in the minors, urged Gooden against striking out the world the way he’d done in 1984 and 1985. Pearlman cites McIlvane telling manager Davey Johnson, “If we can reduce Doc’s pitches, we can save his arm. He doesn’t need 200 strikeouts to succeed.”

As things turned out, exactly 200 strikeouts was what Gooden would deliver in 1986, as well as a 2.84 ERA but a 3.06 FIP, not to mention the opposition on-base percentage jumping 24 points higher in 1986 (.278) than it was in 1985. (.254.)

In one way, it was Gooden’s own fault. But only one. He was known to be pliant and accommodating, so much so that the Mets had to intervene to curtail some of his agreements to appear for this interview or that function before he was plain worn out. And pliant and accommodating when it came to his pitching coach and team overseers meant one thing. “In the pursuit of excellence,” Pearlman concluded, “Gooden made a tremendous mistake. He listened to everyone.”

All that is really what thwarted Dwight Gooden. For his first two major league seasons, he was Hall of Fame great and beyond. For the rest of his career, he was a good pitcher who brushed with greatness every now and then (including his no-hitter as a Yankee), but he was no longer the pitcher about whom no less than Hall of Famer Koufax said, “I’d rather have his future than my past.”

Brooklyn Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen made the same mistake with his own Rookie of the Year relief pitcher Joe Black in spring 1953. Black had posted a great rookie season that included becoming the first black pitcher credited with a win in a World Series game. Black had a hard fastball and a curve ball he threw more as a change of pace, but he knew what he was doing on the mound, too, and he made it work.

In spring 1953 Dressen anticipated the Dwight Gooden unmaking by decided Black needed “more stuff.” He forced Black to try throwing a bigger-breaking curve and possibly a forkball, pitches Black’s hand was physically incapable of gripping properly. But Black tried anyway: “Man says I got to try, I got to.” Uh-oh. Like Gooden in due course, Black’s confidence ended up shot. Unlike Gooden, so was Black’s control.

Gooden managed to forge a sixteen-season career that—despite his coming shoulder issues and his continuing struggle with cocaine and drink—still left him, at this writing, as the 97th best starting pitcher of all time. Black may have been lucky to last six major league seasons after Dressen’s wreckage. After pitching, Black became a Senators scout, then a high school teacher, and then an executive for Greyhound.

And, then, along came Gooden—who’s worked in and out of baseball since, and who continues struggling with the addictions that have pockmarked and potholed his life since—to bump Black to one side as one of New York baseball’s saddest, coaching-ruined might-have-beens.

“Had New York’s [1986] decision makers been present in 1506 when Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa,” Pearlman wrote, “they would have insisted on a mustache and larger ears. Here they had Gooden, called ‘the most dominant young pitcher since Walter Johnson’ by Sports Illustrated, and it wasn’t good enough.”

Figure that if you can: The 1986 Mets were one of the greatest teams in baseball history and they opened the season by ruining theirs and baseball’s best pitcher of 1984-85. It turned out to be the prelude toward the gradual dismantling of a team that was supposed to stay great after returning to competitiveness in 1984 and winning the ’86 Series, but didn’t.

The rubble came from one after another deal that either rid the team of what Gooden himself called “the guys who used to snap” or drained the farm for modest, fading, or indifferent veterans.

And the once-glittering, slender fellow with the big wide smile, the becalmed manner, the pitching rhythm as elegant as Duke Ellington’s jazz, and the strikeout virtuosity that earned him the nickname Dr. K., remains living, breathing evidence of what happens when you call the repairman to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place.

Jim Bouton, RIP: The grip

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Jim Bouton steps forth from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office and the meeting in which Kuhn tried to suppress Ball Four—based entirely on a magazine excerpt.

Fifty years ago Jim Bouton pitched the season he would record to write Ball Four. Once a glittering Yankee prospect reduced to relief pitching thanks to arm trouble that arose after the 1964 World Series, Bouton’s wryly candid notes, asides, and observations while pitching for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Astros both humanised and scandalised baseball and enough of its actual or reputed guardians.

By now, of course, Ball Four is the only sports book included on the New York Public Library’s list of 20th Century Books of the Century. And Bouton died Wednesday at 80, at the Massachussetts home he shared with his second wife, Paula Kurman.

A 2012 stroke left Bouton to suffer cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease linked to dementia that compromised his ability to speak and write. Making it worse: the stroke occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of his daughter Laurie’s death in a New Jersey automobile accident.

Baseball may have gone ballistic when Ball Four hit the ground running in 1970, and Bouton could never be certain whether the Astros sent him down that year because he wasn’t pitching well or because the book was driving the front office and others out of their gourds. But he out-lived enough of his critics, most of the time the living and breathing evidence of the maxim about living well and the best revenge.

And Ball Four keeps company on the New York Public Library list with the likes of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus, Agatha Christie, Grace Metalious, and Tom Wolfe.

Go ahead. Say if you must that Bouton didn’t exactly write The Waste Land, Light in August, Invisible Man, On the Road, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. But then T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe never had to try throwing to Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Lou Brock, Frank Howard, or Willie Mays and living to tell about it, either.

To say Ball Four was received less than approvingly around baseball is to say Baltimore needed breathing treatments after the Mets flattened the Orioles four straight following a Game One loss in the 1969 World Series. “F@ck you, Shakespeare!” was Pete Rose’s review, hollered while Bouton had a rough relief outing against the Reds. All things to come considered, it was a wonder Rose knew Shakespeare wasn’t something the tavern served on tap.

Nicknamed Bulldog in his pitching days, Bouton would have been the first to say how fortunate he was to have met and married Kurman, an academic and speech therapist who holds a Columbia University doctorate in interpersonal communications, and who has worked with brain damaged children during her career. She worked with her husband carefully and helped him re-gain much of his speaking ability despite his illness.

“Together we make a whole person,” Kurman once told a Society for American Baseball Research panel, to laughter that was sad as much as approving.

But Bouton struggled concurrently with what Kurman told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times was “a pothole syndrome: Things will seem smooth, his wit and vocabulary intact, and then there will be a sudden, unforeseen gap in his reasoning, or a concept he cannot quite grasp.”

Teammates were divided mostly over Ball Four; they seemed less offended by Bouton’s vivid descriptions of the lopsided contract talks too many players experienced before the free agency era than by his candid descriptions of their clubhouse, off-field, and road off-field activities.

“The first thing I have to tell people,” said his Seattle roommate and fellow pitcher Gary Bell, with whom Bouton maintained a lifelong friendship to follow, “is that you’re not [fornicating] Adolf Hitler.” Bouton wrote in his book that being Bell’s roommate helped make him slightly more tolerable amidst teammates who weren’t exactly forward-looking or thinking. “Every year,” Bouton said of Bell, “I receive a Christmas card addressed to ‘Ass Eyes’.”

Bouton long believed fellow pitcher Fred Talbot (who died six years ago) was the teammate who was quoted anonymously as saying Bouton’s prose “would gag a maggot.” (“When I asked Fred how he was doing,” Bouton would remember in Ball Four‘s tenth anniversary edition’s postscript, “Ball Five,” after a where-is-he-now call to Talbot, “he said, ‘Well, I’m still living,’ and hung up. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him I was glad.”)

And before the Astros sent him to the minors, where he entered what proved a first retirement, unknown members of the Padres left a burned copy of Ball Four on the Astros’ dugout steps.

He got a delicious chance to write about the reaction/overreaction to Ball Four in the just-as-delightful I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, from then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s active attempt to suppress Ball Four to New York Daily News sportswriting legend Dick Young ripping him as a “social leper” for having written the book. When Bouton met Young in the clubhouse after that column, Young said hello and Bouton couldn’t resist replying, “Hi Dick, I didn’t know you were talking to social lepers these days.” Young replied genially, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take it personally.” Little did Young know.

Bouton’s most famous words may well be the ones with which he ended Ball Four: “You spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out that it was the other way around.” But in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, it may have been an exercise in futility for him to write, ““I think it’s possible that you can view people as heroes and at the same time understand that they are people, too, imperfect, narrow sometimes, even not very good at what they do. I didn’t smash any heroes or ruin the game for anybody. You want heroes, you can have them. Heroes exist in the mind, anyway.”

Bouton enjoys a dance with his wife, Paula Kurman, at their Massachussetts home; the couple once competed as ballroom dance partners.

It took a very long time for baseball people to get it. Even longer than it took them to get that the late Jim Brosnan, a decade earlier, wasn’t trying to smash heroes or ruin a game when he wrote The Long Season and Pennant Race, and Brosnan didn’t go half as far as Bouton went in revealing baseball’s inner sanctum even if Brosnan incurred comparable wrath.

“I had . . . violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety — i.e., what they were really not like,” Brosnan wrote on the 40th anniversary republication of Pennant Race. “Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab.”

Bouton wrote and recorded Ball Four by himself, too, his editor Leonard Shecter doing nothing much more than knocking it into book-readable condition, as he would for I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. It didn’t stop Kuhn from hauling Bouton into his office and trying to jam down the pitcher’s throat a statement saying he hadn’t meant it and the whole thing was Shecter’s fault.

Both pitchers were very aware of the worlds around them, and both wrote about the periodic spells of boredom, racial tensions, off-field skirt chasings, and self-doubts endemic in their professional baseball lives. Brosnan saved them for his books and articles; Bouton was less reluctant to speak his mind about things like politics, Vietnam, and civil rights when asked or when a conversation left him the opening.

Bouton bought even less into the still-lingering press representations of athletes as heroes. Teammates didn’t always hold with that or other things, like calling them out on it when they made mistakes that cost the Yankees games he pitched.

“After two or three years of playing with guys like [Mickey] Mantle and [Roger] Maris,” he wrote in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wise guy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”

“He stands out,” Shecter wrote of Bouton in Sport, “because he is a decent young man in a game which does not recognize decency as valuable.” Much the same thing was said of Brosnan no matter what particular writers did or didn’t think of his two books.

For decades Bouton believed Ball Four got him blackballed from the Yankees in terms of Old-Timer’s Days and other such events involving team alumni, and that Mantle was the instigator. When one of Mantle’s sons died in the mid-1990s, Bouton left a message of sympathy on Mantle’s answering machine. To Bouton’s surprise, Mantle himself called to thank Bouton and, by the way, say that it wasn’t Mantle who put Bouton in the Yankee deep freeze.

Laurie Bouton’s death prompted her oldest of two brothers, Michael, to write an astonishing op-ed piece in The New York Times calling for the Yankees to reconcile with both his father and with Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, estranged ever since George Steinbrenner fired him as manager through an intermediary in the 1980s. Michael Bouton got what he asked for. In both regards. (Yankee Stadium rocked especially with a section occupied by Laurie’s friends, holding a banner hollering LAURIE’S GIRLS!)

When Bouton retired the first time in 1970, he assembled another book, a splendid anthology of writings about baseball managers and managing called “I Managed Good But, Boy, Did They Play Bad,” then became a sportscaster for New York ABC and CBS. As his first marriage was falling apart, Bouton also tried a baseball comeback. He slogged the minors a couple of years before then-Braves owner Ted Turner abetted his September callup in 1978. After a start that prompted such comments as, “It was like facing Bozo the Clown,” as Bouton eventually recorded (in “Ball Five”), “In his next start, Bozo the Clown beat the San Francisco Giants. The pennant-contending San Francisco Giants.”

Then he tangled with Astros howitzer J.R. Richard. “The young flamethrower and the old junkballer,” Bouton described them. On the same night the towering Richard broke the National League’s single-season strikeout record for righthanded pitchers, the old junkballer fought the young flamethrower to a draw, somehow. In the interim, Bouton and a Portland Mavericks teammate named Rob Nelson cooked up the concoction that became Big League Chew gum, the kind that looked shredded like chewing tobacco, and its success made some nice dollars for Bouton and Nelson.

Bouton ended his brief baseball comeback, satisfied that he’d proven what he tried to prove, and also became a motivational speaker who also continued writing as well as joining his second wife administering a recreational 19th century-style baseball league, helping preserve an old ballpark (about which Bouton wrote Foul Ball), and becoming a competition ballroom dancing team. The Renaissance Bulldog.

Whenever one of Bouton’s former Ball Four-season teammates went to his reward, Bouton was genuinely saddened. “I think he came, over the years, to love them,” Kurman told Kepner. “As each one died, he got really teary about it. He realized how deeply they were part of him.” (The Pilots, of course, were sold and moved to Milwaukee for the 1970 season, becoming the Brewers. “The old Pilots are a ghost team,” Bouton once wrote, “doomed forever to circumnavigate the globe in the pages of a book.”)

Ball Four‘s true success, wrote Roger Angell himself (one more time: Angell isn’t baseball’s Homer; Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell), “is Mr. Bouton himself, as a day-to-day observer, hard thinker, marvellous listener, comical critic, angry victim, and unabashed lover of a sport. What he has given us is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost side, along with an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

Baseball didn’t collapse. The world didn’t implode. That Star Spangled Banner yet waves. Things have happened in baseball since that make any outrage over Ball Four resemble the kindergarten style debate most of the original hoopla really was. “If Mickey Mantle had written Ball Four,” Bouton once wrote, “it wouldn’t have been a big deal. A marginal relief pitcher on the Seattle Pilots had no business writing a book.” Or, implicitly, exposing the foibles and more of the reserve era’s abuses than anyone suspected existed within the Old Ball Game.

The marginal relief pitcher, once a Yankee World Series star, ended up meaning far more than that. If you want to call Bouton part of the conscience of baseball, then you must admit with more than a single tear that baseball lost something precious with his illness and, now, his death. So has his wife. So have their children and grandchildren. So has America. May the Lord and his beloved daughter welcome him home gently but happily.

The All-Star Game didn’t bomb, but . . .

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

On a night the pitchers ruled the All-Star roost, Cleveland’s Shane Bieber proudly hoists his All-Star Game MVP for the home audience.

Charlie Morton walked around the American League clubhouse in Cleveland’s Progressive Field wearing a T-shirt saying, “Openers Are Human, Too.” Referencing the semi-trend his Rays took up a couple of seasons ago, of starting a game with a pitcher who’d go an inning or two before turning it over to the bullpen. Little did he know. Or did he?

This year’s All-Star Game turned out to be a game of openers even if the openers—Justin Verlander (Astros) for the American League, Hyun-Jin Ryu (Dodgers) for the National League—and most of their relief on the night are starting pitchers by profession.

What it didn’t turn out to be was a game that reflected the season to date, despite assorted prognosticators anticipating home runs flying often and all over the place.

And it launched on a Let-The-Kids-Have-Fun note of its own, when Freddie Freeman (Braves) faced Verlander with two out in the first. Freeman agreed to be miked for the Fox Sports telecast, with the world knowing he’d ask Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz, now a Fox analyst, to tell him what starting catcher Gary Sanchez (Yankees) put down for Verlander. Fat chance.

He and Verlander played the at-bat like a pair of pranksters, almost, even when Verlander caught him looking at a fastball on the outer edge and a naughty curve ball that landed smack dab on the floor of the zone, before Verlander followed a slider inside (Freeman admitted on the air he was looking fastball there) by catching Freeman looking at strike three, a near-cutter hitting the same spot as that naughty curve.

It was all either Freeman or Verlander could do to keep from falling apart laughing as the leagues changed sides for the bottom of the first.

American League manager Alex Cora (defending world champion Red Sox) used nine pitchers, one per inning. Verlander’s relief Masahiro Tanaka (Yankees) got the credit for the win; six pitchers—Jose Berrios (Twins), Lucas Giolito (White Sox), Shane Bieber (Indians), Liam Hendriks (Athletics), Shane Greene (Tigers), and Brad Hand (Indians)—got credit for holds; Aroldis Chapman (Yankees) got credit for a save.

National League manager Dave Roberts (defending National League champion Dodgers) also used nine pitchers, but they covered eight innings. Ryu’s relief (and Dodgers rotation mate) Clayton Kershaw was handed the official loss; Jacob deGrom (Mets), Luis Castillo (Reds), Walker Buehler (Dodgers), and Mike Soroka (Braves) worked an inning each; Brandon Woodruff (Brewers) and Will Smith (Giants) shared the seventh inning; and, Sandy Alcantara (Marlins) worked the eighth.

If this had happened on both sides of a regular season game, the purists would have reached for the whiskey bottles if not gone Elvis on the television sets. It got even crazier with the American League’s 4-3 win in a game in which thirteen total hits produced seven total runs and only two of the runs came by way of home runs.

Charlie Blackmon (Rockies) spoiled Hendriks’s sixth inning, with two outs on strikeouts (Kris Bryant [Cubs] looking; Trevor Story [Rockies] swinging), by hitting a 1-0 fastball over the right center field wall. And Joey Gallo (Rangers)— after the AL scored its third run off pinch-hitter Xander Bogaerts (Red Sox) dialing a ducks-on-the-pond Area Code 6-4-3 (with Matt Chapman [Athletics] scoring the third AL run), knocking out Woodruff and bringing in Smith—tore Smith’s first service over the right field wall in the bottom of the seventh.

Gallo teed off an inning after two of the only bright lights for the Mets so far this season took care of all three American League outs. Jeff McNeil, inserted into left field, caught a pair of fly outs sandwiching a dazzling play in which Pete Alonso, Monday night’s Home Run Derby winner, picked off a tough throw from Max Muncy (Dodgers) playing second base but stationed at the grass and moving swift to stop Daniel Vogelbach’s (Mariners) hopper from turning into a base hit.

Then Alonso in the eighth ripped a pads-padded liner up the pipe for a two-run single to bring the National League to within a single run for the second time of the night. Blackmon’s bomb took them there the first time, after the American League pried a 2-0 lead out thanks to Astro scoring Astro off Kershaw in the first (Michael Brantley—given a nice ovation from his former home audience in Cleveland—banging a double off the left center field wall to send Alex Bregman home) and Twin (Jorge Polanco, hitting a bouncer Muncy knocked down but beating the throw to first for a hit) scoring Yankee (Gary Sanchez, with a leadoff double).

The other Met bright light at the All-Star Game, deGrom, became the National League’s first pitcher of the evening to retire the side in order when he worked the third. Castillo became the second with a 1-2-3 fourth; Soroka became the third with that 1-2-3 sixth abetted by McNeil and Alonso. Alcantara did it the hard way in the eighth, striking out Merrifield after Gleyber Torres (Yankees) opened with a single, then getting Jose Abreu (White Sox) to dial his own Area Code 6-4-3 to end the inning.

If there was a real star of the show other than Verlander’s and Freeman’s first inning hijinks, it was Bieber, the Indian starter against whom the rest of the American League hits only .214 so far this season. (At least one listener of my acquaintance heard his name as “Chained Beaver.” Go figure, and don’t ask.)

He struck out the side masterfully in the top of the fifth, catching Willson Contreras (Cubs) looking at a fastball on the corner, finishing a seven-pitch battle with Ketel Marte (Diamondbacks) with a swinging strikeout on what looked like a knuckle curve taking a swan dive, and ending another seven-pitch battle by catching Ronald Acuna, Jr. (Braves) looking at a slider that landed right down the chute.

Not even Chapman striking out the side to end the game was quite as crowd pleasing as Bieber was, even allowing that Bieber worked in his own home park. It landed him the prize as the All-Star Game’s most valuable player. But he may need to work a little bit on his postgame pithiness. “Baseball,” he said, referencing the lack of bombing in the year of the bomb, “is a funny game.” Joe Garagiola, call your office.

“”It was electric out there,” said Cora after the game. “the fans got in it and it was fun. And I’m glad that [Bieber] got the MVP. He plays at this level. He’s really good.”

Bieber made the All-Star team in the first place because Rangers pitcher Mike Minor’s eligibility vaporised when he pitched on Sunday. He’s now only the third All-Star to earn the game’s MVP in his home ballpark, joining Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez (Fenway Park, 1999) and Sandy Alomar, Jr. (then-Jacobs Field, 1997).

The only thing that got close to topping the Verlander-Freeman Show in the first was a series of scoreboard blunders during the game. When not misspelling Contreras’s and David Dahl’s (Rockies) names, they spelled McNeil’s name right—but showed deGrom’s smiling mug instead. Nothing against deGrom, of course, but McNeil was less than amused.

“I didn’t really like that,” he lamented. “I wanted to see my picture up there. I know my family did, too. What are you going to do, I guess, but I don’t think that should happen.”

It’s not unusual for things to happen that shouldn’t happen even in baseball games. Think about this: None of the sixteen American League pitchers on the 2017 All-Star team made this year’s model. The National League presented the youngest starting lineup in All-Star history, its average age 26. And both sides combined presented 36 first-time All-Stars.

Both leagues also wore a patch on their uniforms with a number 45, a tribute to the late Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs; and, American League participants Mike Trout (who started the game) and Tommy La Stella (who didn’t get to appear) switched their uniform numbers to 45 in memory of their lost teammate.

If you’re thinking all the foregoing could prevent a little pre-game controversy, think again. Remember what put these All-Star teams together in the first place: a ridiculous “primary” vote for fans that let them vote five times and produced a “Starter’s Election” more notable for worthy snubs.

More players spoke out about how broken the All-Star ballots and votes were this year than in the past. What does that tell you?

And Commissioner Rob Manfred, who’s showing more and more of an ability to trip over himself, not to mention an increasing genius for pointing the way to wisdom by standing athwart it, did it again.

Manfred denies he awarded Cleveland this year’s All-Star Game contingent on tanking longtime logo Chief Wahoo—despite meeting with the Indians in 2017, announcing then that Cleveland would get the 2019 game, and announcing concurrently that the Tribe agreed to dump the Chief.

And Manfred replied to Verlander’s accusation that this year’s ball’s been juiced by saying MLB hasn’t altered or encouraged altering the balls—just a couple of weeks after the commissioner suggested a better-centered core was behind the balls’ reduced drag in flight.

This is the same commissioner who continues to insist that if baseball’s should-be marquee players aren’t on as many marquees as they ought to be, it’s . . . the players’ faults that they game they play and love can’t figure out ways to promote them properly enough.

The same commissioner who fiddles while the Mets—reduced to a clown show that’s as funny as a tax audit by the ham-fisted, brain-challenged touch of their owner and his near-clueless chief operating son—self-immolate. Imagine if a non-sports franchise enterprise did nothing while one or another franchisee reduced his or her stores or store groups to that kind of rubble.

Say what you will about Manfred’s predecessor, but at least Bud Selig dropped the scales from his eyes if only for the moments just long enough, after Frank McCourt compromised the Dodgers by turning the team into his personal ATM machine, and forced McCourt to sell the franchise.

And while Major League Baseball Players Association director Tony Clark agrees that baseball’s asleep at the switch when it comes to promoting its stars, Clark, like Manfred, says nothing still about redressing a very real grievance—the short, even blink-of-an-eye career players from 1949-80 who were frozen out of the 1980 pension plan realignment that now vested health benefits after one day’s major league service and now provided a retirement allowance after 43 days major league time.

Eight years ago, Selig and then-Players Association director Michael Weiner realigned the realignment, sort of: the frozen-out players would get $625 per 43 days major league time, with the 43 days representing a quarter and a sixteen-quarter limit, equal to $10,000 before taxes. But when such players pass away before collecting the final such payments, the money can’t be passed to their families.

The thinking person’s sport continues to be governed by people who can’t or won’t think.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Author Archives: Jeff Kallman