Roger Maris and Hank Aaron–both broke ruthsrecords; neither cared how the ball left the yard as long as it did leave the yard.

One of the more scurrilous arguments I can remember from the 1961 hunt to break ruthsrecord (so help me, that’s how they pronounced it then) involved Roger Maris’s “legitimacy.” Not just over whether a “true Yankee” should be “allowed” to break the single-season home run record (like the import from the Red Sox who set it in the first place) but whether Maris was a “legitimate” power hitter.

The big beef was over Maris’s kind of power hitting. He looked like a muscular ex-Marine, but he hit booming line drives into the seats instead of the parabolic punts for which Babe Ruth and, in due course, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were renowned in his time, and for which sluggers to come (Harmon Killebrew, Frank Howard, Dick Allen, Dave Kingman, Mike Schmidt, Darryl Strawberry, and company) would be held in awe likewise.

Joe DiMaggio once said hitting the other way wasn’t real hitting. The power argument is somewhat similar, and just as foolish. There were even those who thought Hank Aaron was an illegitimate successor to Ruth on the all-time home run list because a) he never put up a Huge Season; and, b) Aaron, more or less like Maris, hit the high line drive far more often than he hit the big, jaw-dropping, neighbourhood-threatening, ICBM-like launch.

The man’s lifetime averages per 162 games show that just about every season Aaron played was a Big Season. He averaged 37 home runs, 113 runs batted in, 185 hits, 31 doubles, 107 runs scored, and a mere 68 strikeouts per 162 games. (That, by the way, folks, is eighteen less than the Babe.) In other words, Hank Aaron’s average season was anyone else’s career year.

Maris wasn’t that kind of great except for the three Yankee seasons in which it looked like he was coming into his own on his own terms, including the year he broke ruthsrecord. (Whatever else you’ve heard or read, the real reason for Maris’s post-1962 decline was injuries.) But he had that one thing in common with Aaron, and people were actually foolish enough to hold it against him, too. As if it mattered more how the ball flew over the fence than that it flew there at all.

They used to accuse Maris of taking advantage of Yankee Stadium’s fabled short right field porch. As if they expected a lefthanded hitter with any kind of power not to. As if they forgot (assuming they knew) that Yankee Stadium was designed and built specifically to accommodate Ruth’s own lefthanded power. The stadium argument recessed occasionally during the more frequent argument over the Marisian liner versus the Mantlesque punt.

Which would be, today, the so-called launch angle argument. The passel of hitters checking in at the plate looking for something at which to swing on an uppercut before looking for something to hit at all. The passel of hitters that includes plenty with power enough who seem to think, without being able to say it that way, that they’re supposed to be Mantle and not Maris. Mays, not Aaron.

In today’s game Roger Maris and especially Hank Aaron would be the poster children for arguing against the launch angle, and they’d have the statistical evidence to back it up. Even passing Ruth on the all-time home run list, Aaron didn’t swing with a swooping uppercut, and the ball didn’t fly as if aiming for the Delta Quadrant.

And, as put by Chili Davis, former outfielder, former Cubs hitting coach, hired for the same job by the Mets practically before he’d had time to chill after the Cubs executed him, “certain players . . . are going to have to make some adjustments because the game has changed and pitchers are pitching them differently. They’re not pitching to launch angles and fly balls and all that anymore. They’re pitching away from that.”

Whatever you thought about Bryce Harper’s peculiar walk year, when he spent most of the first half looking completely unable to hit though ironically producing big enough when he did hit one, the real key to the turnaround that began shortly before the All-Star break was Harper returning to the batting style that first established him. He forgot about launch angles, with which he became pre-occupied coming out of spring training, and remembered about making contact, any kind of contact.

Harper’s first half slash line was .214/.365/.468. His second half: .300/.434/.538. His first half batting average on balls in play: .226. His second half: .378. He hit eleven home runs in the second half compared to 23 in the first half, but it’s probably very fair to suggest that if he hadn’t become a little enamoured of launch angles coming out of spring training he might well have hit the same number of home runs on the season (34) but he’d have been a lot more comfortable and productive all around at the plate.

Davis comes up again because of John Harper’s report that his execution as the Cubs’ hitting coach may have been instigated by the team’s two top stars, first baseman Anthony Rizzo and third baseman Kris Bryant. Harper says Cubs president Theo Epstein had no intention of pinking Davis until Rizzo and Bryant put the squeeze on. “He caved,” one unidentified source said of Epstein. “He’s not happy about it. He thinks it’s BS that the players complained about Chili, but he wasn’t going to stick with his hitting coach just to make a point.”

Davis admitted he had a tough time connecting with some of the younger Cub hitters, including Rizzo and Bryant, without mentioning them by name. And the Cubs’ bats went quiet enough in the second half to force them into a 163rd game just to make the wild card game, and to show nothing in those two games but two runs scored in 22 innings in their own hitter-Friendly Confines.

Rizzo is known to be his own hitting coach regardless of who actually has the job, a near fanatic about refining his plate approach on his own. Bryant, however, is known to be obsessed with launch angling, something instilled in him early by the private hitting instructor who also happens to be his father. Rizzo started 2018 moderately before finding a groove around May; Bryant battled against a combination of shoulder trouble and pitchers figuring out he was so locked into launch angling that he was meat against rising pitches, likely to either strike out or hit catchable flies.

Davis wasn’t the only hitting coach who couldn’t get it into his charges’ thick skulls that launch angling doesn’t work for everyone swinging a bat. Dave Magadan—former sweet-swinging infielder turned hitting coach—has a new job because of it. The Diamondbacks, like many teams who can’t figure out why the bats turned to papier mache, made Magadan a 2018 scapegoat. The Rockies snapped him up post haste.

“I never want guys hitting the ball on the ground, especially to the pull side,” Magadan tells Harper. “I want them driving the ball into the gaps. But to just want to hit the ball in the air … if you’re not [Aaron] Judge or [Giancarlo] Stanton or J.D. Martinez, you’re just going to fly out a lot to the big part of the ballpark when pitchers with velocity and high spin rates are pitching up in the zone. I had a guy last year who tried to be J.D. Martinez, and we finally had to have an intervention with him. It wasn’t until he was sent back to Triple-A that he realized it didn’t work for him, and he got back to hitting line drives.”

Bryce Harper didn’t have to go to Triple-A to fix himself last year, but Magadan’s point is taken well. And Magadan respects Davis, with whom he worked in the Red Sox organisation when Epstein still ran their show. “We’ve talked a lot about hitting,” the former Met infielder says. “He knows the swing and he knows the psychology of players, so I was surprised to hear about some of the stuff in Chicago, but sometimes you just don’t connect with players. I see him doing great things in New York.”

There will always be hitters who can send satellites into orbit at the plate. There will always be hitters who don’t have to launch satellites to leave the yard. (There’s also at least one Mike Trout, who does it both ways; some of his home runs cruise into the seats on a high line, and some blast off as if it’s destination Milky Way.) Things probably haven’t been helped when you turn on the television to watch a game and the broadcast graphics people start hanging up the launch angles of every ball hit over the fence.

When Maris was put through the psychological wringer chasing Ruth’s single-season home run record, the criticism that seems to have stung the least was how he cleared the fences. It may have bothered him that Joe and Jane Fan considered him an interloper. (Yankee fans and otherwise; stories abounded about fan abuse Maris incurred on the road that season, too.) It may have haunted him that he had reason to suspect his own team would have preferred Mantle and not himself chase and break ruthsrecord.

But he knew in his heart of hearts that he didn’t have to hit the ball into earth orbit to hit for power. He had 133 home runs in three seasons, including the record-breaking 61 in ’61, to prove it. He respected and admired Mantle without thinking he had to do what he couldn’t do. Aaron surely had his baseball models, too, but he, too, never seemed to care how the ball flew out as long as it flew out at all.

Imagine Maris and Aaron in today’s game with Davis or Magadan as their hitting coaches. (The late Marvin Miller once asked rhetorically if a visitor could imagine Sandy Koufax as a free agent. Now, imagine Maris [before the injury bug] or Aaron likewise.) Imagine Davis or Magadan showing the rest of the team’s hitters Maris or Aaron and saying, “These guys don’t give a damn about launch angles, and they’re hitting damn well while still hitting home runs like it’s going out of style. What does that tell you?”

Now, imagine today’s hitters looking at Davis or Magadan after that exhibition, by the two men who broke ruthsrecords, and saying, as the phrases went once upon a time, “Who are these fools and what planet were they exiled from?” But where will those fools  turn when they exile themselves so deep into the tank they’ll need an elevator to return?

Eli Grba, the first Angel . . . (Photo courtesy of the Society for American Baseball Research.)

No less than Casey Stengel himself suggested the newborn major league Los Angeles Angels help themselves when the Yankees made Eli Grba available in baseball’s first expansion draft. Stengel liked the bespectacled righthander’s  potential even if, in his final seasons managing the team, he couldn’t always swing Grba into the Yankee rotation, and Grba’s record to date mixed between starting and the bullpen was inconsistent.

The National League expanded a year later, with Stengel on tap as the manager of the incoming Mets, and with the first pick of that expansion draft the Mets picked Giants catcher Hobie Landrith. “You hafta have a catcher,” Stengel said of the pick, “or else you’ll have a lot of passed balls.” So the Ol’ Perfesser had a hand in a battery being picked to open each league’s first expansions.

Grba, who died at 84 Monday following a three-month battle with pancreatic cancer, started and won the Angels’ first regular season game, a 7-2 complete-game triumph over the Baltimore Orioles. The game featured future Hall of Famers Brooks Robinson and Hoyt Wilhelm and the Angels drawing first blood with back-to-back home runs from Ted Kluszewski (drafted from the White Sox) and Bob Cerv (drafted like Grba from the Yankees) in the top of the first off Orioles starter Milt Pappas.

The Angels weren’t even close to finished. They battered Pappas and his relief John Papa before Wes Stock, Billy Hoeft, and Wilhelm settled them down, including an RBI single from pint-sized outfielder Albie Pearson (a draft from the Orioles) and a three-run homer from Kluszewski in the second, putting them up 7-0. (Kluszewski and Pearson roomed on the road, with the 6’2″ muscular Kluszewski telling the 5’5″ Pearson, “I get the bed and you get the dresser drawer.”)

The only runs the Orioles could pry out of Grba that day were Jim Gentile scoring on a fielding and throwing error on the same two-out infield play in the second, and Jackie Brandt scoring on an infield error in the third.

Grba, who’d won six of ten decisions with the 1960 Yankees, finished a six-hitter and provided immediate fodder for headline writers who couldn’t resist having mad fun with his missing-vowel surname (pronounced like the baby food brand) in the times to come. (GRBA PTCHS 4-HTTR was typical.) The bad news was that his triumph was the only win on a 1-7 existence-opening Angels road trip that was further compromised by eight rainouts. It took the 1962 Mets losing the first nine straight of their existence a year later to erase that, sort of.

A big righthander himself, Grba would stand after the Angels’ first two seasons as their all-time winner (19) and all-time loser (22). The further bad news was that in 1962 he’d be lost in the glittery shuffle of rookies Bo Belinsky and Dean Chance—both of whom took a little too readily to the lifestyle of the Hollywood demimonde, Belinsky especially, and both of whom led the pitching staff much of the season while they were at it, sparking the outside possibility of the Angels reaching the World Series.

It didn’t happen. Belinsky opened the season 7-1—including five straight wins to open with the fifth being his once-fabled no-hitter—but finished 10-11 with a 3.56 ERA. Chance led the starters with 14 wins and a 2.96 ERA. Grba found himself back in the same pattern he’d experienced with the Yankees, shuttling between starting and relieving, and finished with eight wins, nine losses, and a 4.54 ERA despite the advent of a pitching-rich baseball era and the Angels playing their home games in Dodger Stadium. (The Angels weren’t exactly buddies with the Dodgers, so much not that their broadcasters called the park Chavez Ravine at owner Gene Autry’s insistence.)

The Angels finished third in the American League in 1962, still a staggering season for an expansion team. They were hit even harder when 40-year-old reliever Art Fowler took a line drive in his face during pre-game practise and starter Ken McBride went down with a cracked rib, and a six-game losing streak in September erased their faint pennant hope.

An only child whose mother raised him alone in Chicago after his father abandoned her when their son was still a small boy, Grba was first a Red Sox discovery until they dealt him to the Yankees in March 1957. The kid who’d grown up a White Sox fan was less than thrilled: “The Yankees would come in and beat us all the time.” His Yankee spell was delayed when the Army drafted him; he was discharged in time for spring training 1959.

To hell and back, Grba tosses out a gold-covered baseball as a ceremonial first pitch for the Angels’ fiftieth Opening Day.

Grba was the Angels’ starting pitcher on Opening Day their first two seasons. In May 1963, after marrying and buying his home, Grba was sent to the minors. “I don’t understand,” he’d say, “how a guy can be good enough to pitch the opening game two years in a row and then isn’t even good enough to pitch in the bullpen.” They sent him to Honolulu, the same minor league team where they exiled Belinsky after a terrible 1963 start.

That was after the Angels unloaded another former Yankee, former relief star Ryne Duren, after Duren’s already hard drinking began to spiral out of control when his marriage collapsed and his infant son unexpectedly died. Duren would drink himself out of baseball (as a Senator, he once had to be talked off a bridge in a suicide bid by manager Gil Hodges) but sober up by 1968. He’d be only the first of a few Angels having to go there.

Grba was a competitor to a fault, his signature moment sometimes thought to be the day he pitched in Yankee Stadium for the first time as an Angel, surrendered home runs in consecutive at-bats to Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle, and circled the mound screaming insults at Mantle as the latter rounded the bases.

But like Duren and Belinsky, Grba developed too much taste for alcohol. He admitted it began affecting his pitching as soon as 1963. Unlike Belinsky, who’d revive his career a few times in Hawaii, Grba became a minor league traveler until his drinking got far enough out of hand to force him out of baseball. “My priorities,” Grba would remember, “were all gone. [Hall of Fame pitcher] Bob Lemon saw me one day and said, ‘I’ve never seen a pitcher lose his stuff as fast as you did’.”

Grba lost his stuff and, in due course, three marriages, before he hit rock bottom in 1981, after several equally failed rehab attempts. This time Grba lived and worked at an El Monte, California detox center, after more than a decade bounding between jobs and between southern California and his native Chicago. Sneaking back to his room in the wee small hours one night, he lost his balance and—depending upon which account you believe—he hit the floor or fell through a window. Whichever it was, Grba finally quit drinking.

He got help from an unlikely source, according to Los Angeles magazine: Bo Belinsky.  The rakish lefthander was once the toast of baseball thanks to patronage from fading but still influential columnist Walter Winchell after his no-hitter and five-game career-opening winning streak. But the Angels suspended him in August 1964, despite what looked a solid season in the making, after a hotel room brawl with veteran sportswriter Braven Dyer.

Belinsky’s career careened off the rails after his trade to the Phillies near the end of 1964 and ended after too much back-and-forth to the minors in 1970. Already a heavy drinker, Belinsky also became amphetamine addict while he was at it, the latter something he’d admit years later that he picked up in the Phillies’ bullpen. “I’d occasionally used greenies, amphetamines, as a starter, but in Philadelphia they had red juice,” Belinsky would remember, “and when I got into the bullpen, I started getting loaded every day, because as a reliever, you never know when you might have to play. This chemical started coming into my life. I thought I could handle it, because I was strong and still had that phony smile. But something was happening to my system.”

When Belinsky’s second marriage collapsed in 1981, he began his own battle to get and stay sober, including membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. In line with A.A.’s twelfth-step principle, carrying its message to fellow alcoholics, Belinsky reached out to Grba after learning of his former teammate’s struggle. “Bo and I had never been that close,” Grba told Los Angeles. “He was too Hollywood. But he came and got me and took me to an AA meeting. I was nervous, but Bo said, ‘Don’t worry, Eli, they’re all drunks just like you and me’.”

Grba stayed sober the rest of his life. So did Belinsky, after a few ups and downs in the 1980s including a suicide attempt of his own, before staying clean and working first as a Hawaii alcohol counselor and, later, a public relations executive for a Las Vegas automotive concern, before his death at 64 of complications from bladder cancer in 2001. So did Duren, who became an addiction counselor after his 1968 cleanup, working for various agencies and groups until his death at 81 in 2011.

Getting and staying sober brought Grba back to baseball. He became a minor league pitching coach and manager, a pitching coach again, and a scout, including in the Phillies’ system thanks to being clean and sober still when he re-connected with another Angels teammate, Lee Thomas, then the Phillies’ general manager.

Grba retired in 1997 and moved with his fourth wife, Regina, to Alabama. He also re-connected with his children, including son Nicholas, now a retired Air Force staff sergeant; and, Stacy, his daughter who also served with the Air Force. In 2016, Grba co-wrote his memoir, Baseball’s Fallen Angel. “The way I was drinking it is amazing I can remember anything,” he told an interviewer while promoting the book. “I had six alcoholic seizures and six DUIs. How I never killed myself I’ll never know.”

When the Angels celebrated their fiftieth anniversary as a major league franchise in 2011, Grba was invited to the ceremonies and to throw out a ceremonial first pitch. That day opens Grba’s memoir, co-written with Douglas Williams, a harrowing account of a haunted man who’d sent himself to hell and back.

“At that game Eli realized so many of his former teammates are no longer with us and I know he wondered why God left him here after he had lived so hard with his alcohol problem,” Williams said later. “Then he realized that maybe he was still here so he could tell his story and warn others of the pitfalls he fell into.”

“What I think about sometimes is about how I messed it up,” Grba told the Orange County Register of his self-shattered career and his three broken marriages. “Baseball has been a secondary thought to me ever since I got sober, I didn’t leave the Angels the way I wanted. It’s nice to be recognized as the first, nice to be remembered, and it’s an honor.”

Grba threw a perfect strike for that ceremonial first pitch. It was nothing compared to the perfect strike he threw for himself, his children, and his grandchildren, after he sobered up to stay.

Mel Stottlemyre, the best pitcher of the Yankees’ lost decade, later a World Series-winning pitching coach.

When the 1964 Yankees won what turned out to be the last pennant of the old guard, it wasn’t pretty. First-year manager Yogi Berra was the unsuspecting victim of backstabbing abetted by first-year general manager Ralph Houk. Age and injury began catching up to the team. Their sale to CBS rocked baseball controversially. And Berra was saddled especially by an unreliable bullpen.

With Hall of Famer Whitey Ford beginning to experience elbow discomfort and Jim Bouton suffering an unexpected tired arm in the first half, lefthander Al Downing putting up a solid season wasn’t quite enough even if he would lead the American League in strikeouts. (He also led in walks, unfortunately.) Over Houk’s objection, still-co-owner Dan Topping made two moves before turning it over to the Tiffany Network.

He ordered the call-up, from the Richmond farm, of a kid named Mel Stottlemyre, who’d grown up a Yankee fan despite living cross continent. His mild manner was probably the only thing mild about him. On the mound, the Missouri-born Pacific Northwesterner proved something else immediately. So did Pedro Ramos, a journeyman righthander who joined the Yankees that September’s beginning.

Stottlemyre would win nine of twelve starting decisions down the stretch including a five-start winning streak and two shutouts. Ramos down the stretch gave Berra and the Yankees the bullpen stopper they were missing since Steve Hamilton’s early-season success dissipated.

The Yankees won the pennant at almost the final minute. Their Series opponents, the Cardinals, won their pennant a little bit later than that. The Phillies’ infamous collapse threatened to send the National League to a three-way pennant tie before the Cardinals survived against the hapless Mets on a final weekend during which the Reds bumped the Phillies off once and for all.

Stottlemyre—who died Sunday at 77, after a long battle with multiple myeloma—went on to beat Bob Gibson handily in Game Two of the World Series. He faced Gibson in Game Five and came out in a 2-0 hole (the Yankees would go on to lose); he faced Gibson again in Game Seven and was done in in the fourth, when rookie infielder Phil Linz couldn’t avoid a takeout slide on what might have been an inning-ending double play, turning instead into a Cardinals three-run inning en route the 7-5 final for the Redbirds.

“Tim McCarver hit a grounder to Joe Pepitone at first,” Stottlemyre would remember. “Pepi made a good throw to second but the runner took Phil Linz out and he made a wide throw back to first. I came over and dove for the ball and landed on my right shoulder. Fortunately I wasn’t injured.”

That wouldn’t happen for another decade. In the interim, Stottlemyre—whose money pitch was a filthy hard sinker—became the best pitcher on a Yankee club entering its lost decade. Ford’s elbow turned into his nightmare and the end of his career soon enough. Bouton developed serious arm trouble, enough to reduce him to a marginal relief pitcher. Downing proved talented, inconsistent, and injury plagued. The team’s other stars (Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle plus Roger Maris, Tony Kubek, and Elston Howard) surrendered to age, injury, or both. And except for pitchers Fritz Peterson and Stan Bahnsen, plus reliable (and underrated) outfielder Roy White, the parched farm produced journeymen at best.

And Stottlemyre, who’d become a three-time 20+ game winner in his career, suffered the 1966 indignity of losing 20 games despite pitching to his normal capability and making his second straight All-Star team while the Yankees finished dead last for the first time since 1912. He suffered his highest ERA ever with a lower fielding-independent pitching rate (ERA minus defense) that was around his career norm; twelve of his 20 losses came when the Yankees gave him two or less runs to work with. He had four no-decision starts in which he pitched well enough to win, surrendering three earned runs or less; in ten of his losses he pitched well enough to win along the same criteria.

Stottlemyre would have more individual moments, including the staggering inside-the-park grand slam he hit to beat the Red Sox in 1965. “I didn’t slide in at the plate so much as I collapsed,” he remembered. When the pitcher who surrendered it to him, Bill Monbouquette, became a Yankee in 1967, Stottlemyre relished needling him about it. He had it listed in the 1967 Yankee yearbook as his greatest baseball thrill.

By the 1970s, he was accompanied by Peterson and then Bahnsen as the core of a promising new Yankee staff. It lasted only long enough for Bahnsen, the 1968 AL Rookie of the Year, to be traded after the 1971 season; and, for Peterson and fellow pitcher Mike Kekich to swap families notoriously in spring 1973, prompting the eventual trades of both.

Stottlemyre and his wife, Jean, were close to both pitchers and their wives and couldn’t figure how the deal could have been done without them figuring something was up. Not until the day Kekich, according to Stottlemyre, called to ask if he’d heard about the trade. Knowing both Peterson and Kekich were first class pranksters, the Stottlemyres first thought it was one of their gags.

It turned out to be nothing compared to how Stottlemyre’s career ended. After George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973, and Stottlemyre landed himself an $87,500 salary for 1974 following his first-ever contract holdout, he felt something pop in his shoulder that June. What popped was his rotator cuff. Season over. The following spring, after an off day fishing in the Everglades, Stottlemyre got a call to meet general manager Gabe Paul. Released. The day before his $30,000 severance would vest.

Stottlemyre fumed and went home to Issaquah, Washington, twenty minutes outside Seattle. But after a spell as a pitching coach in the Mariners’ system before joining the Mets as their pitching coach for their mid-1980s glory seasons, he worked two years for the Astros in the same job. Then, of all things, the Yankees wanted him back. To become Joe Torre’s pitching coach in 1996.

“I made a lot of statements about [Steinbrenner] that I had to eat twenty years later,” said Stottlemyre, who felt that despite Steinbrenner’s then-suspension The Boss could have intervened quietly but firmly in how his original release was handled. “When they decided they wanted me to come back to be Joe’s pitching coach, George called me himself and apologised. That really meant something.”

He added four Yankee World Series rings to the one he won with the 1986 Mets. Then Steinbrenner angered him again, this time after the Angels beat the Yankees in the 2005 American League division series and Steinbrenner congratulated Angels manager Mike Scioscia—whose team had been the only one to beat Torre’s Yankees consistently over the years, in regular season as well as postseason play—but said nothing for Torre.

Stottlemyre with his Monument Park plaque, 2015.

The usually mild Stottlemyre hit the ceiling. “To congratulate the other manager and not congratulate your own, after what he’s done this year, I laughed,” he said later. He laughed, and he quit. Except for a one-season return engagement as the Mariners’ pitching coach in 2008, Stottlemyre called it a career.

In the interim, Stottlemyre had suffered great sorrow when his youngest son, Jason, died of leukemia at age 11; and, great pride, when his other two sons, Todd and Mel, Jr., became second-generation major league pitchers. Todd’s career outlasted his father’s by three seasons but earned him only half the wins above replacement-level his father earned; Mel, Jr.’s major league career lasted one season.

Stottlemyre himself thought he had his cancer beaten once, in 2001, after chemotherapy and stem-cell treatment appeared to knock it out of his park. Remembering Jason’s battle decades earlier kept him strong, as did his involvement with the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. Reminded then that he had more hair on his head than he had before his chemo, Stottlemyre laughed. “Everybody’s mentioned that to me,” he replied, “although I don’t recommend what I had to go through to do it.”

Ten years after he left the Yankees for the final time, Stottlemyre was stunned to be invited to Old-Timer’s Day 2015 . . . where his entry into the Yankees’ fabled Monument Park was unveiled. There was probably nobody more shocked over it than Stottlemyre himself, who felt that as a pitcher he’d represented an era the Yankees and their fans would prefer to forget.

“If I never get to come to another Old Timers Day,” he told the Yankee Stadium crowd, “I will take these memories and I’ll start another baseball club, coaching up there, wherever they need me.”

Once upon a time, Stottlemyre’s uniform number—30, which hasn’t been retired yet (it was seen last on the back of now ex-Yankee reliever David Robertson)—was also a journalist’s code at the end of a good piece of copy. He wasn’t always good copy during his career, other than pitching and winning. But men who beat Bob Gibson in even one World Series game draw almost as much attention and respect as men who live well and battle more insidious foes with his kind of silent courage.

Micah Bowie, on the mound as a National, before assorted elbow, hip, and shoulder issues killed a career they compromised in the first place.

Micah Bowie’s isn’t necessarily a name you’d recognise at first hearing. He pitched for five major league teams, when he could pitch at all, before retiring in 2008. Now he may be lucky to be alive at all. The lefthander who left baseball hoping to help aspiring players avoid or get past injuries of the kind that derailed his career gasps for air now. Literally.

Bowie suffers a ruptured diaphragm. A harrowing YouTube video shows him fighting for his breath behind assorted monitoring cables attached to his chest. (He’s believed to have a mere eight percent lung capacity now.) Compared to this, spending his professional baseball life losing a war with his elbow, hip, shoulder, and groin was child’s play for the now 44-year-old Texas product.

The Major League Baseball Players Association spurned a request from Bowie’s family to vest his $60,000-per-year medical benefit in advance of the normal 62-years-old vesting age. Bowie was released from palliative care on 29 December 2018, according to journalist Douglas Gladstone, whose mission has become advocating for such players as Bowie and for former major leaguers denied pensions after a 1980 rules change.

Bowie was due to go to the Jewish National Lung Hospital in Denver on 3 January. Bowie’s wife, Keeley, has all she can do to keep a semblance of normalcy for their children in the middle of her husband’s poor prognosis. The Players Association, whose executive director Tony Clark is a former major league first baseman, and whose staffers today include Hall of Famer Dave Winfield and several other former players, didn’t respond to requests from this journal for comment.

The players’ union may have rejected Bowie’s family for an early benefit vest, but that’s not the case with one-time Cy Young Award runner-up Mike Norris, one of the quintet of starting pitchers Sports Illustrated ballyhooed as the Athletics’ “Five Aces” in an April 1981 cover story. Former Nationals pitching coach Steve McCatty plus former Blue Jays pitching coach Rick Langford, Brian Kingman, and Matt Keough completed the quintet; Billy Martin, a manager whom Bill James once described as “a man who did not quite believe in the existence of the future,” rode them hard until they were put to bed wet, figuratively.

Their splash turned to drowning within three seasons, mostly, as one after another of the Five came down with career-destroying arm or shoulder issues after a collective workload that sent baseball people then and now to the nearest whiskey jug. Norris—who pitched through pain in 1981 and 1982 after winning 22 games in 1980—also turned up in cocaine’s grip, testifying at the notorious 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials.

He cleaned up and in time became involved with Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, a group helping youth learn the game and its pitfalls alike. In 1999 hes underwent surgery to correct cervical myelopathy, a spinal condition. A decade later, at age 53, Norris asked for and received his $89,000 annual family disability benefit.

“It is anathema to me why, if Mike Norris could get his reported $89,000 disability benefits claim approved a decade ago,” says Gladstone, who doesn’t begrudge Norris receiving it, “the union is unwilling to do the same for Micah and his family. And Mr. Norris wasn’t in palliative care.”

Bowie never got anywhere near Norris’s brief but certain acquaintance with mound glory. What began with an ulnar ligament injury in the Braves’ system in 1966 turned into two more injuries to it that finally forced him to Tommy John surgery in 2003. He’d barely worked his way back when he suffered a detached latissimus muscle under his throwing arm and, two years later, a groin injury. He was lucky to pitch parts of six major league seasons with the Braves, the Cubs, the Athletics, the Nationals, and the Rockies before he called it a career after the Astros released him from their organisation in 2008.

“I’ve gone through most every injury that you can go through as a pitcher,” Bowie told the San Antonio Express-News in 2010. “I know how to find out how to fix it, and how to come back and pitch on the major-league level. I want to take those things that guarantee you take the hurt away.”

On ninety acres east of San Marcos, Texas, Bowie put his knowledge and his money where his mouth was. He formed the Bowie Baseball Academy with staffers that included former minor league manager Joe Szekely, former Astros first-round pick Jimmy Gonzalez, current Pirates prospect Pasquale Mazzocoli, former Dodger minor league catcher Brett Magnusson, and former Royals minor leaguer David Wood.

“Every time I got hurt, I got released,” Bowie told Express-News writer Richard Oliver. “I lost my livelihood, my job. These kids get hurt, they lose college, they lose opportunity. I don’t want an injury to be the determining factor if they play baseball or not.”

Not the way it was for Bowie. After three relief appearances for the 1999 Braves, despite being groomed as a starter in the minors, he was traded to the Cubs in the package that brough the Braves veteran pitcher Terry Mulholland and infielder Jose Hernandez. The Cubs returned him to starting where he didn’t exactly flourish; then, he was converted to relief work by the A’s. The Tommy John surgery followed not long after that, and he missed 2004 recuperating before the Nationals signed him on a minor league deal.

Bowie got another major league callup to the Nats in 2006 and became an effective setup reliever (1.37 ERA in fifteen appearances) before a groin injury derailed his season. He returned for 2007, again in the setup role, before four of the Nats’ five starting pitchers hit the disabled list and he returned to the starting role. In six starts he earned a 4-0 record with a 3.82 ERA before the hip injury hit.

He has also been a regular instructor at T Bar M Camps, a non-denominational Christian sports camp located in his native Texas. His entry at the camps’ Website includes a quote from Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Colossians: “Whatever you do , work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, and not for men.”

It isn’t his heart that threatens Bowie’s life now.

Zach Britton stays a Yankee after all . . .

Apparently, Zach Britton has decided life in the Yankee bullpen is worth living for the next few years, and the Yankees have decided concurrently that life in their bullpen can only be enhanced by keeping him aboard. Hence will Britton sign to return to the Bronx for three years, $40 million, and an opt-out clause contingent on whether the Yankees pick up a fourth-year option after the second year of the new deal.

The Angels were thought to be the top finalists for both Britton and David Robertson, before Robertson negotiated his own new deal with the Phillies, eliminating the middle man, for two years, $23 million. Needing a serious bullpen upgrade, the Angels apparently didn’t move fast or furious enough on either, which seems a little too par for their course.

The Phillies have more or less hinted Robertson stands to become their Andrew Miller, going into games when they’re on the line regardless of the inning in question as well as being one of two relievers (Seranthony Dominguez the other) in line for the save opportunities. Britton merely re-joins a very powerful Yankee pen with encouraging work to build on since he went there from the broiled and basted Orioles last summer.

The Empire Emeritus didn’t exactly want to lose Robertson if they could help it, but they’re banking on Britton building upon 25 Yankee innings with a 2.88 ERA including 21 strikeouts. If he’s really begun to re-discover the right handle on what was once his money pitch, a hard, sharp, wipeout sinkerball, the Yankees make out at bargain rates when all is said and done.

The alarms sounded softly in Britton’s deeper numbers: his fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP: your ERA when your defense is taken out of the equation, folks) as a Yankee was 4.08, but that was down from the 4.44 FIP he showed with the Orioles last year before the trade. His strikeout-to-walk rate was 1.91 as a Yankee and 1.62 on the season as a whole. The Yankees know he isn’t quite Zach the Knife who terrorised the American League from 2014-2016. They also know he may not become that Britton ever again.

But if he can build on what he did do for them last year, they’ll get a Britton who keeps their bullpen in one piece and makes life a lot simpler in the late innings. For the Yankees, that is. A pen with such bulls as Aroldis Chapman, Dellin Betances, Chad Green, and a healthy Britton can turn the rest of the American League into a china shop.

If the Yankees want to go back to the postseason and go deeper than the round one dispatch they got from the Red Sox last October, they’ll need that. And maybe this time Britton’s manager won’t leave him or any of the other bulls stewed and warmed in the bullpen with no place to go when a wild card game, if not a pennant, is on the line.

Two Octobers ago, the Orioles and the Blue Jays took the wild card game to the eleventh inning tied at two each. The Jays spent their then-closer Roberto Osuna for a wipeout ninth against two of the Orioles’ biggest boppers, Manny Machado and Mark Trumbo, plus Matt Wieters, and the teams matched bulls until Orioles manager Buck Showalter pulled Brian Duensing after he opened the bottom of the eleventh by striking out Ezequiel Carerra.

Showalter reached for Ubaldo Jimenez, normally a starter but on a string in which he surrendered only a .172 batting average against him from August beginning through regular season’s end, married to a .252 on-base percentage. But Jimenez surrendered back-to-back singles for first and third, on fastballs down the pipe or at least belt high, abetted by left fielder Nolan Reimhold’s bobble of Josh Donaldson’s first-pitch base hit. And the skipper plus his infielders confabbed at the mound.

Maybe they agreed Jimenez’s job regarding Edwin Encarnacion checking in at the plate was to throw nothing but a double play ball. What just about everyone in baseball agreed upon in that moment was how ridiculous it seemed that Britton—who’d just posted the arguable best season any major league closer’s had under the contemporary coordinates of the job—wasn’t even a topic.

He’d allowed four earned runs all year long and not a one since April, he had an 0.54 ERA and a 1.94 FIP, and out of 254 hitters faced 202 of them either struck out or whacked balls into the ground. Yet Showalter didn’t go to the mound with a hook for Jimenez and a signal for Britton. He didn’t even have Britton warming up.

Showalter’s was the wrong conservatism in that moment, wanting the righthander-vs.-righthander matchup, not even pondering that, lefthander though he is, Britton in 2016 kept righthanded hitters to a .155 batting average and a .199 slugging percentage. With Encarnacion hitting in the lap of luxury as it was, having to think of nothing more complicated than hitting a measly sacrifice fly to win it, that luxury would have been spoiled if he’d had to try getting Britton’s sinker in the air.

But you know about those looking gift horses in the mouths. The Orioles should have. Their lineup struggled against lefthanded pitching that year but the Jays started righthander Marcus Stroman against them that night. And the only thing the Orioles had to show for it was Trumbo’s two-run homer in the fourth. So it was Jimenez versus Encarnacion, leaving Encarnacion in the luxury bath.

Sure enough, Jimenez threw Encarnacion a fastball right down the pipe to open. And Encarnacion hit that gift into the second deck, turning Rogers Centre into the place where the nuts hunt the squirrels, sending the Jays to the division series they’d win against the Rangers only to lose the League Championship Series to the Indians. Showalter hadn’t learned a thing from Mike Matheny’s identical mistake two years prior.

With a trip to the 2014 World Series on the line, Matheny stayed with a still-rusty Michael Wacha in the bottom of the ninth rather than reach for his then-shutdown closer, Trevor Rosenthal, because, well, you don’t bring your closer in unless you have a lead to protect, right? Wrong. The then-Cardinals manager watched Travis Ishikawa channel his inner Bobby Thomson and hit a three-run homer to the top of Levi’s Landing in Pac Bell Park with the pennant attached. Inspiring dubbings of Russ Hodges over Joe Buck and sending the Giants to the World Series.

Showalter and Matheny can commiserate over a few drinks now. Matheny and two coaches were purged last July, the first in-season managerial change the Cardinals made in almost a quarter of a century. Showalter was executed a couple of days after the 2018 season ended. Matheny lost his clubhouse; Showalter—who’d turned the Orioles around after taking over in 2010 and taking them to a three postseasons in five years string, belying his former reputation as a detail freak who wore out his welcome as fast as he earned it—may have been lucky not to lose his marble. Singular.

The Orioles collapsed completely after that wild card game loss. They finished dead last in the American League East the next two seasons including 2018 and found themselves forced to offload their more prime talents including Machado and Britton. Britton himself suffered even worse, losing part of early 2017 to tightness in his forearm, before an offseason workout hit him with a torn Achilles tendon that would keep him out of action until June last year.

Dealing Britton and Machado (to the Dodgers) was the Orioles’ admitting that it was time to blow up and rebuild. After they’d been 7-20 at one point last year, thirty years after another Orioles team with a couple of future Hall of Famers (Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray) aboard opened a season 0-21. The Yankees have re-upped Britton and may yet remain in the Machado market.

All Yankee manager Aaron Boone has to do is prove he’s learned a lesson or two from last fall’s division series wipeout, and not leave Britton or any of his best bulls blowing in the wind, while leaving lesser or gassed arms to do the clutch pitching with a postseason advance on the line.