Category Archives: Baseball

The New York Times sports section, RIP

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Red Smith

Red Smith’s arrival in 1971 elevated the New York Times sports section from mere literature to transcendence. Now the section dies, sadly.

Those of you who weren’t alive to see the sports section of The New York Times in its most complete glory, I feel for you. The Times disbanding its sports section this week is a blow, but in absolute truth it would have hurt a great deal more if it had happened, say, forty years ago.

The paper never really seemed to think of its sports section as something terribly important, in any time, but New York baseball fans surely did. They may have loved the more visceral approaches of the Daily News or the New York Post, but they also loved the more nuanced takes from the best of the Times.

There was Dave Anderson, a refugee from the Brooklyn Eagle and the Journal-American, who’d eventually become a Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished commentary, in 1981. He won the prize largely for his take on George Steinbrenner’s laughably disgraceful firing of composed, cerebral, first-year, American League East-winning Yankee manager Dick Howser.

Steinbrenner tried to convince one and all present at that press conference that it was Howser’s idea to exchange a gig managing the Yankees for a shot at the Florida real estate game. “Say this for Dick Howser—instead of going along with George Steinbrenner’s party line yesterday, he declined to comment,” Anderson wrote, in a column called “The Food on the Table at the Execution.”

By not answering questions, he answered them. Anybody could see that. And anybody could see through George Steinbrenner’s scheme

‘What advice,” Dick Howser was being asked now, ”would you give Gene Michael?” ”To have a strong stomach,” Dick Howser replied, smiling thinly, ”and a nice contract.” Minutes later, the execution was over. Dick Howser got up quickly and walked out of the room without a smile. Behind his round desk, George Steinbrenner looked around.

”Nobody ate any sandwiches,” the Yankee owner said.

That from the man who once had a classic lead slaughtered by a particularly un-seeing Eagle copy editor, after a game in which critical errors cost the Milwaukee Braves against the Brooklyn Dodgers. “The Milwaukee Braves died with their boots,” Anderson began. Classic. Then, the un-seeing copy editor added, and made stick, “on.”

There was George Vecsey, whom I first met through his writing a biography or two aimed at the juvenile market. (Including The Baseball Life of Sandy Koufax, written after the Hall of Famer’s baseball retirement and awkward premiere as an NBC announcer and pre-game host.) He retired from the Times at 2011’s end, but he was a cool yet enthusiastic presence who knew emotion, not economics, was at the core of sports love.

“To its credit,” Vecsey writes on his Web journal, “this great paper continued to report and comment on the major issues in sports . . . [but i]nevitably, the excitement over the ‘local’ teams was lost. I felt the absence of emotion. Readers felt it.”

Speaking for myself, in retirement I had more time to read the paper—the print version, in a blue bag, in my driveway every morning. My friends in the Times printing plant call it ‘the daily miracle,’ and for me it is.

. . . But now the sports department is going to be disappeared, while promising new jobs for great editors, great reporters. I hope they appreciate Kurt Streeter, whose most recent Sports of the Times column savaged the pro-gambling baseball commissioner and the owner of the A’s, as they prepare for the A’s to vacate Oakland for Las Vegas.

That was the man who also wrote a sweet and sad elegy to A. Bartlett Giamatti, upon that short-lived baseball commissioner’s death (wherein Vecsey first formulated the precept that the good of the game isn’t the same as making money for the owners, a precept upon which I’ve leaned shamelessly), eight days after he pronounced Pete Rose persona non grata from organised baseball:

At the very least, the Rose affair kept Giamatti from sitting in the stands very often. He did get to see Nolan Ryan record his 5,000th strikeout last month in Texas, ticking off at least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.

Giamatti knew that baseball is about rooting, about caring. Let us envision him on the edge of his seat, a smile softening his gray beard and somber eyes, his fists itching to pump the air as Ryan blew his heater past Rickey Henderson. Let us picture him in Seattle or in Atlanta, suffering with the home fans, or back in Fenway, letting his true passions out.

As long as he was commissioner, there would have been the chance he would act and speak out of his convictions, and that these would have made him the ultimate steward of the national game.

There was also the singular Red Smith, whose death in 1982 opened the way for Vecsey to become a Sports of the Times columnist in the first place. Smith, a longtime New York Herald-Tribune fixture who was hired by the Times five years after that once-august paper collapsed into the short-lived World Journal Tribune experiment. Smith, who graduated thus from mere titan to another plane entirely, becoming the first of his breed to win the Pulitzer for distinguished commentary in 1976.

Smith, a wry observer who kept baseball foremost among the games he loved (he dismissed basketball as “whistleball” and despised hockey), a man who suffered no fools gladly. He suffered them ungladly, especially, when they tried to manipulate Hall of Famer Henry Aaron’s coming blast of Hall of Famer Babe Ruth to one side as baseball’s career home run champion for the box office above the game’s integrity:

Bill Bartholomay, the Braves’ president, meant to keep Aaron on the bench through the first three games in Cincinnati in the hope that the crowds would fill the Atlanta park to see Henry go after Ruth’s record in the eleven-game home stand that opens Monday night.

(Commissioner Bowie) Kuhn realised that in the view of most fans, leaving the team’s cleanup hitter out of the batting order would be tantamount to dumping the games in Cincinnati. He explained to Bartholomay what self-interest should have told the Braves’ owner, that it is important that every team present its strongest lineup every day in an honest effort to win, and that the customers must believe the strongest lineup is being used for that purpose.

When Bartholomay persisted in his determination to dragoon the living Aaron and the dead Ruth as shills to sell tickets in Atlanta, the commissioner laid down the law. With a man like Henry swinging for him, that’s all he had to do.

Of course, Henry swung big in the top of the first on 4 April 1974, turning the Reds’ Jack Billingham’s heater into a three-run homer to tie Ruth at 714. The “persistence” to which Smith aluded led to Braves skipper (and Hall of Fame third baseman Eddie Mathews) holding Aaron out of the second game, but playing him under orders in the third, where Aaron took an honest collar before the Braves went home and he could pass Ruth against the Dodgers.

There was Ira Berkow, who hasn’t won a Pulitzer for commentary yet but whose writings about baseball have elevated the human element into transcendence and can be had in several splendid anthologies, including Summers in the Bronx (Yankee writings), Summers at Shea (Mets writings), and It Happens Every Spring (all around the game).

There was Claire Smith, drafted from the Hartford Courant and graduated from groundbreaker (the first woman on a regular U.S. baseball beat, covering the Yankees; the late Alison Gordon did it in Canada, covering the Blue Jays for the Toronto Star) to Hall of Fame writers wing winner—joining such Timespeople as Smith and Anderson—and, in one of the sweetest turns of poetic justice, this year’s Red Smith Award winner from the Associated Press Sports Editors.

The woman whom Steve Garvey once pulled aside to give an interview, after his fellow Padres tried to block her during a postseason series, said upon hearing the news, “What I never dreamed of was being honoured with the Red Smith Award, because that’s the Mount Olympus in terms of the writers who’ve received it.”

The Times bought The Athletic, of course, and it makes sad sense that adding that online journal to its holdings should make its own sports section superfluous. Says former Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte to New York: “[B]uying The Athletic was really about getting rid of the sports section.”

I never understood why they bought it in the first place.If you remember, The Athletic was built on the business model of stripping the sports section of all the other newspapers in the country and giving you one person to cover every single team in the world.

They are going to have to strip The Athletic back to the bone because the business model of covering everything certainly doesn’t work. The Times’s sports department, which even as denuded as it is, contains some of the smartest and most sophisticated sports reporters in the country. So, what is going to happen to them? Are they going to be integrated into other departments? Maybe. The devil is in the details, because how is The Athletic going to cover things?

The Times has also had issues aplenty, usually on the news and political sides, in which it’s compromised its veracity and its image all by its own not-so-sweet self, and for a time long enough.

But it’s hard not to feel you should attend a funeral when learning the Times sports section has died. For me, who first read the Times sports pages when Arthur Daley was still writing Sports of the Times during my boyhood, it’s like learning a favourite cousin has gone to the Elysian Fields.

The All-Scar Game

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Austin Riley, Pete Alonso

Austin Riley’s (Braves, left) kneeling throw to kneeling scooper Pete Alonso (Mets, right) ended the bottom of the All-Star Game eighth with a double play . . . (MLB.com photo) . . .

The best thing about Tuesday night’s All-Star Game? Easy. That snappy eighth inning-ending double play into which Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker hit. He shot one up the third base line to Braves third baseman Austin Riley, who picked and threw on one knee across to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, who scooped on one knee to nail two outs for the price of one, doubling Blue Jays second baseman Whit Merrifield up.

That play preserved what proved the National League’s 3-2 win over the American League in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. They got the second and third runs in the top of that eighth, when Elias Díaz (Rockies) pinch hit for Jorge Soler (Marlins) with Nick Castellanos (Phillies) aboard after a nine-pitch leadoff walk and nobody out. Díaz sent Orioles righthander Félix Bautista’s 2-2 splitter off a bullpen sidewall, then off an overhang into the left field seats.

It meant the first NL All-Star win since 2012. It also meant Díaz becoming the Rockies’s first-ever All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award winner. Otherwise? It meant almost nothing. Because the worst thing about this year’s All-Scar Game was . . . just about everything else.

Mr. Blackwell, call your office. All-Star Game specific threads have been part of it for long enough. They began ugly and devolved to further states of revulsivity. But Tuesday night took the Ignoble Prize for Extinguished Haberdashery. The only uniforms uglier than this year’s All-Star silks are those hideous City Connect uniforms worn now and then during regular season games. Both should be done away with. Post haste. Let the All-Stars wear their regular team uniforms once again.

Who are those guys? They sort of anticipated long ovations for the hometown Mariners’ All-Star representatives. But they didn’t anticipate they’d be longer than usual. To the point where two Rays All-Stars—shortstop Wander Franco, pitcher Shane McLanahan—weren’t even introduced, when they poured in from center field among all other All-Stars. (Rays third baseman Yandy Díaz, an All-Star starter, did get introduced properly. But still.)

Maybe the two Rays jumped the gun trotting in while the ovation continued, but they should have been announced regardless.

While I’m at it, what was with that nonsense about bringing the All-Stars in from center field instead of having them come out of the dugouts to line up on the opposite base lines? Some traditions do deserve preservation. Not all, but some. What’s next—running the World Series combatants’ members in from the bullpens? (Oops! Don’t give the bastards any more bright ideas!)

Down with the mikes! In-game miking of players has always been ridiculous. But on Tuesday night it went from ridiculous to revolting. When Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi took the mound miked up, the poor guy got into trouble on the mound almost at once. He had to pitch his way out of a two-on, one-out jam in the second inning. He sounded about as thrilled to talk while working his escape act as a schoolboy ordered to explain why he put a girl’s phone number on the boys’ room wall.

What’s the meaning of this? We’ve got regular-season interleague play all year long now. The National League All-Stars broke a ten-season losing streak? Forgive me if hold my applause. So long as the entire season is full of interleague play, the All-Star Game means nothing. Wasn’t it bad enough during those years when the outcome of the All-Star Game determined home field advantage for the World Series?

The road to making the All-Star Game mean something once more is eliminating regular-season interleague play altogether.

Elias Díaz

. . . saving the lead (and, ultimately, the game) Elias Díaz gave the NL with his two-run homer in the top of the eighth. (And, yes, the All-Star uniforms get uglier every year. Enough!) (AP Photo.)

Tamper bay. Sure it was cute to hear the T-Mobile Park crowd chanting for Angels unicorn star Shohei Ohtani to come to Seattle as a free agent. The problem is, he isn’t a free agent yet. He still has a second half to play for the Angels. I’ll guarantee you that if any team decided to break into a “Come to us!” chant toward Ohtani, they’d be hauled before baseball’s government and disciplined for tampering.

I get practically every fan base in baseball wanting Ohtani in their teams’ fatigues starting next year. If they don’t, they should be questioned by grand juries. But they really should have held their tongues on that one no matter how deeply you think the All-Scar Game has been reduced to farce. Lucky for them the commissioner can’t fine the Mariners for their fans’ tamper chants. (Not unless someone can prove the Mariners put their fans up to it, anyway.)

Crash cart alert. Cardiac Craig Kimbrel (Phillies) was sent out to pitch the ninth. With a one-run lead. The National League should have put the crash carts on double red alert, entrusting a one-run lead to the guy whose six 2018 postseason saves with a 5.90 ERA/6.74 fielding-independent pitching still felt like defeats. The guy who has a lifetime 4.13 ERA/4.84 FIP in postseason play.

Kimbrel got the first two outs (a fly to right, a strikeout), then issued back-to-back walks (six and seven pitches off an even count and a 1-2 count, respectively) before he finally struck Jose Ramirez (Guardians) out—after opening 0-2 but lapsing to 2-2—to end the game. Making the ninth that kind of interesting should not be what the Phillies have to look forward to if they reach the coming postseason.

Sales pitch. How bad is the sorry state of the Athletics and their ten-thumbed owner John Fisher’s shameless moves while trying and failing to extort Oakland but discovering Nevada politicians have cactus juice for brains? It’s this bad—when the T-Mobile crowd wasn’t chanting for Ohtani to cast his free agency eyes upon Seattle, they were chanting “Sell the team!” when Rooker whacked a ground rule double in the fifth.

Can you think of any other All-Star ballpark crowd chanting against another team’s owner in the past? Not even George Steinbrenner’s worst 1980-91 antics inspired that. That’s more on Fisher, of course, but it’s still sad to think that a team reduced to cinder and ashes with malice aforethought captured an All-Star Game crowd’s attention almost equal to the attention they might have paid the game itself.

The ten million-to-one shot comes in

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Domingo Germán

German’s uniform number must have felt like adding insult to injury to the Athletics Wednesday night.

When the late Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in Game Five of the 1956 World Series, New York Daily News writer Joe Trimble was stuck for an opening line. His News colleague Dick Young handed one to him, practically in a glass case: The unperfect man pitched a perfect game.

That pretty much robs anyone of using it as a headline for Domingo Germán, who became the fourth Yankee pitcher to come away with a perfect game Wednesday night. Which is a shame, because Germán can be seen as having made Larsen resemble a saint.

Before he married in 1960, Larsen was a wild oat whom no less than Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle called the greatest drinker he’d ever known. That was saying something considering Mantle’s own prodigious taste for distilled spirits. The night before he went to a no-windup delivery and reached baseball immortality, Larsen went out—still steaming over an early Game Two hook—and got smashed.

Germán’s is a more grave backstory. He missed 2019’s final eighteen games plus the entire pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 after slapping his girlfriend during retiring Yankee legend CC Sabathia’s charity party late in the 2019 season. His 2021 return didn’t thrill all his teammates, even though there’d been Yankee fans swearing that a lack of formal criminal charges meant he should have been back in 2020.

“Sometimes,” relief pitcher Zack Britton said, before Germán’s 2021 return, “you don’t get to control who your teammates are.”

The Yankees entered spring training this year without figuring Germán in their starting rotation plans. Not until Frankie Montas needed shoulder surgery, Carlos Rodòn injured his forearm and then his back, and Luis Severino incurred a lat injury. And Germán himself—who has said he started undergoing treatment for depression following his 2019 incident and counseling to improve as a husband and father—dealt with shoulder inflammation last year.

Nothing in Germán’s 2023 entering Wednesday suggested he’d have anything coming such as what he’d do in Oakland’s RingCentral Coliseum—pitching the 24th perfect game in Show history and the fourth in Yankee history, following Larsen, David Wells, and—with Larsen and his Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra in attendance for a ceremonial pre-game first pitch—David Cone.

Germán was ejected, then suspended ten games, for too much of that new old-fashioned medicated goo on his hand after a May outing in Toronto. Before that, in April, he was suspected but allowed to wash his hands during a game against the Twins.

From early May through mid-June, Germán became, perhaps surprisingly, the best Yankee starting pitcher who wasn’t named Gerrit Cole, including a two-hit performance against the Guardians 1 May and six and two-thirds one-run ball against the Dodgers on a Sunday night game in June that was televised natinoally.

Then, his two outings prior to Wednesday night saw Germán abused by the Red Sox for seven runs in two innings; and, bushwhacked by the Mariners for ten runs including on four home runs.

I don’t know what Germán did on Tuesday night. I do know that he went out to the mound Wednesday night with absolutely nobody in the sparse-enough RingCentral house, perhaps including himself, expecting him to come away with the first perfect game ever pitched by a man whose previous start saw him take a ten-run beating.

That includes factoring that the A’s were the opposition. This year’s A’s have become such a pathetic set after long enough dismantling and disembowling under the all-thumbs hand of their owner that a perfect game against them might be considered doing it the easy way.

Especially since, during the top of the fifth, the Yankees made bloody well certain that Germán could go back out to the mound, pull up a lounge chair, and pitch from a sitting position serving up balls on tees without incurring serious damage.

They entered the inning with a mere 1-0 lead thanks to Giancarlo Stanton’s fourth-inning, two-out, first-pitch home run. They finished it with a 7-0 lead following an RBI double (Kyle Higashioka), a run home on a throwing error off a bunt (by Anthony Volpe, who stole third during the next at-bat), an RBI single (DJ LeMahieu), a two-run single (Stanton) after another A’s error enabled the bases loaded, and a two-out RBI single.

The Yankees then scored once in the top of the seventh (on Josh Donaldson’s sacrifice fly) and thrice in the top of the ninth (a run-scoring throwing error, an RBI double, a run-scoring ground out) to finish the 11-0 pile-on. It’s the fattest winning score in a perfect game since the Giants staked Matt Cain to a 10-0 conquest in 2012 and only the second time a perfect game pitcher had double-digit run support to work with.

All the while, Germán kept feeding the A’s things onto which they couldn’t attach sneaky eyes through the infield or wicked distractions in the outfield. He struck nine batters out, all before the eighth inning, and should have handed his defense at least equal credit for the perfecto as he might have accepted for himself. This is Germán’s gem with a win factor assigned, result of his strikeouts divided by the sum of his ground and fly outs:

  Score K GB FB WF FIP
Domingo Germán 11-0 9 8 10 .500 5.30

Essentially, Germán himself was responsible for half the game’s perfection. Which actually places him well enough ahead of Larsen’s perfecto (WF: .350) but behind those of Wells (.688) and Cone (.588).

Among the perfect games pitched in the World Series era (1903 forward) with available game logs, Germán’s win factor is higher than six perfecto pitchers (Larsen plus Charlie Robertson, Tom Browning, Dennis Martinez [the lowest at .227], Kenny Rogers, Mark Buehrle, Dallas Braden) but lower than eleven. (Cain, Wells and Cone, plus Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax [tied for highest with Cain: 1.077], Catfish Hunter, Len Barker, Mike Witt, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernández.)

You might care to know that Germán shares a .500 WF with one perfecto pitcher, one-time Yankee Philip Humber. But Germán’s curve ball, considered a sharp pitch when it’s thrown right, was responsible for nineteen of his 27 outs, including seven of his strikeouts.

“He threw that curveball in any count that he wanted to,” said A’s infielder Tony Kemp postgame. “It was spinning differently and moving differently. He put his fastball where he wanted to. Changeup as well. He just kind of mixed them.”

Larsen beat a somewhat aging but still formidable Dodgers team who’d ground their way to their final pennant during their Brooklyn life. Germán took on an A’s team that’s been compared often enough to the 1962 Mets—while lacking that team’s circumstantial popularity and flair for inadvertent ensemble comedy.

Those Mets merely got no-hit by Hall of Famer Koufax—who threw one of the most voluptuous curve balls in history himself—while Koufax’s Dodgers slapped eleven runs out of Met pitching . . . on 30 June 1962. These A’s accomplished something on 28 June 2023 that those Mets didn’t. They were victimised by Germán and the Yankees without the relief of the five walks Koufax surrendered.

Washington Post sportswriting legend Shirley Povich led his story of Larsen’s World Series perfecto with, “The million-to-one-shot came in.” It’s not unfair to suggest Germán was the ten million-to-one shot.

But you wonder whether his unusual uniform number—the only available single-digit number on the Yankees anymore, chosen when he gave Rodón his usual number 55 to indicate a new beginning for himself—didn’t look more swollen in the A’s eyes, adding insult to injury, than it looked on Germán’s back. Zero.

Smash, slash, and smother

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Mike Trout, Brandon Drury

Trout accepts congrats from Drury after his leadoff blast in the third—unaware that Drury would hit the next pitch out and Matt Thaiss would hit the next pitch after that out, opening the thirteen-run third-inning carnage against the Rockies Saturday night.

Saturday night was one night the Angels could well afford Shohei Ohtani having an off night. One RBI single in seven plate appearances might be cause for small alarm ordinarily. But who the hell needed Ohtani, on a night that the Angels dropped a 25-1 avalanche atop the walking-wounded Rockies in Coors Field?

The Rockies went into the game knowing they’ll miss right fielder Charlie Blackmon another few weeks, hitting the injured list with a broken right hand, after he tried playing through it following the hand having been hit by a pitch in Kansas City. They were already missing Kris Bryant with a heel injury. Not to mention three key starting pitchers including Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela.

But nobody saw Saturday’s kind disaster coming when the Angels opened a 2-0 lead after two full innings.

They spent the second inning nailing a pair of back-to-back base hits before Rockies starter Chase Anderson plunked Angels right fielder Mickey Moniak on 0-2 to load the pads, and David Fletcher slashed a two-run single on the first pitch—all with nobody out.

Anderson looked rehorsed after he induced a double play grounder and caught Ohtani himself looking at a full-count third strike. You’ll find fewer more grave instances of looks being deceiving than what the Angels did to him in the top of the third.

It only began with future Hall of Famer Mike Trout leading off by hitting a 1-0 pitch over the center field fence, then with Brandon Drury hitting Anderson’s very next pitch over the left center field fence, and then with Matt Thaiss hitting Anderson’s very next pitch over the right field fence.

Three pitches. Three thumps. To think the fun was just beginning for an Angels team whose past few seasons have been anything but in the end.

Not even the most cynical observer of the thin-aired yard known as Coors Field expected what happened after Thaiss completed his circuit around the bases, and after Anderson walked a man, induced a force out at second, surrendered a base hit, and induced a pop out around the infield:

* Taylor Ward singling home new Angel toy Eduardo Escobar, acquired from the Mets a day or so earlier and going 2-for-4 in his Angels premiere.

* Ohtani singling Moniak home and sending Anderson out of the game in favour of Matt Carasiti.

* Trout walking to re-load the pads.

* Drury sending a two-run single up the pipe.

* Thaiss walking to re-set first and second.

* Hunter Renfroe yanking a bases-clearing double, one of his team-leading five hits on the night.

* Esobar singling Renfroe home.

* Moniak sending a two-run homer over the right center field fence.

The third-inning carnage ended only when Carasiti got Fletcher to ground out right back to the mound. And wouldn’t you know that at least one Twitter twit harrumphed about the injustice of it all after Moniak connected: “21st-century MLB, taken to its most absurd extreme. This is one example of why I can’t get that excited about homers, anymore.”

Not even over three straight to open an inning in which only five of the thirteen runs scoring in the frame scored by way of home runs and half the hits were singles? Not even over five runs scoring off singles and three off a double? Not even ten of the thirteen Angel runs of the inning coming home with two outs?

You want to harrumph about something, harrumph about why the Rockies were caught woefully unprepared and left two relievers in to take fifteen for the team. Not just the six Carasiti surrendered of his own as well as adding two to Anderson’s jacket, but poor Nick Davis starting in the top of the fourth.

The Angels slapped him silly for eight runs on seven hits including back-to-back one-out RBI singles followed by an RBI double, another bases-loading walk, a two-run double, and Fletcher hitting a three-run homer. Then Davis got Ward to ground out and struck Ohtani out swinging to stop that inning’s carnage.

Davis survived a pair of two-out singles in the fifth. I confess—I couldn’t resist tweeting at that point: “With apologies to the Roaring Twenties, after five it’s Angels 23, Rockies skiddoo.”

The Rockies’ righthander wasn’t quite so lucky in the sixth, but he might have felt just a small hand of fortune: the worst the Angels did to him in that inning was a double (Moniak) and a single (Fletcher) to open the inning with first and third, before the Angels’ 24th run scored on a force out at second.

That would be the same way the Angels got their 25th and final run of the night two innings later, with Karl Kauffmann on the mound for the Rockies. The only thing spoiling the Angels’ smothering shutout would be Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle leading the bottom of the eighth off with a 1-0 drive over the center field fence off Angels reliever Kolton Ingram.

Just days earlier, the Angels were humiliated by back-to-back shutouts courtesy of the Dodgers. Now, they ended Saturday night setting a franchise record for runs in a single game—a franchise record they broke by one, having scored 24 against the  Blue Jays in an August 1979 game. They also became the first in Show in the modern era to score twenty or more runs in a two-inning span.

All that on a night when the only Angels not to get any hits were one pinch hitter and two mid-to-late game insertions. And, when they secured themselves in second place in the American League West—six games behind the division-leading Rangers.

“Today,” said Moniak postgame, “was just one of those days, where everyone was feeling good and we were getting the right pitches to hit.” That may yet qualify as the understatement of the season.

Danny Young, RIP: The hard climb and fall

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Danny Young

It took Danny Young just over a decade to make the Show, and a shoulder injury following a harsh cup of coffee to return home.

The 21st Century’s first official grand slam wasn’t hit in the United States. The Mets and the Cubs opened the 2000 season on 30 March in Japan’s Tokyo Dome. The game went to an eleventh inning, and Cubs manager Don Baylor sent a longtime minor leaguer named Danny Young to the mound to pitch the top half.

The first student from Woodbury, Tennessee’s Cannon High School to make the Show in the first place, Young started auspiciously enough, getting two quick outs on a grounder to shortstop by Robin Ventura and a pop fly around the infield by Derek Bell. Then he surrendered a base hit to Todd Zeile before walking the bases loaded by way of Rey Ordóñez and Melvin Mora.

Mets manager Bobby Valentine sent Benny Agbayani out to pinch hit for relief pitcher Dennis Cook. Young’s first pitch to him missed for ball one. Agbayani hammered the lefthander’s second pitch over the center field fence. After Jay Payton’s followup double, Young escaped when Edgardo Alfonso flied out to center field.

“Even though I gave up a grand slam, I still looked around and it’s like, ‘That’s Mark Grace right there. I’ve got Sammy Sosa in the outfield’,” said Young—found dead at home at 51 Sunday—to Fox Sports. “They patted me on the back and let me know it was going to be all right. I had a lot of the guys come to me and say, ‘Welcome to the big leagues.’ They were like, ‘Things like this happen.’ I should have gotten out of the inning. It was just nerves and knowing within myself that something was wrong.”

It took Young long enough to get to the Show in the first place. Drafted by the Astros at nineteen in 1990, he played for nine minor league teams affiliated to three major league franchises over the decade to follow before he finally made the Cubs after the turn of the century. He never complained about being drafted in the 83rd round, either.

“If I was a first-rounder,” he once told Fox Sports writer Sam Gardner, “I might not have made it, because I had a thirst and a hunger to make it because of where I was drafted. If they’d have set a million dollars down in my hand at that time, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. So maybe that was just meant to be my turn.”

He simply didn’t expect to be on the wrong side of history when he finally got his turn in a Cub uniform in Tokyo.

He knew he’d had control issues from the outset—in his first minor league season he struck 41 batters out in 32.2 innings, but he also walked 39—but he also knew he could learn plenty enough about the game he loved but knew too little about. “I struggled just because it was a new process for me,” he told Gardner. “I still had this fear of making a mistake and the coaches just thought, at the time, ‘This guy is just having a hard time picking this stuff up’.”

Before they released him to be picked up by the Pirates organisation, the Astros even tried as radical a class as they could think of: they hired Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, then working free-lance as a roving pitching instructor, to work with Young and with a kid named Billy Wagner in spring 1994.

Young had absolutely no idea who his new teacher was.

“Then I come to find out a couple years later,” Young said, “and people are looking at me like, ‘Dude do you know who you were with?’ I just didn’t know baseball, but they didn’t know that I didn’t know baseball. I just went out there and pitched.” Ever the gentleman, Koufax gave Young a signed ball that Young kept in a clear ceramic ball on a pedestal in his home.

“[I]t was overwhelmingly mind-blowing, the things that he knew about the directional part of pitching that I didn’t really grasp at first,” Young told Gardner of his Hall of Fame teacher. “And as I went along, it got better. I was a late bloomer, so I didn’t really understand the concepts that he was teaching me, but he taught me to find a comfort zone and how to tune out the crowd and what’s going on around me.”

The Pirates, too, remained as patient as possible as Young continued to struggle finding the comfort zone Koufax preached. As in the Astros organisation, Young tried everything he could think of, from changing deliveries and arm angles to changing speeds and back. Only when the Cubs picked him in the 1997 Rule 5 draft did Young begin to smell something close enough to success, or at least real major league potential.

He moved up the chain until he made the team in spring 2000. After Agbayani’s Tokyo blast, the Cubs returned Stateside and Young got into the next three straight games against the Cardinals. The first outing: two walks in two-thirds of an inning but no runs allowed. The second: a two-out double by Fernando Tatis, Sr. but another scoreless escape. Maybe Young was getting it at last.

The third: disaster—a pair of two-out walks, leaving a mess for his relief Brian Williams to clean up in the fourth inning, a mess that continued with a bases-loaded walk, a grand slam by J.D. Drew, and three runs charged to Young that he wasn’t on the mound to surrender himself.

The Cubs sent him back to Iowa after that. Young continued struggling until he finally spoke up further about an issue he’d felt in Tokyo, when he first mentioned to Mark Grace—after a pickoff throw that bounced to first—that he felt something wrong with his shoulder. It turned out his rotator cuff required major surgery, the first of five on the shoulder.

After 2000, Young retired from the game he’d never really had the chance to learn even rudimentarily in a Woodbury where baseball wasn’t exactly a well-taught sport. At least, not until Young returned home to spend the rest of his life raising his family and teaching and coaching the game to local kids.

“I played tee-ball, played Babe Ruth, played Dixie Youth Baseball and high school, but there was no real coaching,” he told Gardner. “And for the [coaches], that was no fault of their own. We hauled hay, we fished, we did whatever we did, and then we went out on the field and had fun. We had teams, but it wasn’t competitive. I mean, I ended up being a right-handed hitter because none of the coaches knew how to teach me how to hit left-handed.”

If only the Danny Young who went home to teach the game on his native ground had been available to the Danny Young who originally caught the Astros’ eyes, however deep in that 1999 draft. He might have had more to show for his long slog to the Show, and in the Show itself.

He never struck a major league hitter out, he walked six, he surrendered five hits, but he kept a big league attitude. For himself, and for his wife, Sarah, their six children, and their two grandchildren. The battler who surrendered this century’s first major league grand slam should only know peace and fulfillment in the Elysian Fields to which he was taken—cause unknown at this writing—too soon.