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.

Baseball’s sky isn’t falling, folks

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Dodger Stadium

No, folks, this is not the home of the new Evil Empire.

Ken Rosenthal isn’t the only one who’s slightly staggered that Rob Manfred actually tried to speak reasonably about the current ponderings of a baseball salary cap. Slightly, but perhaps not irrevocably.

Said Commissioner Pepperwinkle when some owners began making some pro-cap noise, “I am a huge believer in the idea that there are always multiple solutions to a particular set of concerns.” Said Rosenthal, though, playing the trust-your-mother-but-cut-the-cards card, “It’s possible, perhaps even likely, Manfred was playing possum when he spoke of ‘multiple solutions’ for revenue disparity.”

Let’s remember, as Rosenthal does by way of Forbes, that baseball in 2024 generated $12.1 billion in revenues, a new record even if it’s not as ritzy a record as Aaron Judge’s American League single-season home run record. The math says that’s an average $400 million per major league franchise.

Alas, some owners and team executives have begun to bellyache well ahead of the current collective bargaining agreement’s 2026 expiration. Rosenthal cites a few who may or may not surprise you: the Orioles’ new owner, David Rubenstein; the Yankees’ veteran owner Hal Steinbrenner; the Mets’s president David Stearns:

Rubenstein has said he wishes baseball a salary cap “the way other sports do.” Steinbrenner says those profligate Dodgers it’s difficult “for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they’re doing now.” Stearns says baseball has “a little tougher time” figuring out how to keep stars who came up through the smaller market organisations in those organisations.

Not so fast, Rosenthal rejoins:

Funny, Rubenstein is a private equity billionaire who last March, with no assurance of a cap, had no problem paying $1.735 billion for the control stake of the Orioles . . . Funny, Forbes last March valued Steinbrenner’s team at a major-league high $7.55 billion and the Dodgers at $5.45 billion . . . Funny, Stearns previously worked for the Brewers, who play in the smallest market in baseball, yet signed outfielders Christian Yelich to a nine-year, $215 million contract and Jackson Chourio–after Stearns departed–to an eight-year, $82 million deal. And the Brewers . . . consistently find a way to compete.

“There is no disputing that small-market teams are at a financial disadvantage, and often lose star players,” Rosenthal continues. “But it’s also true that those teams occasionally keep some stars long-term, and perhaps could invest more of their revenue-sharing dollars in major-league payroll.”

Perhaps they could take the cue from the late Peter Seidler, whose Padres have been “proof that small-market teams should not operate as if they are doomed.” Seidler may also have been one of the only exceptions (countable on a single hand) to the rule that no fan ever pays their way into the ballpark to see the team’s owner. That’s how fan friendly he was before his death.

The Padres may or may not have spent all wisely, all the time. But as Rosenthal notes, they do have three postseasons in the past five years (including and especially the thriller with the Phillies that climaxed in Bryce Harper’s mud-bowl home run) and four consecutive attendance rankings in the top five.

“Make the luxury-tax thresholds higher, but the penalties steeper; about 50 percent of luxury-tax proceeds go to small-market teams,” Rosenthal adds.

Redistribute draft picks to give small-market clubs better positions and additional selections. Force those teams to spend by instituting penalties for falling below certain payroll thresholds, similar to the ones that exist at the top of the luxury-tax structure.

Don’t like those ideas? Fine, come up with others . . . How would the sport revive from another stoppage? The owners advocating for a cap should not even want to flirt with that question. Their “sky is falling” act is already growing tiresome. Fix the sport some other way. Or sell your damn team.

Meanwhile, Rosenthal’s Athletic colleague Jayson Stark reminds one and all that playing the “competitive balance” card while agitating for a baseball salary cap is about as credible as calling the NFL the true parity league or the Trump Administration the true stewards of the Constitution.

How many baseball teams broke decades-long championship droughts, fifty years or longer, since 2001? Stark asks. And, answers: Eight—the 2002 Angels, the 2004 Red Sox, the 2005 White Sox, the 2010 Giants, the 2016 Cubs, the 2017 Astros*, the 2019 Nationals, and the 2023 Rangers. How many NFL teams have done likewise since 2001? Three—the 2009 Saints, the 2017 Eagles, and the 2020 Chiefs.

Stark has more myths to bust, and bust them he does, admirably:

Come Sunday, the Chiefs sought their third straight Super Bowl and fourth in the past six years. Meanwhile, among baseball’s behemoths whom some owners and a lot of witless fans claim are Ruining The Old Ball Game while the NFL is the Any Team Can Win league, Stark points forth:

“The Dodgers? They’ve won four World Series in the last 59 years.” Perspective: Those four began shortly after the Beatles performed their final-ever American concert . . . in what was then the home of the Dodgers’ hated rivals up north in the Bay Area.

“The Braves? They’ve won four World Series in the last 121 years.” Perspective: They won their first Series just a few months before Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination launched the world war that made the world safe for World War II.

“The Red Sox? They’ve won four World Series in the last 106 years.” Perspective: Before the first of those, the United States had sixteen presidents–from a former Princeton president named Woodrow Wilson to a former baseball owner named George W. Bush.

“The Giants? They’ve won four World Series in the last 91 years.” Perspective: Prior to 2010, the Giants hadn’t won a Series since the year of America’s first black radio network, the first mass polio vaccinations for children (in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates would finish dead last in the National League), and Edward R. Murrow handed Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy a television knockdown punch.

“The Cardinals? They’ve won four World Series in the last 60 years.” Perspective: You can make it five in the last 61, with their 1964 Series triumph against the Yankees . . . to whom their Series-winning manager would repair as their next manager following the disgraceful pre-ordained dumping of Yankee skipper Yogi Berra.

“The Phillies? The Astros? They’ve won four World Series combined in the history of their franchises.” Perspective: The Phillies had to beat the Astros to win the 1980 pennant that led to their first-ever Series triumph—32 years before the Astros were the team to be named later in the swap that sent the Brewers to the National League and the Astros to the American League.

The Yankees? Their dominance and dynasties are just so Twentieth Century, even if their wealth isn’t. Stark reminds us that we’ve seen 22 World Series since baseball decided to slap the big spenders with the luxury tax. The Yankees have won—wait for it!—exactly one of those Series.

Oh, yes: The Empire Emeritus and the Damn Dodgers have met in exactly four World Series since America’s bicentennial birthday bash. Want to know the score? Dead heat: two Series each . . . and the Yankees won both of theirs during the disco era–1977 and 1978.

Before last fall, Stark would like to enlighten or remind you, regarding tangles between two out of the five fattest payrolls in the game over the past 35 Series, “a World Series like that had happened precisely three times in those 35 years: 2018 (Dodgers-Red Sox) … 1999 (Yankees-Braves) … and 1996 (also Yankees-Braves). And that’s it.”

Meanwhile, what Stark calls the Sport That’s Broken has seen twelve 2024 teams with Opening Day payrolls less than $130 million, but he points out that 1) all but two of those teams played October baseball over the past five years; and, 2) all but four of them made the postseason in the past two years.

By the way, the salary-cap NFL has had eighteen distinct Super Bowl champions in the 49 years since the Messersmith decision ended baseball’s reserve era. Before you holler a-ha! be advised that baseball without the salary cap has had 24 distinct World Series champions in the same 49 years.

Repeat after me: Baseball’s sky isn’t falling. How can you tell an owner is lying? When his or their lips form the word “poverty” or synonyms thereof while forming the phrase “salary cap.” But how can you tell fans hollering for a salary cap are disingenuous? When their lips don’t form the phrase “salary floor.”

Written for and published at Sports Central.

Fay Vincent, RIP: Heart in the Right Place

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Fay Vincent, Rollie Fingers

Then-commissioner Fay Vincent (right) with Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers at the latter’s Cooperstown induction, 1992.

Fay Vincent’s finest hours involved navigating a World Series through an earthquake and navigating George Steinbrenner out of baseball, for a little while, anyway. His worst hour involved overcompensatory overreach and lit the powder keg that imploded his commissionership.

Which was a shame, because Vincent—who died Saturday at 86, after stopping treatment for bladder cancer—usually had his heart in the right place when it came to baseball.

For better and for worse, Vincent in the commissioner’s office he’d never really sought actually believed that baseball’s commissioner was supposed to act in “the best interest of the game.” He also believed the best interest of the game wasn’t restricted to making money for the owners.

What Steinbrenner got from Vincent, for using a street gambler named Howard Spira to help harvest dirt against Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, was suspended from baseball, though Vincent cannily allowed the Boss his vanity and let Steinbrenner say he’d merely resign. Biggest favour anyone could have done the Yankees then. With Steinbrenner on justifiable ice, it left Yankee visionaries such as Gene Michael unmolested enough to rebuild the Yankees (“reduced to rubble by the ten-thumbed touch of their owner,” George F. Will wrote on the threshold of the suspension) to greatness.

When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area right smack in the middle of the 1989 World Series (wags took note of the quake’s effect on ramshackle, refrigerating Candlestick Park and called the joint Wiggly Field), Vincent split the difference between the grief of the Bay Area and the necessities of his business. He put the Series on hold for a week. Returned in the rhetoric of healing, the Series finished and the Athletics (hey, yes! they used to be a Bay Area team!) got to finish what they started, a sweep of the Giants.

“Vincent displayed,” wrote Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post of that belief and his actions upon it, when Vincent was forced to resign, “one unexpected tendency that frightened the owners so much that, in recent weeks, they plotted against him . . . ”

When the owners, after years of collusion, shut the spring training camps in 1990, Vincent was a force against the hard-line labour strategy of some owners . . . When many assumed that George Steinbrenner would get off with a light punishment for rubbing shoulders with unsavoury types, Vincent treated the Boss with no more respect than if the owner had been a mere athlete who had gone astray and damaged the game’s reputation for integrity. When he was asked to divide the [1993] expansion spoils, he divided them so fairly that no one was happy. When he thought it was healthy for the game to put teams from the West in the NL’s West division and teams from the East in the East division—a shocking notion that had been discussed for decades—Vincent actually did it, even though one team* (out of twenty-eight) really didn’t like it and threatened to cause lots of legal trouble.

Vincent got into baseball only because his close friend A. Bartlett Giamatti asked. Pretty please, with sugar on it, even. So this man who made his fortune as an attorney, as a chief executive of Columbia Pictures, and as a Coca-Cola honcho after Coke bought Columbia, heeded his longtime friend. (“Coca-Cola surprised even Columbia’s management team of Herb Allen and Fay Vincent by paying $750 million for the studio, the equivalent of nearly twice its stock value at the time,” wrote historian Mark Pendergrast in For God, Country, & Coca-Cola.)

He stood by his man when Giamatti dropped the hammer on Pete Rose. He accepted baseball’s mantle when Giamatti suffered his fatal heart attack eight days after winding up the Rose investigation, and the owners practically begged him pretty please, too.

Alas, the owners would learn the hard way that they hadn’t exactly bought themselves a yes-manperson. If only Vincent hadn’t built them the guillotine into which they’d force him to put his head in 1992.

Vincent’s most wounding flaw was as John Helyar (in The Lords of the Realm) described it: “passively waiting for [some] issues to become a mess instead of getting ahead of the curve on them.” Then, when he did involve himself, enough owners could and did smear him as a stubborn tyrant. Then came the Steve Howe mess.

Once a formidable relief pitcher, Howe became the near-poster boy for baseball’s 1980s cocaine epidemic. And, a six-time loser while he was at it, in terms of baseball standing. Then, in 1991, Howe applied for reinstatement and Vincent gave it to him. Then the Yankees gave him a shot after he set up an independent tryout at their spring camp. The aforementioned Gene Michael said, just as magnanimously, “He’s been clean for two years. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions about him, his makeup, the type of person he is. I feel there’s been a lot worse things done in baseball than bringing Steve Howe back. If it was my son or your son, you’d want to give him another chance.”

At first, Howe more than justified Vincent’s and the Yankees’ magnanimity. He pitched his way onto the Yankee roster and posted the second best season of his career: a 1.68 ERA, a 2.34 fielding-independent pitching rate, and an 0.96 WHIP. A hyperextended elbow ended his season in August 1991, but when Howe opened 1992 with a 2.42 ERA and a 0.45 WHIP, he made Vincent, Michael, and the entire Yankee organisation resemble geniuses.

Except that there was this little matter of Howe being busted in Montana during the off-season on a charge of trying to possess cocaine. Howe had little choice but to plead guilty in June 1992. Almost unprompted, Vincent barred Howe for life.

The Major League Baseball Players Association filed a grievance based on Howe’s having passed every drug test he was called upon to take. Howe’s agent Dick Moss handled the union side of the grievance and brought in a few heavy Yankee hitters—Michael plus manager Buck Showalter and a team vice president named Jack Lawn—as character witnesses.

Oops.

Thinking that Vincent felt as though Howe had just made him resemble a fool after going out on a very long limb for him was one thing. But he struck back like a man whose knowledge of fly swatting involved a hand-held nuclear weapon. He tried to strong-arm Michael, Showalter, and Lawn into changing their testimony the following day. He ordered them flatly to be in his office no later than eleven that morning, never mind that Showalter was already in his Yankee Stadium office prepping for the day’s game against the Royals.

Vincent sent the same orders to Michael and Lawn at home. Michael picked up Lawn, then Showalter, and an attorney Michael called warned them: don’t go to Vincent without a lawyer present unless you’re taking suicide lessons. When they arrived, Vincent told them they’d each “effectively resigned form baseball” because they had dared to “disagree with our drug policy” by acting as Howe’s character witnesses.

Lawn, an ex-Marine who once worked for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, told Vincent he was sworn to tell the truth and “only testified in accordance with my conscience and my principles.” The commissioner whose conduct rankled those owners who essentially told him, “We don’t need your steenkin’ conscience and principles,” told Lawn—who wrote it on an index card so he wouldn’t forget it—“You should have left your conscience and your principles outside the room.”

An attorney privy to the Yankee trio’s session with Vincent said, “This guy has cooked his own goose.”

Showalter didn’t get back to the Stadium until four minutes before the first pitch. It hit the New York media as hard as the home runs that began a 6-0 Royals lead and helped end things with a 7-6 Yankee comeback win. Three guesses which part of the day mattered more postgame.

If Vincent wanted to mop the floor with The Boss, that was fine by the scribes. But if he wanted to mop the streets with Showalter, Michael, and Lawn, they were going to raise a little hell. They forced Vincent to back off his disciplinary threats. He was also forced, more or less, to order notices posted in baseball clubhouses saying no one should fear retaliation for testifying candidly during grievances.

Those among the owners already itching to dump Vincent got new impetus by his “manhandling of the Yankee Three,” Helyar wrote. “More no-confidence [in Vincent] memos came across [then-Brewers owner Bud Selig’s] fax machine. The conference callers turned to two big questions. One: How much support did they need to fire Vincent? Two: Could they legally fire him?” In order: 1) A two-thirds majority. 2) Yes, long as they paid the man the rest of his contract terms.

After vowing to fight to the end but gauging his falling support, Vincent saved the owners the trouble of executing him when he resigned in September 1992.**

“He vowed,” Boswell wrote, “to fight his backstabbing, leak-planting, disinformation-spreading enemies all the way to the Supreme Court. But, in the end, Jerry ‘I’m Michael Jordan’s Boss’ Reinsdorf of the White Sox, Bud ‘Me? Plot against Fay?’ Selig . . . and Peter ‘I’m Just as Powerful as Dad’ O’Malley of the Dodgers got their way . . . Vincent resigned rather than than drag baseball through the indignity and distraction of a long legal brawl . . . His final act ‘in the best interests of the game’ was, he wrote, ‘resignation, not litigation’.”

Long before the Howe mess, enough owners believed Vincent was too much of a players’ commissioner. Vincent himself said often enough that his largest regret after leaving office was being unable to build what he called “a decent relationship” between the owners and the players.

“I thought somebody would take over after me and get that done,” he told a reporter in 2023. “If I died tomorrow, that would be the big regret, is that the players and the owners still have to make some commitment to each other to be partners and to build the game.”

Selig, of course, became the head of the owners’ executive council, which made him in effect baseball’s acting commissioner. After the owners under his watch forced the 1994 players’ strike, they elected to make him the new commissioner, where he stayed until 2015.

“To do the job without angering an owner is impossible,” Vincent once said. “I can’t make all twenty-eight of my bosses happy. People have told me I’m the last commissioner. If so, it’s a sad thing. I hope [the owners] learn this lesson before too much damage is done.”

Vincent didn’t exactly go gently into the proverbial good gray night, either. His memoir, The Last Commissioner, was a bold if futile wake-up invitation to the game he loved. His later interviews with assorted Hall of Famers and surviving Negro Leagues players led to three books worth of oral history (The Only Game in Town, We Would Have Played for Nothing, and It’s What’s Inside the Lines that Counts).

He tried to leave baseball better than when he found it. If he couldn’t do that, it wasn’t because he failed to speak or act but because enough who mattered failed to listen when he was at his best and overreacted the one time he overreacted himself.

Vincent deserved better than to be pushed out the door under the lash of one bad mistake. May the Elysian Fields angels grant his family comfort and himself a warm homecoming.

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* For the record, that team was the Cubs.

** Steve Howe was reinstated, again, after all. Arbitrator George Nicolau ruled that baseball failed to test Howe “in the manner it promised based on Howe’s documented case of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder,” as Forbes’s Marc Edelman wrote in 2014. Howe had a none-too-great 1993 but got himself named the Yankee closer for 1994, having a splendid season, the near-equal of his striking 1991-92 work.

His 1995 was anything but, alas. Moved back to a setup role in 1996, he would be released that June after 25 appearances and an obscene 6.35 ERA. He tried one more season in the independent Northern League, with the Sioux Falls Canaries, but called it a career after that 1997 season, after the Giants backed away from signing him following an airport incident in which he was found with a handgun in his luggage.

Almost ten years after his pitching career ended, working his own Arizona framing contracting business, Howe was leaving California for home when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, ejected him, and landed on him, killing him at 48. Toxicology reports said there was methamphetamine in his system.

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Note: This essay was published first by Sports Central. A very few small portions were published previously.

The continuing ballad of Billy the Kid

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Billy Wagner

Billy Wagner stood 5’10” . . . but to the hitters facing him, he must have looked and felt 10’5″.

When Billy Wagner called it a career after a short tour with the Braves, he spoke like a man who wasn’t worried about whether he’d make or endure on a Hall of Fame ballot. “I’m not going to change anyone’s mind about whether I’m a Hall of Famer,” the longtime relief pitcher said. “People are either going to like me or hate me, and I can’t change their minds. Besides, life is about a lot more than this game.”

That was fifteen years ago. Tomorrow should reveal that enough voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America have changed their minds. Wagner’s first Hall ballot showed him with 10.5 percent of the vote. At this writing, his final appearance on the BBWAA ballot should usher him into Cooperstown with at least 85 percent of the vote, well above the minimum needed.

Thus would Billy the Kid stand on the induction stage with outfielder Ichiro Suzuki (bank on it: he’ll become the first unanimous election among position players on their first Hall ballot), CC Sabathia (another first ballot lock, though a hair over seven points less than Ichiro), and Carlos Beltrán. (80.3 percent.*)

Almost a week ago, Wagner wasn’t sounding as sanguine as he did upon his retirement from the mound. “You’re sitting here and you can’t control [the outcome],” he told The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner by phone. “It’s tough. I hate it. It’s just not been a very fun experience, especially when it comes down to your tenth and final ballot. It’s not going to be pleasant. It’s a grind, but in a couple of days, this will be over—one way or the other, good or bad.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Wagner could and likely would make an appearance on a future ballot of the Hall’s Contemporary Baseball Era (Players) Committee, perhaps as soon as next December. But it looks as though nobody has to worry about that anymore. Wagner, especially.

Last week you’d have had to go the extra hundred miles to convince him. Last year, he waited and waited only to fall short by five votes. When Kepner asked Wagner if that compared to being spurned for a prom date with his buddies watching live and millions more watching on television, he couldn’t resist laughing. Then, he calmed down again and answered soberly.

“My gosh. You’ve got thirty kids looking at you,” he began.

I’m emotional, I don’t want to be emotional, so I’m fighting it back like, “Well, you know, it’s great.” You’re saying all the things you need to say, but it was awful. So the ballot comes out, they take all their stuff and leave—and you’re still going through practice. There’s no, “Hey guys, we’re going to take a five-minute break here.” You couldn’t do anything. That was rough. I was so embarrassed.

If the current indicators hold, and I’m not sure how you can tumble from 85 percent of the vote to falling beneath the 73 percent line without some very suspect eleventh-hour activity, the man who stood 5’10” as a human being but about 10’5″ to the batters he faced pitching for the Astros, the Phillies, the Mets, the Red Sox, and the Braves, is about to become anything but embarrassed.

Which is more than you can say for those batters over the sixteen-year career that ended in 2010. You might wish to become the proverbial fly on the wall if those batters could round up for a seminar called, “How Not to Hit Billy Wagner—Because You Can’t.” The beginning of Wagner’s Hall of Fame case, and possibly the end, too, is this: Opposing hitters could only hit .187 against him.

.187.

Not even The Mariano himself kept hitters that sharply out of luck. Wagner’s .187 batting average against him will become the lowest BAA of any Hall of Fame relief pitcher. Lower than Rivera and Trevor Hoffman (.211 each), lower than Hoyt Wilhelm (.213), lower than Dennis Eckersley (.225), lower than Goose Gossage (.228), lower than Bruce Sutter (.230), lower than Rollie Fingers (.232), lower than Lee Smith (.235).

Among that group, too, are a mere four who pitched in the most hitter friendly of times: Smith (in the final third of his career), Hoffman, Rivera, and Billy the Kid. That, I’ve written before and don’t mind repeating, should make you wonder what the record would have been if Wagner could have avoided assorted injuries including a late-career Tommy John surgery.

And before you take up carping yet again over his comparatively small number of innings pitched, try to keep these in mind: 1) It wasn’t his idea to finish with 903 innings pitched. 2)  His lifetime walks/hits per inning pitchd (WHIP) rate, as Kepner pointed out, is lower than any pitcher with 900+ innings in the century between the final game of Hall of Famer Addie Joss and Hall of Famer-to-be Wagner. Including The Mariano and Trevor Time.

If it’s numbers you still wish, how about these: The best strikeouts per nine rate (11.92) in baseball history. The best ERA (2.31) by any lefthander in the live ball era (1920 forward). The lowest opposition OPS (.558) in that same century between Joss’s and Wagner’s final games.

All of which are rather surrrealistic for a fellow whose hardscrabble childhood (and “hardscrabble” is phrasing things politely about a kid for whom peanut butter on a cracker was dinner often enough when he was growing up) including driving himself to throw lefthanded because two right elbow fractures made throwing his natural righthanded impossible.

That’s about as close to a self-made Hall of Famer as you can get.

“You’re not supposed to get too high or too low,” Wagner told Kepner about The Wait, “but you just sit with a big pit in your stomach right now, wondering where this thing’s going to go. You’re constantly fighting the buildup to that moment.” Finally, it looks as though Billy the Kid’s going to win his final fight.

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* Seemingly, Beltrán is about to be told about his Astrogate co-masterminding, “All is forgiven.” As if the writers didn’t hear, didn’t see, or chose to ignore, how Astrogate co-exposer Evan Drellich (in Winning Fixes Everything) zinged Beltrán for his post-suspension apology, the one in which he said he wished he’d asked more questions about what the 2017 Astro Intelligence Agency was doing.

Beltrán was as powerful a clubhouse presence as there was on the 2017 Astros, begging the question, what was stopping him from asking those questions? (Emphasis added.)

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This essay was first published at Sports Central.

Bob Uecker, RIP: Always join them laughing

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Bob Uecker

‘We’d like to inject you with hepatitis. We need to bring an infielder up.”—The words Bob Uecker put into 1964 Cardinals general manager Bing Devine’s mouth, during Uecker’s Hall of Fame speech.

The man who went from making people laugh with the way he played baseball to making them laugh with the ways he talked about the game and himself has gone home to the Elysian Fields. Their gains in laughter and inverted wisdom are our losses on this island earth.

“I’d set records that will never be equaled,” Bob Uecker told the Cooperstown gathering, as he was inducted into the Hall of Fame’s broadcasters’ wing, “ninety percent I hope are never printed: .200 lifetime batting average in the major leagues which tied me with another sports great averaging 200 or better for a ten-year period—Don Carter, one of our top bowlers.”

There was far, far more to the jovial former catcher than the “jussssssssssst a bit outside” call in Major League. Most of it came forth over decades of broadcasting the Milwaukee Brewers and more than a few evenings in the guest chair with Johnny Carson. A lot of it came forth when he spoke in Cooperstown that day.

Those who think just anyone can be funny could never say they’d left half a stage of Hall of Famers in tears from laughter, led by Willie Mays himself. For now I’m going to borrow some immortal words from Vin Scully: You really ought to hear and/or read it for yourself, so I’m just going to keep my pen to myself . . .

I signed a very modest $3,000 bonus with the Braves in Milwaukee, which I’m sure a lot of you know. And my old man didn’t have that kind of money to put out. But the Braves took it. I remember sitting around our kitchen table counting all this money, coins out of jars, and I’m telling my dad, ‘Forget this, I don’t want to play.’ He said, ‘No, you are going to play baseball. We are going to have you make some money, and we’re going to live real good.’ My dad had an accent, I want to be real authentic when I’m doing this thing.

So I signed. The signing took place at a very popular restaurant in Milwaukee. And I remember driving, and my dad’s all fired up and nervous, and I said, ‘Look, it will be over in a couple of minutes. Don’t be uptight.’ We pull in the parking lot, pull next to the Braves automobile, and my dad screwed up right away. He doesn’t have the window rolled up far enough and our tray falls off and all the food is on the floor. And from there on it was baseball.

Starting with the Braves in Milwaukee, St. Louis, where I won the World’s Championship for them in 1964, to the Philadelphia Phillies and back to the Braves in Atlanta, where I became Phil Niekro’s personal chaser. But during every player’s career there comes a time when you know that your services are no longer required, that you might be moving on. Traded, sold, released, whatever it may be. And having been with four clubs, I picked up a few of these tips.

I remember Gene Mauch doing things to me at Philadelphia. I’d be sitting there and he’d say, ‘Grab a bat and stop this rally.’ Send me up there without a bat and tell me to try for a walk. Look down at the first base coach for a sign and have him turn his back on you. But you know what? Things like that never bothered me. I’d set records that will never be equaled, ninety percent I hope are never printed: .200 lifetime batting average in the major leagues which tied me with another sports great averaging 200 or better for a ten-year period, Don Carter, one of our top bowlers.

In 1967 I set a major league record for passed balls, and I did that without playing every game. There was a game, as a matter of fact, during that year when [knuckleball specialist/Hall of Famer] Phil Niekro’s brother Joe and he were pitching against each other in Atlanta. Their parents were sitting right behind home plate. I saw their folks that day more than they did the whole weekend. But with people like Niekro, and this was another thing, I found the easy way out to catch a knuckleball. It was to wait until it stopped rolling and then pick it up.

There were a lot of things that aggravated me, too. My family is here today. My boys, my girls. My kids used to do things that aggravate me, too. I’d take them to the game and they’d want to come home with a different player. I remember one of my friends came to Atlanta to see me once. He came to the door, he says, ‘Does Bob Uecker live here?’ He says, ‘Yeah, bring him in.’ But my two boys are just like me. In their championship little league game, one of them struck out three times and the other one had an error that allowed the winning run to score. They lost the championship, and I couldn’t have been more proud. I remember the people as we walked through the parking lot throwing eggs and rotten stuff at our car. What a beautiful day.

You know, everybody remembers their first game in the major leagues. For me it was in Milwaukee. My hometown, born and raised there, and I can remember walking out on the field and Birdie Tebbetts was our manager at that time. And my family was there: my mother and dad, and all my relatives. And as I’m standing on the field, everybody’s pointing at me and waving and laughing, and I’m pointing back. And Birdie Tebbetts came up and asked me if I was nervous or uptight about the game. And I said, ‘I’m not. I’ve been waiting five years to get here. I’m ready to go.’

He said, ‘Well, we’re gonna start you today. I didn’t want to tell you earlier. I didn’t want you to get too fired up.’

I said, ‘Look, I’m ready to go.’

He said, ‘Well, great, you’re in there. And oh, by the by, the rest of us up here wear that supporter on the inside.’ That was the first game my folks walked out on, too.

But you know, of all of the things that I’ve done, this has always been number one, baseball. The commercials, the films, the television series, I could never wait for everything to get over to get back to baseball. I still, and this is not sour grapes by any means, still think I should have gone [into the Hall of Fame] as a player. Thank you very much. The proof is in the pudding.

No, this conglomeration of greats that are here today, a lot of them were teammates, but they won’t admit it. But they were. And a lot of them were players that worked in games that I called. They are wonderful friends, and always will be.

And, the 1964 World’s Championship team. The great Lou Brock. And I remember as we got down near World Series time, Bing Devine, who was the Cardinals’ general manager at that time, asked me if I would do him and the Cardinals, in general, a favor. And I said I would. And he said, ‘We’d like to inject you with hepatitis. We need to bring an infielder up.’ I said, ‘Would I be able to sit on the bench.’ He said, ‘Yes, we’ll build a plastic cubicle for you because it is an infectious disease.’ And I’ve got to tell you this. I have a photo at home, I turned a beautiful color yellow and with that Cardinal white uniform. I was knocked out. It was beautiful, wasn’t it, Lou? It was great.

Of course, any championship involves a World Series. The ring, the ceremony, the following season in St. Louis at old Busch Stadium. We were standing along the sideline. I was in the bullpen warming up the pitcher. And when they called my name for the ring, it’s something that you never ever forget. And when they threw it out into left field. I found it in the fifth inning, I think it was, Lou, wasn’t it? And once I spotted it in the grass man, I was on it. It was unbelievable.

But as these players have bats, gloves . . . I had a great shoe contract and glove contract with a company who paid me a lot of money never to be seen using their stuff. Bat orders . . . I would order a dozen bats and there were times they’d come back with handles at each end. You know, people have asked me a lot of times, because I didn’t hit a lot, we all know that, how long a dozen bats would last me? Depending on the weight and the model that I was using at that particular time I would say eight to ten cookouts.

I once ordered a dozen flame-treated bats, and they sent me a box of ashes, so I knew at that time things were moving on. But there are tips that you pick up when the Braves were going to release me. It is a tough time for a manager, for your family, for the player to be told that you’re never going to play the game again. And I can remember walking in the clubhouse that day, and Luman Harris, who was the Braves’ manager, came up to me and said there were no visitors allowed. So again, I knew I might be moving on.

Paul Richards was the general manager and told me the Braves wanted to make me a coach for the following season. And that I would be coaching second base. So again, gone. But that’s when the baseball career started as a broadcaster. I remember working first with Milo Hamilton and Ernie Johnson. And I was all fired up about that, too, until I found out that my portion of the broadcast was being used to jam Radio Free Europe . . .

Keep them laughing in the Elysian Fields, Mr. Ueck.

Uh, no. These guys aren’t everything fans should be.

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Mookie Betts

Interfering with Mookie Betts’s bid to haul Gleyber Torres’s Game Four-leadoff foul to the right side for out number one got two Yankee fans thrown out of Yankee Stadium on the spot, and now banned “indefinitely” from everything MLB.

It goes like this: If you have a problem with a pair of Yankee Stadium jerks getting banned indefinitely for interfering flagrantly with a player in the World Series, I have a problem with you. And I don’t care if the player with whom you interfered was Mookie Betts or Moe Baloney.

Austin Capobianco and John P. Hansen were banned indefinitely last week “from major league stadiums, offices, and other facilities.” MLB sent the pair a letter banning them concurrently “from attending any events sponsored by or associated with MLB. Please be advised that if you are discovered at any MLB property or event, you will be removed from the premises and subject to arrest for trespass.”

The play in question happened in the bottom of the first, Game Four, last October’s World Series. Betts ran Yankee leadoff hitter Gleyber Torres’s drive to the wall and took a flying leap, his glove hand stretched upward, trying for the ball. He had the ball in his glove squarely enough. That’s when Capobianco and Hansen reached out, one grabbing Betts’s wrist and the other trying to grab the ball out of Betts’s glove.

Outfielders are taught to steal home runs back from over fences. They’re also taught to turn foul flies into fly outs if they can get gloves on them and yank them back. I’m not sure if they’re taught how to defend themselves against overzealous fans who think they have the right to obstruct players from making plays at or over the fences by hook, crook, or anything else short of mutilation they can think of.

Which wasn’t exactly the sentiment Capobianco expressed after they were ejected from Yankee Stadium. As he told ESPN, “I patrol that wall and they know that.” That sounded as though someone in the Yankee organisation died and left Capobianco to play fence field in the will.

But the pair changed their stance when interviewed subsequently by Barstool Sports. Capobianco acknowledged they’d “crossed the line” taking hold of Betts’s wrist. Betts may have waved the play away postgame himself, but come December he wasn’t having it.

“I get them trying to get the ball. Cool,” the Mookie Monster told  2024 Back That Year Up with Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson on the Peacock network. But, like, you tried to grab my s–t. I was in the moment. So I thought about throwing a ball at them. And then I realized, ‘Mook, you ain’t gonna do s–t. Go back to right field’.”

When the incident actually happened, Barstool Sports writer Tommy Smokes didn’t exactly feel all that sympathetic to Betts or all that outraged by Capobianco and Hansen, Capobianco in particular. “This guy is everything that a Yankee should fan be,” Smokes wrote. “A loud, passionate, Italian greaseball who will do anything it takes to help the team win.”

We just did a full interview with him linked above that’ll be out everywhere else soon and as he told us, ‘I wasn’t trying to get the ball or to hurt him, I was just trying to extend the at-bat.’ And if you can’t respect that, then I don’t respect you.”

If you can’t look at that video and objectively find it hilarious, then I know everything I need to know about you as a person. I know what you stand for . . . It’s such a clear divide between people who laugh at that and people who want this guy thrown in prison. Even Mookie Betts after the game last night seemed to not care. People are acting like they decapitated him. He acknowledged to us that the friend probably shouldn’t have grabbed his hand, and that’s true, but let’s not pretend like he tried to [fornicating] decapitate him. All the main fan was trying to do was the get the ball out of the glove and extend the at-bat. The Yankees were down 3-0 in the World Series and you do whatever it takes to extend the at-bat for your guy at the plate.

Who is “you?”

Fans in the stands are permitted to “do whatever it takes” to extend the home player’s plate appearance? Betts is to blame because Torres swung late on a 1-0 pitch and sent it foul to the right side? Fans in the stand wearing the home team’s jerseys are thus auxiliary players entitled to make or break plays? Thank God and His servant Col. Ruppert that most fans, even most Yankee fans, would answer all the above with a resounding “You’re kiddin’, Spike.”

“This is just a classic baseball moment that had no real consequences other than bringing the Yankee crowd alive and keeping their season alive,” Smokes wrote further. “Anthony Volpe[‘s grand slam in the third] helped too. But if the Yankees come back and win the series, then this man deserves a parade float and a spot in Monument Park.” Let me guess. Smokes would have been ready to hand Jeffrey Maier the keys to the city and maybe his own private New York subway car.

I’m reasonably certain that there were and are others who think classic baseball moments such as that provoke not monuments but karma.

Just ask every Yankee fan who in the ballpark for Game Five. You know—the game after the Yankees won Game Four, 11-4. The game following the only Yankee win of a set in which they just did out-hit, out-run, out-slug, and out-pitchd the Dodgers. The game they thought the Yankees had in the bag with Gerrit Cole on the mound and a 5-0 lead, until the Bronx Boneheads ordered up an on-field sando* in the top of the fifth.

The game the Yankees lost after reclaiming the lead briefly enough with Giancarlo Stanton’s sixth-inning sac fly, a lead lasting only long enough for the Dodgers to overthrow it with a pair of eighth inning sac flies the Dodger bullpen made stick.

Capobianco and Hansen were probably lucky that being ejected from Game Four, and now banned indefinitely from anything MLB from the ballpark to the back lot of spring training to possibly the team stores, too, are all they’ve received.

Yankee fans who believe karma the bitch as which she’s so often advertised would probably like to give them a parade, all right. Preferably, onto and off the Triborough Bridge and into the East River.

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* “Sando”—Slang for “s–t sandwich,” created and popularised online (and, on lots of merchandise) by Las Vegas slot machine YouTube star Vegas Matt.

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* This essay published originally at Sports Central.