Author Archives: Jeff Kallman

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About Jeff Kallman

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

Exit under launch. Please.

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2019-05-16 AaronJudge

Do this man’s launch angles and exit velocities make his skyrockets any less moon drives?

You thought “runners in scoring position” fancified men on second and third? Welcome to the era of “exit velocity,” “launch angles,” and other locutions you might have thought more appropriate to a space launch than a baseball game.

Somehow it had to come to pass, unfortunately. All those years we obsessed about which pitchers hit three figure speed on the radar guns were bound to send someone off to give the hitters equal time. Continuing hangover from the Year of the Pitcher? Who knows?

So now for every Aroldis Chapman who throws a 100 mph pitch, we have to hear about an Aaron Judge (or we will, again, when he returns from the injured list) who hits one over 100 mph. That was then: the pitcher who threw the lamb chop past the wolf. This is now: The hitter who drives the lamb chop past the wolf.

One of these days the wolves are going to sue for willful starvation. It’ll happen sooner than language mavens sue to stop turning baseball into coverage of the space program, whatever’s left of it. It betrays my age but I never thought of Frank McGee as Vin Scully’s heir apparent. Though it might have been more fascinating to hear Scully report Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight than to hear McGee calling a World Series.

It’s one thing for my newly-minted friend Bill Denehy (former pitcher) to say the bomb Dick Allen hit off him in his first major league start “wasn’t a home run. That was a moon drive.” (It sailed on a rising line up toward the overhang of Connie Mack Stadium’s upper deck, stopped from landing in Delaware, as Denehy described it, only by the Coca-Cola sign on top of that overhang.) It’s something else now to hear and read baseball commentators and reporters discussing launch angles. Not to mention front office analytics departments as concerned about launch angles as astronauts were about re-entry angles.

Lots of players from the advent of the home run as a regular weapon have used uppercut swings. And we called them uppercut swings. Some of us described it a little more colourfully. “Dave Kingman’s like me,” Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle once said. “Swings from his ass.”

Kingman was a 6’6″ galoot with a long, loping uppercut swing and power equal to a nuclear weapon when he connected right and equal to a wind tunnel when he didn’t connect. Mantle himself once saw Kingman connect right and then some. “I know I never saw one like it,” he said.

He spoke of Kingman a brand-new Met facing brand-new Yankee Catfish Hunter in the first spring training 1975 exhibition between the two teams. Kingman caught hold of a Hunter slider and drove it so high and far out of the park that, according to Roger Angell in a piece collected in Five Seasons, it sailed over several palm trees before hitting the ground on the practise field behind it. Almost all the way to that field’s second base.

“A six-base blow,” Angell remarked dryly. In the same piece, he suggested the real impact of Kingman’s moon drive was to welcome Hunter—the first huge-money free agent, after he was made one thanks to Charlie Finley reneging on a contracted-for insurance payment—to his new Yankee mates: “There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a five-million-dollar executive suddenly seem lovable.”

They didn’t talk about Kingman’s launch angle then or for any of the 442 major league home runs he hit in his career, enough of which homers traveled surrealistic distances. But they didn’t have to talk about his launch angle, either. The blast he sent clean out of Wrigley Field onto a porch three houses down on Waveland Avenue in 1979 may have been only the most obvious evidence. As also one of his nicknames, Sky King.

Today they’d analyse Kingman’s launch angles nigh unto death. Just the way they do with Cody Bellinger, Chris and Khris Davis, Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge, and Christian Yelich, to name a few. They shouldn’t be wearing baseball uniforms, they should be wearing NASA space suits. And maybe Houston should recommission the Astrodome, where once upon a time grounds crews in mock space suits manicured the Astroturf with upright vacuum cleaners.

Statcast figured out that balls hit in the air were more likely to become hits than those hit on the ground. So did enough players, with or without a little help from their analytically rounded front offices. “Ground balls are outs,” Josh Donaldson once said. “If you see me hit a ground ball, even if it’s a hit, I can tell you: It was an accident.” So why don’t we just say fly balls anymore?

Vin Scully, calling a monstrous Darryl Strawberry home run in Game Seven of the 1986 World Series: “High drive into deep right field, Evans to the track, at the wall—gone!” Now, try to imagine Scully compelled to toe the launch angle lines: “Thirty degrees into deep right field . . . ” There’d be a degree of madness in that mangle.

When showing television viewers a replay of Strawberry’s bomb, Scully began, “Here’s another look at that skyrocket, a towering drive . . .” Prose poetry. Thirty degrees into deep right field isn’t even “There once was a man from South Central . . .”

As much as I’ve accepted, embraced, and bathed happily in statistics and analytics, as profoundly as I reject the notion that statistics are the blood poisoning of a game whose very life blood is statistics, even I have my limits. Not just because it doesn’t matter how you hit your home runs as long as you hit them, period.

As I’ve written in the recent past, Roger Maris didn’t have launch angles; his homers were somewhat high line drives most of the time. And they were no less home runs than Darryl Strawberry’s skyrockets or Dick Allen’s moon drives or . . . well, who knows what to nickname Babe Ruth’s bombs? In his day transoceanic flight was done mostly by low-altitude flying boats. Or, by airships like the Graf Zeppelin and the Hindenburg, which weren’t that high and weren’t that fast. Man on the moon was science fiction.

One of those flying boats, a Boeing 314 flown by Pan American World Airways, inspired nicknaming Joe DiMaggio the Yankee Clipper. The 314 had a kind of rough beauty on the outside but inside it was a textbook model of beauty and grace. Which is how they thought of DiMaggio—likewise kind of rough looking as a youth (he became legitimately  handsome in his retirement), until he swung the bat or ran down a ball in center field.

And who cares how fast a ball sails for a base hit or over the fence? Unless you’re really that obsessed with pace-of-game, of course. The problem is that it doesn’t matter whether a home run reaches the seats faster than a speeding bullet or floats there like the Goodyear blimp. No matter how fast the ball travels, it’ll still land before the bombardier even reaches first base running it out, whether he’s pimping or running full speed.

When the opportunity arises, I argue that analytics divorced from scouting means the kids torn unnecessarily between two contentious parents. Scouting can’t tell you everything about a prospect’s potential deep value, and analytics can’t tell you whether you’re going to get a committed baseball avatar or a first class jerk. (By which I don’t mean players having, God help us, fun playing the game.)

But I know analytics can turn baseball’s lingo into something between poeticide and gobbledegook. Let me go as analytical as I please, but don’t ask me to eliminate the skyrockets, the moon drives, the bullet liners, the frozen ropes, and the seeing-eye grounders. (And don’t go there about “contact hitting” unless you can show me a batter who can breathe a base hit or home run.)

When Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel was doing what he could with the absurdist Original Mets, one of his pitchers was future pitching guru and pennant-winning manager Roger Craig. As Hall of Famer Willie McCovey approached the plate in one game, Stengel went to the mound to talk to Craig. “How do you want to pitch him?” the Ol’ Perfesser asked. “Upper deck or lower deck?”

Stengel might be one of the arguable founding fathers of analytics (Baseball is percentage plus execution), doing the things analytics people adore decades before anyone ever heard of sabermetrics. And he created his own distinctive lingo of triple-talk. (It was known far and wide as Stengelese.) But he knew. He didn’t have to come right out and say it. Even accepting that he couldn’t just come right out and say something if he studied with Henry Higgins himself.

Launch angles and exit velocity matter a lot more for making New York to London in six hours or less than for putting runs on the scoreboard. A homer is a homer is a homer is a homer. Doesn’t matter whether it’s imitating Apollo 11 or the Yankee Clipper. It isn’t rocket science.

Let’s start the counterrevolution. How do you want to pitch Aaron Judge when he comes back from the injured list? Upper deck or lower deck?

Watching your language, baseball division

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Detroit Tigers Manager Sparky Anderson watches his

Sparky Anderson, who murdered the King’s English now and then but whose baseball lyricism was second to few.

There are times—in cyberspace or otherwise—when stumbling upon something you missed when it first arrived can sting rather than charm. Especially if it’s a fine essay on baseball jargon, and you discover you’re just as guilty as everyone else of making mincemeat out of it. Or, you rediscover that you’re a repeat offender who’d better be grateful he doesn’t live in a state with a three-strikes law.

The essay in question is Allen Barra’s, from The Atlantic, in June 2012. He took a good, long look at what became of baseball’s language and was not amused. More saddened than infuriated, Barra decided, with apologies to Yogi Berra (whose biographer Barra admires him for his syntax as much as his baseball virtuosity), that he wished baseball people really hadn’t said half the things they’ve said since, oh, around 1980.

I’d love to be able to say much as changed. But then I’d love to be able to say I’m not guilty of failing to pay my syntax, too. Say, regarding runners in scoring position, which bothered Barra as “an ugly and imprecise term, originating mostly with broadcast announcers.” Once we had a runner on second, a runner on third, or runners on second and third, customarily. We’ve had runners in scoring position since the Reagan Administration.

“The new phrase means, of course, a runner in position to score on a single,” Barra wrote, “which is true only if the base runner is not Jason Giambi, who generally needs a double to have a break-even chance of scoring from second. Used indiscriminately. . . it is not merely vague and confusing, it’s incorrect. You can just as easily call the batter’s box a ‘scoring position’.”

Especially if the batter is someone like, say, Tommy La Stella, the Angels’ new toy, acquired in an offseason deal with the Cubs where he’d made himself into a useful substitute (wait, just wait) but didn’t exactly threaten to become the next Mike Trout. Oops. At this writing La Stella has hit exactly as many home runs this season (ten) as he’d hit in his entire previous major league career. He also has a season’s OPS just 72 points below Trout’s. At the rate he’s going now, La Stella is in scoring position when he merely checks in at the plate.

On the other hand, someone did come up with something other than “the bases loaded” to describe, well, the bases loaded. I could be wrong but I think it was Rex Hudler, then an Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels broadcaster, who went swimming and came up with a beauty: “ducks on the pond.” He didn’t say “ducks in scoring position, either.” One up for Raspasaurus Rex.

Barra had no great love for pitchers versus position players, either. Hard to blame him. “When I played Babe Ruth League ball we had pitchers and regulars, the latter term referring to players who play every day,” he wrote. “Now we’ve got something called ‘position players,’ which takes up two more syllables than ‘regulars’ and is misleading, since pitcher is as much of a position as the other eight spots. We also have ‘role players,’ which says nothing and takes up two more syllables than ‘subs,’ short for substitutes. ‘Role players,’ too, is inaccurate; doesn’t every player on the team have a role?”

Yankee substitutes of the late 1950s-early 1960s had a term for themselves. Tell me scrubeenies doesn’t sound friendlier, and funnier, to the game and to the ear, than “role players.” It won’t cost you an extra syllable, either.

Coaches and managers have roles, too. But let’s not get too technical. I’m pretty sure the announcer who dreamed the term up decided “position players” was a sensible way to distinguish everyday men from not-quite-everyday pitchers. I’m also pretty sure men walked on the moon, women won’t become pregnant from a mere kiss, and children think of only one thing when it comes to their parents. (Divide and conquer, and thank you, Danny Thomas.)

Barra also didn’t like “velocity” for extremely fast fastballs, “location” for what we used to call “pinpoint control” or “excellent control,” or “walkoff hit/home run” for “game-ending hit/home run.” (I’d also like to know just when and just why “home run” became a compound word.) But he didn’t complain about “gas,” “bullets,” “BBs,” or “cheese” for extremely fast fastballs.

Showed him the high cheese, then I punched him out with the yakker—Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley. In case you wondered, “yakker” in what was once known as Dial-Eck referred to a curve ball. Curve balls are also known as benders, 12-to-6, and Uncle Charlie. Then Dwight Gooden had to spoil it: his curve ball was so curvy and so deadly when he was on it became known as Lord Charles. Lord, have mercy.

I may be wrong but I think we have legendary Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone to thank for turning pinpoint control into a real estate pitch. It did and does get a little sickening after awhile, listening to pitchers talk about “location, location, location.” Even if they were such Mazzone charges as Hall of Famers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz.

Just once, I’d pay money to hear any pitcher talk about painting, working, climbing, hitting, or using the corners the way Hall of Famer Whitey Ford or anyone speaking and writing about him once did. Let a pitcher speak of his failure to “locate” his pitches, I’d like to ask him when, where, and how he misplaced them. Maybe that was the problem. “Sorry, Skip, I lost that hanger.” We found it for you, kiddo, we retrieved it from behind the ballpark.

(Which reminds me: If there’s one sportswriter question that should earn immediate excommunication, it’s “What were you thinking?” after a hitter’s been humiliated with a called third strike breaking into the zone when he least expected. Or, after a pitcher’s been hit for a ten mile drive. What do you think a hitter was thinking about getting frozen alive? What did you think a pitcher was thinking about getting taken across the state line? In front of 35,000-55,000 in the ballpark and about ten million on television or next to radios? I guarantee it wasn’t, “I thought to myself, what a wonderful world.”)

The game-winning home run gave the winner great praise, Barra wrote, referencing Bobby Thomson and Bill Mazeroski specifically. The walkoff home run, he frowned, is “a term that thumbs its nose at the loser since the team in the field begins to walk off as soon as the ball clears the fence, while the batter is still circling the bases.”

And, while the winning team pours out of dugout and bullpen at once, and en masse, the better to commemorate the blast by turning the blaster into game-winning hamburger. “I’m just about out of breath,” heaved David Freese after he hit that staggering game-winning, 2011 World Series-tying home run in the bottom of the eleventh of Game Six. “I just got beat up by thirty guys.”

Barra admired Virginia Woolf’s admiration for Ring Lardner, whose best stories and articles were “about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problem of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a center, a meeting place for the diverse activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gave his English brother.”

In other words, Barra continued, “millions of immigrants, no matter what language they spoke when they came here, came together around baseball. And that happened because even if you knew just a little English you could, by listening to the broadcasts, learn baseball Baseball language once drew newcomers into the game. Now, it’s becoming a language that shuts many people out, one that makes them feel as if what’s happening on the field is something a little more complicated than they thought. The ultimate result is that we all end up knowing less—particularly about baseball.”

And yet. “We try every way we can think to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it,” said Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson, who could have been tried by jury for murdering the King’s English (not to mention the Queens, the Bronx, the Manhattan’s, and the Staten Island’s) now and then, but whose baseball lyricism was second to few. And who never saw men in scoring position sent home on walkoff hits off misplaced pitches. (I think.)

But I’m getting a little ahead in the count. (In baseball, that’s a good thing. In writing, it isn’t.) To Barra, turning fielding into defense and hitting into offense is, well, offensive. “When, exactly, did ‘fielding’ become ‘defense’? The word fielding perfectly described what a baseball team in the field was doing. Defense was the term common to basketball.”

I have one answer: I can remember Mets broadcaster Bob Murphy, of blessed memory, opening a 1960s home game broadcast by “setting up the dee-fense for the New York Mets.” Little by little I heard more people doing it. Defense was also a term common to football and hockey, too. The last I looked, sporting goods stores still don’t sell defenders’ gloves.

“For that matter, when did hitting and base-running get lumped together under the leaden term ‘offense’?” Barra added. “Were ‘batting’ and ‘hitting’ and ‘base running’ too quaint for an audience that also watched football and basketball? When did we decide that because football and basketball had offense and defense that baseball had to have them, too?”

Unfortunately, people who ought to know better decided long enough ago that baseball itself had to have things football and basketball had, too. Things like diluted championships, salary caps, and other cancers.

When baseball first went to divisional play, it didn’t have “playoffs”—it had League Championship Series. Then, baseball introduced the wild cards. In 2012 it introduced the second wild cards. And speaking of wild cards, leave it to baseball—which makes gambling Original Sin—to describe a batter hitting with two balls, two strikes, two out and two men on, as “deuces wild.” That one’s aces in my book.

Once upon a time, baseball’s only known wild Cards were the Gas House Gang, that bunch of particularly randy, rowdy 1934-35 St. Louis Cardinals. (The 1957 Braves, the 1986 Mets, and the 1993 Phillies were just a bunch of wild and crazy guys.) How long, now, before baseball’s governors, arbiters, and shepherds introduce not just every team in a division, practically, going to play for a championship with the World Series becoming something with an unrecognisable name?

Hey, it could be worse. At least three major team sports have identifiable championships. We have the World Series, still; not even Rob Manfred is willing to throw that one out of the game. The National Football League has the Super Bowl, and they’re welcome to it, never mind that it sounds more like something—in hand with the scrambled brains of football play—you’d see involving a wrestling title.

The National Hockey League has had the Stanley Cup Finals to itself since the folding of the original World Hockey League in 1926, after the Montreal Maroons defeated the Victoria Cougars. The National Basketball Association has . . . the NBA Finals. They can’t even call it the Naismith Finals, never mind that that’s the trophy the winner wins. How boring, for a sport of perpetual motion, whose championship trophy is named after its founding father.

Once upon a time, if the occasional fight broke out on the baseball field, we had Red Barber to thank for telling us we had quite a rhubarb going there. Wouldn’t you rather have a rhubarb than a bench-clearing brawl? (We once had Barber to thank, too, for describing the bases loaded as “FOB”—full of Brooklyns.) It beats the hell out of “donnybrook,” which sounds more like naming a soap opera super couple than a rhubarb, anyway. (I wonder: did the couple have themselves a donnybrook over the rhubarb?)

We have Barber’s disciple and successor, Vin Scully, to thank for the can of corn—the easy outfield fly. The can of corn probably originated in the old-time grocer picking off a high-mounted can of food with a hook stick, prompting it to drop almost lazily into his apron, unless the rest of the shelf’s contents came down upon his head first. Name me one football, basketball, or hockey term that was born in the A&P. (Oops! Today we’d say Wal-Mart.)

I once promised to send every last gasp of gibberish in my baseball writing out (at the plate and otherwise) to the best of my ability. And I know I broke that promise so liberally so often you could mistake me for an elected official. Or, decide to run me for office in the first place. William F. Buckley, Jr., wherever you are, may I borrow your immediate response to the question of the first thing you’d have done if you’d been elected? (It wasn’t, “I’m going to Disneyland,” either.)

I’ve sent more than my share of men in scoring position home on misplaced pitches turned into walkoff hits, and I didn’t even show them the high cheese, never mind that I couldn’t punch them out with the yakker. (Guilty, Judge Robinson: I’ve used “punchout” for strikeout. Yes, I know it wasn’t Muhammad Ali throwing one at Joe Frazier. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court, Your Honour.)

I plead no contest. But as Michael Corleone once said to his wife—when she reminded him it was seven years since he promised the Family would be completely legitimate in five years—“I’m trying, darling, I’m trying.” As James Thurber once said, you could look it up. But I’d rather you take my words for it.

Dr. Pujols and Mr. Hydes

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2019-05-10 AlbertPujols2000thRBI

Albert Pujols flips his bat heartily after hitting the solo home run that meant RBI number 2,000 Thursday . . .

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to catch history in your hands. Even when you’re not trying to get paid for it.

Albert Pujols cranked a hefty solo home run in Comerica Park Thursday to land his 2,000th career run batted in. The blast put the future Hall of Famer into some very distinguished company as it was.

Cap Anson drove in his 2,000th run at the end of the 1896 season, but unless the Hall of Fame has an online-accessible library I couldn’t discover just how he drove it in. And the run batted in wasn’t counted as an official statistic until 1920.

But Henry Aaron drove his 2000th in in July 1972 with a three-run homer and Alex Rodriguez drove his 2000th in in June 2015 with a two-run homer. Babe Ruth is in the 2,000 RBI club, too. Yes, you might think the Big Fella did it with a big blast but, yes, you’d be wrong: he worked out a walk with the bases loaded against the St. Louis Browns in May 1932 to do it.

A 33-year-old Tigers fan named Ely Hydes just so happened to catch Pujols’s bomb in the top of the third, after Pujols turned on a Ryan Carpenter fastball right down the pipe and drove it into the left field seats, right into Hydes’s waiting hands.

Along came baseball government to prove that no good deed goes unpunished. When its representatives at the game refused to authenticate the ball, it crowned Hyde’s indignation not over the milestone sphere but things in general at Comerica Park involving the Tigers, as he sees it.

“I am not rich. I am a broke-ass law student,” Hydes wrote in a Facebook post. “I did not do this out of any sort of  ‘entitlement’ . . .  I had the best of intentions. This ball will most likely end up in the Hall of Fame. I’m sorry if no one can ‘authenticate’ it, but the only reason I ended up with it is because Tigers management treated me so terribly.”

Detroit Free Press reporter Aleanna Siacon writes that the Tigers and the Angels each made “generous efforts” to retrieve the milestone ball but Hydes didn’t much like being treated like an opportunist. You know, the sort of fan who can’t wait to cash in a history-making baseball for prolific pelf. Giants fans brawled in the stands over who’d get to leave the park with the ball Barry Bonds smashed for his 600th career home run in 2002.

And sometimes such opportunists try stealing souvenirs with less history attached to them. In 2014, a Minute Maid Park fan wearing a Derek Jeter shirt in the field boxes on Opening Day—Jeter’s last as a player—was spotted by Jeter himself. But when the longtime Yankee captain tried to hand the girl a ball, a woman in an Astros jersey sitting in front of her in the seats tried to steal the ball. Jeter wouldn’t have it. He leaned up against the rail and put the ball in the girl’s hands despite the woman’s upstretching.

Hydes wasn’t exactly in the frame of mind to brawl over the Pujols bomb, nor did he steal it from any adjacent fans.

“I considered it an honor to catch Pujols’s ball,” Hydes wrote in his Facebook post, “and tried to act all day with the honor I thought it obligated me to.” Indignant about current Comerica Park policies such as refusing to allow ballpark ushers to be tipped, which he said compelled him to put tips right into their pockets physically, Hydes tore into the younger generation of Illitches and how callously he thinks they’ve behaved since the death of Tigers owner Mike Illitch.

But his indignation with MLB is just about equal. “Honestly, if they were just cool about it I would’ve just given them the ball,” he told WXYT interviewer Kyle Bogenschutz. “I don’t want money off of this, I was offered five and ten thousand dollars as I walked out of the stadium, I swear to God . . . I just couldn’t take being treated like a garbage bag for catching a baseball.”

Pujols himself took a sanguine attitude about the ball and Hydes.

“I think he was given a little hard time and I told the guys, just you know, just leave it,” Pujols told reporters. “Just let him have it, I think he can have a great piece of history with him, you know. When he look at the ball he can remember . . . this game, and I don’t fight about it. You know, I think we play this game for the fans too and if they want to keep it, I think they have a right to. I just hope, you know, that he can enjoy it . . . He can have it . . . He can have that piece of history. It’s for the fans, you know, that we play for.”

Hydes was aware of Pujols’s comment. “You’re a class act,” he wrote, addressing Pujols. “You wouldn’t pay me a penny for the ball and I wouldn’t take a penny.”

When Roger Maris finally hit his 61st home run on 1961’s final day, busting Ruth’s single-season record, a 19-year-old Yankee Stadium fan, Brooklyn truck driver Sal Durante, caught the ball with one bare hand in the right field seats. Stadium ushers came to Durante for the ball. Durante asked only one thing—to hand it to Maris personally.

The ushers agreed. They brought him to the Yankee clubhouse and Durante—who later admitted he’d had to borrow the money from his future wife, Rosemarie, to get his ticket for that game in the first place—handed it to Maris saying, “Here’s the ball, Roger.”

With his family and some team officials around him, Maris surprised Durante by signing and dating the ball and handing it back to him. “Keep it, kid,” Maris said genially. “Put it up for auction. Somebody will pay you a lot of money for the ball. He’ll keep it for a couple of days and then give it to me.”

Somebody did. California restauranteur Sam Gordon paid Durante $5,000 for the ball and then turned it over to Maris. Gordon also paid for the honeymoon when Durante married Rosemarie, with whom he raised three children as a Coney Island bus driver.

Durante was subsequently offered another $1,000 to catch the ball on the street after being dropped from the top of a giant Seattle World’s Fair ferris wheel (the Space Needle was ruled out for safety reasons)—by Tracy Stallard, the Red Sox pitcher who’d thrown the ball Maris hit out for the record. Durante wore a catcher’s mitt for the stunt and the ball hit the mitt and bounded right to the pavement. He got the $1,000 anyway.

Maris died in 1985. Rosemarie Durante died in 2014. Sal Durante is still alive at 77. He once admitted that he, like a lot of Yankee fans and other baseball people at the time, hoped originally that Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle and not Maris would break Ruth’s record. He once said meeting Maris and his family made him glad it turned out to be Maris.

Sometimes giving a player a milestone ball hurts in the aftermath. When New York cell phone salesman Christian Lopez caught the ball Jeter clobbered for a home run that was also his 3,000th major league hit, in 2011, Lopez happily gave Jeter the ball, and Jeter and the Yankees happily gave him season tickets for the rest of that season and a pile of signed memorabilia. The guesstimated value was $80,000.

The bad news was that Lopez would be hit with a hefty tax bill for his effort. A number of companies ponied up to pay it for the generous fan.

Alex Rodriguez remembered. When A-Rod homered off Justin Verlander for his 3,000th major league hit, a fan named Zack Hample—notorious as an all-but-professional souvenir hunter (his trophies are said to include Mike Trout’s first major league home run)—refused to turn the ball over.

“The thing I was thinking about is, where’s (Jeter’s) guy?” Rodriguez said after Hample refused to hand over ball—which was authenticated almost on the spot, by the way. “The guy that caught (Jeter’s) ball? That’s the guy that I needed here. Where is that guy? I wasn’t so lucky.”

“A-Rod will not be in possession of this ball tonight,” Hample harrumphed, “unless he personally mugs me outside on 161st St.”

Hydes says the Pujols ball now reposes on his coffee table. But not for long, perhaps. “I don’t know it’s been a rat race so far, but I’ve got a brother who’s a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan,” he says, referring to the club where Pujols shone for so long, “so I might give him the best gift ever.”

Pujols’s milestone mash made 4-0 a game that ended with the otherwise struggling Angels blowing the Tigers out, 13-0. He would have been overtaken after awhile by Angels second baseman Tommy La Stella hitting two out, one in the second and one in the seventh, if baseball government hadn’t been so cavalier about the milestone mash.

In a career that’s seen a glandular share of headlines and bombs, married to an equal reputation for being one of the game’s most humane players, Pujols probably never figured to achieve a milestone with controversy attached to it, even as his career has had a sad decline phase provoked mostly by injuries since becoming an Angel.

But, typical of the man, he’s handled this one with the class baseball government lacked.

UPDATE: Several hours after I published the foregoing essay, Ely Hydes changed his mind, agreeing to give the ball to either Albert Pujols or the Hall of Fame.

“All I ever wanted was to sleep on it,” he told the Detroit News. “I slept on it and I woke up and I think [Pujols] is a class act. He’s not my player, he’s not my guy, I don’t deserve the ball. I reconsidered. One-hundred percent, I’m either going to give it to Pujols or to the Hall of Fame.”

Hydes still refuses to accept money for the ball, too.

Hunger pains

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2019-05-09 PeteRosePlayHungry

Going on sale come 4 June . . .

To my late younger brother, Bruce, wherever you are, guess what’s coming forth on what would have been your 59th birthday on earth. A new Pete Rose book. By Pete Rose himself. The title is Play Hungry: The Making of a Baseball Player. And if NBC Sports’ Craig Calcaterra can be believed, which he can be as one of the country’s most acute baseball writers, it stands to be a page-turning stomachache.

“I just got this book in the mail,” Calcaterra tweeted in about the same Thursday time frame during which Albert Pujols bopped a solo home run to nail his 2,000th career run batted in. “It has 2.5 pages (out of 290) about his gambling and ban. No specifics other than a claim that he only bet on the Reds to win, which is irrelevant. There are 6 pages about Pete Rose Jr.’s 11-game big league career.”

Bruce, so help me God I had nothing to do with a birthday present like that.

But I’m also feeling a little like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III. You know. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Just when I think I can keep any promise not to address Rose again, something pulls me back in. That’s not exactly the same thing as trying to ditch a life of murder, of course. But just as Michael Corleone could never truly escape organised crime until his own death, I suspect no baseball writer will truly escape Rose until his own or Rose’s death, whichever comes first.

You could argue plausibly that using a mere two and a half pages on a subject to which Rose devoted almost an entire previous book (My Prison Without Bars) makes a certain perverted sense in the current context. “I Blew It and I Know It,” he calls that very brief chapter. Even if it took him three decades and a volume enough of obstructions and lies before he could finally say it that way.

From what Calcaterra says and the advance synopses verify, the book’s prime premise is how Rose willed himself past his long self-admitted skill limits to become the Hall of Famer he would have been if it hadn’t been for, you know, that other stuff. It’s also the fifth autobiographical book he’s produced. And its timing, just like that for My Prison Without Bars and the much earlier Pete Rose: My Story, is just a little too ticklish.

This season the Reds commemorate franchise milestones. Baseball should pay a lot more attention to the 1919 Reds, a hundred years ago, whose World Series triumph was delegitimised by the Series fix plot among some White Sox. How troublesome it must be to the Reds that baseball’s two most notorious gambling scandals injured them directly. The first compromised the integrity of the their first World Series winners through no fault of their own. The second cost them a franchise icon and manager through all fault of his own.

My Prison Without Bars, of course, hit the bookstores in one of the most grotesque cases of horrible timing in baseball history, the same week it was announced that Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley were elected to the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose: My Story came forth shortly after his original banishment from baseball and the death of the commissioner who banished him, A. Bartlett Giamatti. And, with its recalcitrant denials of his betting on baseball, the book accomplished nothing other than staining the reputation of its co-author, Roger Kahn (The Boys of Summer).

Indeed, when Rose sat for a 2007 interview with ESPN in which he said, “I bet on my team to win every night because I loved my team,” Kahn—who’d begun researching Pete Rose: My Story before Rose started facing the investigation that got him banished— admitted he wanted to reach for an airsick bag. And that was before the Bertolini notebooks were made public and shredded every last lingering defense Rose and his supporters might have still had.

At least Play Hungry‘s publication date doesn’t cross into a known baseball commemoration. Unless you think anyone would really like to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the drunken ninth inning fan riot that led to an Indians forfeit to the Rangers on 1974’s Ten Cent Beer Night.

The Rose story has been told so often and so voluminously that its sole relevance now would be toward younger fans today who have little idea who this Pete Rose might be, other than that he’s an annual controversy, however large, whenever Hall of Fame votes or Hall of Fame inductions cross our paths. I’m not sure there’s a more polarising Hall of Fame-concurrent subject to be found, not even when other controversial Hall of Fame candidates or inductees (Phil Rizzuto, Jack Morris, Harold Baines, etc.) are involved.

Either writers or online forum denizens pipe up about Rose at those times. The drift runs between keeping Rose out for the transgressions that got him banished from baseball and made ineligible to stand for Hall of Fame election; and, forgiving, forgetting, and letting him in on his career accomplishments while he’s still alive to appreciate the honour. Because, you know, it’s just not a legitimate Hall of Fame without the Hit King.

And the former group has the latter group whipped every time when they ask, as you absolutely must, “Which portion of Rule 21(d) do you still have trouble comprehending?”

Once upon a time Rose autographed baseballs for those visiting his stands in Las Vegas or Cooperstown with this beneath his name: “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.” His autograph repertoire has expanded liberally since. Rose-signed baseballs abound with such additional phrases as:

“HOF?” (Not until a) he’s reinstated to baseball (it won’t happen); or, b) the Hall of Fame changes its rule denying those on baseball’s ineligible list standing on any Hall ballot. And why should the Hall change that rule?)

“I didn’t do steroids.” (No, but he was doing greenies—amphetamines—in his time. Players then and beyond have been given steroid shots for pain, too. Yes, cortisone is a steroid, technically though non-anabolically. And, a lot of those who turned to later actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, whether particular steroids or human growth hormone, started doing so for pain relief. Yes, you can look it up.)

“There is no crying in baseball.” (Apparently, he doesn’t always remember the tears of joy he shed at first base after he passed Ty Cobb on the career hit parade.)

“Mr. Trump, Make America Great Again.” (President Tweety thinks Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame despite breaking the rules. That could be called sympatico from a man to whom the rules often seem to be that there ain’t no rules.)

“I’m sorry I shot J.F.K.” (In the immortal words of the late Robin Williams, as Mork from Ork, “Humour—ar! ar! ar! ar!”)

“I regret I ever got involved in the book,” Kahn once told the Los Angeles Times about Pete Rose: My Story. “It turns out that Pete Rose was the Vietnam of ballplayers. He once told me he was the best ambassador baseball ever had. I’ve thought about that and wondered why we haven’t sent him to Iran.”

Penguin Press, which is publishing Play Hungry, has also published volumes by the like of Matthew Arnold, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Steinbeck. (Don’t even think about asking which papers they wrote for, Yogi, wherever you are.) Imagining Pete Rose in their company is something comparable to imagining Denny Crane in Clarence Darrow’s.

“Culture,” Arnold wrote, “is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.” Along comes Rose, whose flair for the jarring aphorism once made sportswriters hunger but also made baseball men reluctant to investigate what were then only whispers about his darker sides. “Playing baseball for a living is like having a license to steal” is pithy but hardly “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” (Bacon.)

“The road of excess,” wrote another Penguin author, Blake, “leads to the palace of wisdom.” Baseball fans know that by way of Annie Savoy quoting it indignantly to Crash Davis in Bull Durham. The road of excess led Rose to breaking baseball’s gambling rule and away from the palace of Cooperstown he craves to join. But wisdom isn’t the same as being a wisenheimer now and then.

 

 

Fiers burns a milestone

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2019-05-07 MikeFiers

After spreading his wings to no-hit the Reds, Mike Fiers spread his wings to start the celebration . . .

You’d be hard pressed when asked to think of things baseball people love more than milestones. Except maybe excuses for puns clever and otherwise.

“A’s to Reds: You’re Fiered!” went one such posted on Facebook, after Mike Fiers threw a curve ball that took a swan dive below Eugenio Suarez’s bat to finish a no-hitter Tuesday night.

Imagine if that Facebooker and others in the moment knew it was the 300th no-hitter in major league history. Three hundred has a few magic connotations in baseball and otherwise.

Pitching wins are now overrated in evaluating a pitcher’s actual value, but even those who overrate them with cause like to ponder who’s likely to to be credited for 300 of them next. CC Sabathia’s out of that running since he plans to retire after this season and isn’t likely to earn 52 wins between now and then. Justin Verlander may have an outside shot if his arm obeys his known wishes and lets him pitch another five or six years.

But Fiers didn’t just pitch baseball’s 300th no-hitter but the second one of his otherwise journeyman major league career. With a 4.38 lifetime fielding-independent pitching rate (that’s your ERA when your defenses are removed from the equation, folks) so far in a nine-year career, to go with his 4.11 lifetime ERA, Fiers isn’t exactly a Hall of Famer in the making.

But modestly gifted men have been known to perform immodest deeds now and then. And fans of modest intelligence have been known to say that certain milestones “should” be reached by none but the proven absolute greats.

Such fans several generations ago said it about Roger Maris daring to chase, catch, and pass Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. You could almost hear the isolated harrumphing now: “Who the hell is this guy to pitch the 300th no-hitter? That’s supposed to be Max Scherzer! Or Justin Verlander! Or Clayton Kershaw! Mike Who?!?”

Unfortunately, baseball doesn’t always work that way, bless the game. If the guy you wouldn’t spot in a Grand Central Station rush hour throng can come up big in the biggest moments like the postseason (Howard Ehmke, Al Gionfriddo, Sandy Amoros, Don Larsen, Moe Drabowsky, Al Weis, Denny Doyle, Mark Lemke, and David Freese, anyone?), why can’t the guy you’d never mistake for Tom Seaver throw a milestone no-hitter?

There are 35 pitchers who’ve thrown more than one no-hitter in their careers and, not counting such still-active men as Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, 22 of them aren’t Hall of Famers.

Among those like Fiers who’ve thrown two, Cooperstown has seven: Pud Galvin, Christy Mathewson, Addie Joss, Warren Spahn, Jim Bunning, Randy Johnson, and Roy Halladay. Three men have thrown three and only one of those, Larry Corcoran, isn’t a Hall of Famer.

Fiers is also one of only eight men to pitch a no-hitter for more than one team. He’s done it for the Astros (in 2015) and now the A’s. The list includes Cy Young, Bunning, Johnson, and Ryan among the Hall of Famers and Ted Breitenstein, Adonis Terry, and Hideo Nomo otherwise.

Johnny Vander Meer (not a Hall of Famer) is still the only man to pitch no-hitters in back-to-back starts; Sandy Koufax is still the only man to throw no-hitters in four consecutive seasons, with his fourth proving literally that practise makes perfect. Nolan Ryan fell short of that streak by a season (he pitched two in 1973 and one each in 1974 and 1975) while working toward his record seven.

Fiers is in rather charmed company now. Especially since May is the month for milestone no-nos, and the two previous to his were also thrown by Hall of Famers. Carl Hubbell threw number 100 ninety years ago today; and, Dennis Eckersley threw number 200 on 30 May 1977. Anyone care to predict which May to come will feature no-hitter number 400?

And Fiers is another kind of outlier. No pitcher ever took a season’s 6.81 ERA to the mound before throwing a no-hitter.

“I’m just glad they got those lights working,” Fiers deadpanned after the 2-0 win.

He referred to three panels of lights failing above the left field stands in Oakland’s otherwise unloveable Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Game time was delayed a little over an hour and a half. Finally, the A’s and the Reds said let’s play ball and Joey Votto checked in at the plate to open.

Votto popped out to the infield to open. Suarez struck out to finish. Except for an error at third in the fourth, Suarez working out a leadoff walk in the seventh, and Yasiel Puig walking later in the inning, no Red reached base in any way, shape or form.

And, yes, Fiers needed a little help from his friends in the sixth inning, such as Jurickson Profar ambling out to shallow right to catch Kyle Farmer’s quail and, especially, Ramon Laureano—making a fresh reputation as an outfield acrobat—taking a home run away from Votto with a leap up the short end of left center field wall.

Not to mention Profar driving home both the runs in the game, first with a two-out double in the second with Stephen Piscotty aboard and then with a two-out launch over the right field fence in the seventh.

Maybe the testiest moment of the game came in the ninth with one out, when Fiers fell behind Votto 3-1 before throwing the Reds first baseman a changeup nasty enough to be worth nothing more than a ground out to first base.

For Laureano that play was an awakening. “That’s the first time I realized he had a no-hitter,” he said of Fiers’ performance. “Really, I didn’t know.”

“I think the stars aligned tonight,” said Farmer of the Profar and Laureano catches. “Once we saw those two plays happening, we said this might be his night.”

It wasn’t exactly a picnic for the last A’s pitcher to throw a no-hitter. “It was way more nerve-wracking then when I was doing it,” said Sean Manea, who threw his last year but who’s still working his way back from September surgery to repair a torn shoulder labrum. “I was shaking on the bench. I don’t know, it was crazy seeing him do it.”

It didn’t stop Manea from being the man to shower Fiers—who wouldn’t have pitched Tuesday at all if the A’s hadn’t shuffled their rotation on their off day, as things turned out—with the Gatorade tank.

“I remember when I was drafted, I wasn’t too high on the charts,” Fiers told reporters after surviving the mobbing he got on the mound when the game ended. “I was a guy throwing 88 to 90, down in South Florida. I’m one in a million down there.” And in more ways than one, his million-to-one shot came home.