Category Archives: Baseball

Sorry, Charlie

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Charlie Montoyo

Montoyo takes the fall for somewhat less than gets other managers executed.

Let’s see. The Phillies sat 22-29 and having lost 11 of their previous 17 when they executed manager Joe Girardi in favour of Rob Thomson—whose team has gone 24-14 since.

The Angels went from 27-17 to 27-29, the first team in major league history to plunge from  ten games over .500 to a twelve-game losing streak, and sent manager Joe Maddon to the guillotine in favour of Phil Nevin. Nevin’s crew has gone 12-21 since, including 2-11 to open July.

The Blue Jays went 46-42 through Wednesday morning but suffered a five-game losing streak after opening July with a win, went 1-7 against one American League West wild-card contender and one of the division’s weaker teams, and awoke Wednesday at 2-12 for the month to date. Thus did they decide manager Charlie Montoya had a date with the firing squad despite the Jays beating those Phillies Tuesday.

Bench coach John Schneider was handed the bridge with the usual “interim” tag. The Blue Jays’ first act under their interim commander was to beat the Phillies to sweep a two-game set. Thomson’s been a steady skipper thus far; Nevin’s been little more than an apprentice seaman. One win isn’t enough to make the call on Schneider.

But something stunk about Montoya’s firing at first that was a little more profound than the fragrances surrounding the Girardi and Maddon executions. The timing especially.

Earlier this month first base coach Mark Budzinski’s seventeen-year-old daughter Julia was killed in a tubing accident. On Monday, Montoyo—who’d left the dugout with Budzinski in the middle of a doubleheader on receiving the news—joined other team reps in attending Julia Budzinski’s funeral.

Maybe collapsing to a 2-12 July opening gave the Jays enough reason to think Montoyo had to go, but with the All-Star break approaching it’s not unreasonable to think they might have waited just a short while longer, maybe on the eve of the break itself, to align the firing squad.

This may have been the second most cold-blooded managerial firing in modern major league history. The first would have to have been the Yankees dumping pennant-winning manager Yogi Berra in favour of the man who beat him in the 1964 World Series, the Cardinals’ Johnny Keane, the day after the Cardinals won in seven, a move that was planned back-channel before the Yankees put on the stretch drive (going 30-13) that nailed their pennant in the first place.

It looked even worse if you thought about was Montoyo having managed the Jays to 91 wins and a near-miss to the 2021 postseason despite the continuing coronavirus pan-damn-ic compelling the team to make three different cities the site of their home games.

But as Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic pointed out in the immediacy of Montoyo’s execution, the Jays may have their still-euphemistic “compelling reasons” to give the command to fire. If that’s true, maybe they shouldn’t have let him stay on the bridge with a one-year extension and a couple of option years to follow to open the season in the first place.

Like Girardi and Maddon before him, Montoya bore the burden of a misconstructed team even if it’s a team still in the new but dubious wild card hunt. It wasn’t Montoya who delivered a bullpen that finds as many bats as it misses or a starting rotation whose rear end resembles the northbound end of a southbound moose.

They opened July in second place in the tough American League East, but hitting the skid let the re-horsing Red Sox and the Rays pass them in the division standings while letting the Mariners match them for the third wild card thus far.

Now it comes forth, too, that some in the Jays clubhouse thought they needed a somewhat firmer hand when they hit the skid and Montoyo, as loved and popular as he was on the bridge, wasn’t quite the man to offer that hand.

Athletic Blue Jays beat reporter Kaitlyn McGrath found at least two players willing to talk about the clubhouse atmosphere, one anonymously but another willing to go on the record. Of course.

The anonymous Jay told McGrath that hitting the skid required what Montoyo apparently lacked. “When you’re [in a] 1-9 [slump], you’re looking for someone to come in and either kick you in the ass or pump you up, just something, some guidance,” the player said. “And you could have it as players, for sure, and we did, but you really do need it coming from the top and that just wasn’t happening . . . If we were playing better, this wouldn’t have been as much of an issue, but we weren’t, so you’re looking for leadership and a lot of us felt like it wasn’t really there.”

But even that didn’t erode the respect the Jays’ players have for Montoyo the man, if you take the word of pitcher Ross Stripling, who earned the Wednesday win against the Phillies with six strikouts but eight ground outs and ten fly outs in seven innings during which he surrendered two earned runs on two hits.

“I don’t think anyone would ever think that he doesn’t want us to have success individually or as a team, the whole Blue Jays organization,” Stripling told McGrath.

He had our backs all the time and wanted us to win baseball games. And it’s a shame—he’s been here since 2019, when this kind of young core got going—that he’s not going to be there to see a lot of their success and where they go and where we go as a team. But I think everyone would say thank you to him and the effort that he gave us for the years that he did and that we love him and wish him well.

General manager Ross Atkins, who carried the execution forth, said it’s not “necessarily” good starting pitching and good bullpens alone that contend and win. “Look at the history of the game,” he said, “good teams win championships. The person to look to is me. I’m the one that needs to be accountable. And we will continue to work hard in every area of our team to improve.”

In other words, don’t blame me because Charlie couldn’t make do with shallow starting and bullpen bulls.

For now the Phillies have lived a somewhat charmed team life since Girardi’s dismissal, even while losing Bryce Harper to a thumb fracture after the right fielder was limited to DH duty thanks to an elbow injury. They’re only nine games out of first in the National League East, though they have a formidable wall to climb with the first-place Mets and the second-place (and defending World Series champion) Braves making life none too simple.

The Angels? They could bring Casey Stengel back from the dead and still sputter. Especially since, in addition to their still-usual pitching problems not named Shohei Ohtani, the bottom of their order became such a trainwreck that it didn’t matter what the bigger bats did. It comes into sadder play when such bigger bats hit the slumps to which all bats are prone, even those of future Hall of Famers.

Nevin’s tenure has been a plane crash thus far. Especially when he landed himself a ten-game suspension for being none too subtle about looking to avenge a ninth-inning Mike Trout head hunt the night before and sending an opener to start the game and exact revenge. The Mariners may have had it coming, but one behind-the-back pitch and a subsequent plunk was out of line.

And while the umpires sounded mealymouthed in not starting the game with warnings after Trout was inches from decapitation in the ninth the night before, the ensuing brawl after Andrew Wantz hit Jesse Winker in the hip cost Nevin a key relief pitcher (Archie Bradley) for a month, at least, when he hopped over the rail to join the fracas and broke a bone in his pitching elbow.

It’s gotten to the point where the published calls for the Angels to start thinking about the once-impossible: trading both Trout at this year’s trade deadline and Ohtani before he reaches his first free agency, the better to get a replenishing return (hopefully, with pitching slightly above the level of arthritic cleaning crews) while the getting is prime—aren’t waiting until their season is all but officially dead.

So the Blue Jays aren’t exactly that bad off just yet. It’s still too soon to call a single win under a new bridge commander the beginning of an in-season resurgence. Who knows what Atkins might move upon as the trade deadline approaches? But there’s still something badly disconcerting about the Montoya execution. The man’s been a class act who’ll probably get another chance to take another major league bridge soon enough.

There may yet be more to come in the way of deeper details. As often as not, there usually are. And it’s not impossible to ponder whether Atkins himself might now be on a seat whose temperature rises a little more as the season goes forward.

“What have you gotten yourself into?”

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Keith Hernandez

An on-base machine at the plate, Keith Hernandez’s real baseball genius was revolutionising first base as a command infield position.

Almost four decades ago, the Mets’ general manager Frank Cashen thought he’d laid the foundation for the Taj Mahal. The Cardinals’ transcendent but troubled first baseman, Keith Hernandez, thought the roof fell in on him.

A mainstay of a defending world champion, who’d driven Cashen to drink almost every time he played against the Mets, was about to become a Met.

From the moment a previous Met regime traded Hall of Famer Tom Seaver because he seemed a little too uppity about how the team should spend their money (a few parts upon himself as baseball’s best pitcher; a lot more parts on the free agency market and replenishing the farm), the Mets reverted to their original losing ways. And they weren’t half as funny about it.

It was one thing for the best first baseman in baseball to run afoul of his manager Whitey Herzog because a small morass of off-field issues sent him into the cocaine netherworld and, in 1983, into a few lazy baseball habits. It was something else to be sent to what was then, still, the National League’s version of the seventh circle of hell.

Herzog and Hernandez weren’t exactly Damon and Pythias. The White Rat was earthily thoughtful; Mex was cerebral. Where Herzog preferred the George Brett prototype right down to the pinch of Skoal in that Hall of Famer’s cheek, Hernandez smoked cigarettes and engaged Civil War period fiction and the New York Times crossword puzzle, for openers.

The thinking person’s sport had an actual thinking person in its ranks, who just so happened to be an on-base machine and a first base revolutionary. Herzog forgot the thinking side of himself and also listened to the whispers about Hernandez’s cocaine dalliance. (At the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials, Hernandez would call cocaine “the devil on earth.”)

Herzog asked Cashen if he’d be willing to deal talented reliever Neil Allen. “[Allen’s] well-known drinking problem,” Jeff Pearlman noted in The Bad Guys Won, “didn’t seem to bother Herzog.” When Cashen said he hadn’t thought about it, Herzog replied, “If you think about Neil Allen and another pitcher, we’ll give you Keith Hernandez.”

To St. Louis, which roasted the Cardinals for years to follow over the trade, it was rather like Capitol Records sending Frank Sinatra to Dot Records in exchange for two spare session musicians and a tape operator. (“He came right into our kitchen and rattled our pans for about four years,” Herzog has written, “burned the Cardinals with a lot of big hits.)

Only Hernandez was probably less amused than the Chairman of the Board would have been. The first call he made when told he was about to become a Met was to his agent, Jack Childers. Hernandez wanted to know if he could afford to retire and live off his deferred income. Childers counseled his client not to even think about it. Hernandez resigned himself. Oops.

His Met tenure began with a classic, almost Metsian screwup. According to Pearlman, he caught a flight to Montreal, where the Mets were playing the Expos. The Mets’ media relations man, Jay Horwitz, sent a limousine to meet Hernandez. The limo went to the wrong gate, compelling Hernandez to catch a cab.

“When he first got there, I remember looking across the clubhouse at him,” says Ed Lynch, a pitcher on the 1983 Mets. “He was unpacking his bags, I think we’re in Montreal, and I’m thinking, ‘Boy, you poor son of a bitch. What have you gotten yourself into?’”

It took a little romancing and a lot of tour guidance from popular veteran Mets pinch hitter Rusty Staub to convince Hernandez he hadn’t exactly been sentenced to Sing-Sing. Staub showed Hernandez enough of the city’s best—the theater, the museums, the eateries, the libraries, the clubs, the lovely ladies on every street corner, seemingly—to convince the first baseman, “I’ll make a brand-new start of it, New York, New York.”

Hernandez became about 3,200 degrees more. After playing out the 1983 string, Hernandez was convinced enough to sign a five-year deal with the Mets. In his six full seaons as a Met—five solid, the sixth showing the toll the injuries and age took at last—the Mets won more games than any team in the entire Show.

As a Met, he posted a 131 OPS+ upon a slash line of .301/.388/.437, an OPS of .825, and a Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances) of .530. Lifetime, his RBA is .528.

Among postwar, post-integration, night ball-era Hall of Fame first basemen it would put Hernandez two points above Tony Perez and in seventh place. But being an on-base machine was only part of his presence. He remains the single most run-preventive first baseman in baseball history. (+120 total zone runs above league average.) It isn’t close. (Should-be Hall of Famer Todd Helton is a distance +107 in second place.)

He wasn’t the lumbering, big-bopping first base cliche. He played the position as though a third or second baseman, not just going for the tough plays and not just his expertise at neutralising bunts, but making himself the on-field infield commander.

“Not only he would tell you what you need to do,” says Lynch, “but he’s going to tell you how the pitchers going to try to prevent you from doing it. So he gave you not only the result, but he gave you the plan to get to that result.”

“The knowledge of the league, which he’d been in for a while, the knowledge of the other hitters, the willingness to know about the other manager’s strategy, the nuances of the game, the minutiae of who’s hitting, who’s running, their tendencies—it all added up to a wealth of knowledge over there that you could draw on,” says Bob Ojeda, the best lefthanded pitcher on the World Series-winning 1986 Mets. “And I did draw on it at times, no question.”

Keith Hernandez

Now a respected, popular longtime Mets game broadcaster, Keith Hernandez points up to where his 17 hangs as a newly-retired Met uniform number.

It was hardly Hernandez’s fault that the Mets climbed the National League East ladder, reached the Promised Land, and finished his tenure with only one World Series ring and two pennants to show for a run of first or second place division finishes.

It wasn’t Hernandez’s idea to fool with Dwight Gooden’s repertoire in spring 1986, a foolery that would turn him in due course from beyond this earth to journeyman pitcher while he battled with his own drug addiction. It wasn’t Hernandez’s idea that Darryl Strawberry should spend most of the rest of his Mets life at war with himself, with substance abuse, and with his own team time and again.

It wasn’t Hernandez’s idea that Cashen should break the team apart little by little, or that he and Hall of Famer Gary Carter (Winning brings opposites together, Hernandez once said of Carter, an intelligent catcher but not in Hernandez’s cerebral league) should hit decline phases accelerated to somewhat warp speed by injuries atop their years of hard labour on the field.

Hernandez might have begun giving the Mets “a swashbuckling, devil-may-care, damn the torpedoes, full-speed ahead image,” as Lynch phrases it, an image New York loved but the rest of the league didn’t, but it didn’t exactly mean he wanted swashbuckling confused with recklessness as happened with too many of those 1986 Mets.

It took the Mets a very long time to come to terms with both the best and the most controversial team in their long, surrealistic history. The beginnings of those terms included bringing Hernandez into the broadcast booth, first as a part-time colour commentator, then a full-time partner to longtime mainstay Gary Cohen plus Hernandez’s 1980s Mets teammate, equally cerebral pitcher Ron Darling.

“You do the pitching, I do the hitting,” Hernandez told Darling when completing the trio.

The most vivid continuation of that coming to terms was the Mets retiring Hernandez’s uniform number 17 Saturday, before the Mets beat the Marlins in ten innings, 5-4, in a fashion that must have reminded Hernandez of his own good old days, almost: a two-out double sending the inning-opening zombie runner home; and, a throwing error on a dying ball on the front infield grass allowing the winning run to score.

“He asked for No. 37; that was his number with the Cardinals,” Lynch remembers of Hernandez’s original arrival. “And they told him no. He looked at them funny. And they said, ‘That’s Casey Stengel’s number.’ So now he comes over, he takes 17, and that’s getting retired also.”

“I never dreamed I’d be here this long, in the organization,” the Young Perfesser told a packed Citi Field Saturday. “I am absolutely humbled and proud that my number will be up in the rafters for eternity.” With the Ol’ Perfesser and The Franchise, among others.

Perhaps another humbling day will come Hernandez’s way, in due course, if the newly-aligned Contemporary Baseball Era Committee sees fit to give his career the thorough review it merits and gives first base’s greatest defender ever and one of its steadiest on-base machines a berth in the Hall of Fame.

“I got traded to a last-place team and no one at the ballpark,” Hernandez says. “And it turned out to be such a life-changing event for me in such a positive way.” For him and, for a few glorious if not always controversy-free seasons, New York itself.

Are Hal Chase’s statistics “meaningless?”

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Hal Chase

Hal Chase—The talent said a great defensive first baseman; the corruption says otherwise. (Sporting News photo.)

If there’s one thing that baseball itself will debunk somewhere, some time, somehow when you least expect it, it’s the idea that you’ve seen everything on or off the field. The moment you satisfy yourself that you have, the game has a way of replying in a split second, “Pants on fire!”

That doesn’t work with great hits or great plays alone. You think you hear it all (over again) whenever Pete Rose’s dwindling supporters burp up yet another mealymouth argument on behalf of putting him into the Hall of Fame despite what Rule 21(d) and the Hall’s own rule about ballot eligibility say? Brace yourselves.

For whatever reason, the subjects of the day a few days ago, on a Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) social media group thread, included Hal Chase, whom history still treats as perhaps the poster boy for baseball’s gambling infestation from the late 1800s through the end of the Dead Ball Era.

A thread opener cited Babe Ruth’s once-famous observation, when asked to name those he thought the best at their positions:

[T]he Prince was also a very fine hitter who played his entire career before the ball was juiced up. He couldn’t run, he could fly. And aside from Ty Cobb, he was the best baserunner I ever saw. Fielding, are you kidding? Prince Hal was the greatest fielding first baseman that ever played. He was worth the price of admission just to watch him toe-dance around first base and pick those wild throws out of the dirt.

Funny, but that’s not exactly what Chase’s statistics say. When I pointed that out in the thread, among the replies was, “And that’s what makes the stats on him useless,” which was dubious enough. But then came the real corker: “Just goes to show how much stats are useless.” Not the stats on Chase himself but stats overall. On a SABR group thread, no less.

Just about all accounts of Chase affirm that what Ruth saw in him was there. But add that it tended to happen only when Chase was of a mind to exercise it. You don’t even have to read Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella’s The Black Prince of Baseball to comprehend. The record was long enough in place attesting that, in baseball’s arguable most corrupt era, Chase was its arguable most corrupt figure.

“Chase’s talents,” wrote SABR director of editorial content Jacob Pomrenke in a 2013 essay, “were legendary: He made one-handed catches with astonishing ease, played farther off the bag than anyone had ever seen and charged sacrifice bunts with speed and agility. He also earned the reputation of being the best hit-and-run batter in the American League and frequently ranked among league leaders in batting average, RBI and stolen bases.”

There is, of course, an ocean’s worth of distance between one’s talents and one’s development and exercise of them. In this instance Pomrenke’s reminder is vivid enough:

His career in the major leagues from 1905 to 1919 was checkered with accusations of game-fixing. Two of his managers with the New York Highlanders (later the Yankees), George Stallings and Frank Chance, accused him of “laying down” on the team. He missed signs frequently (especially on the hit-and-run, causing base runners to be hung out to dry) and dropped balls from his infielders in such a subtle way that it made their throws look like errors. But whenever a stink was raised about his play, club owners Frank Farrell and Big Bill Devery sided with their star first baseman—and even made him the manager once, a decision that satisfied no one. Chase lasted just one full season in the role.

We’re not going to run down the entire record of Chase’s corruption here. We know that the Dead Ball Era could also have been called the Dubious Ball Era considering how many players were involved in gambling-inspired game fixing and how many owners and managers lacked clean hands themselves. (It only begins with remembering New York Giants manager John McGraw owned a piece of a pool hall belonging to and run by eventual 1919 World Series financier Arnold Rothstein.)

We won’t even go into the complete details about how Christy Mathewson—pitching star (and charter Hall of Famer) turned manager of the 1916 Reds, where Chase landed after a two-season term in the upstart/outlaw Federal League—caught Chase dead to right bribing teammates and opponents to help him fix games and suspended him, only for Chase to be let off after Mathewson entered the Army during World War I and was unable to testify at a league hearing.

Let’s hark back to the Ruthian recollection of Chase’s abilities. Far from being meaningless, Chase’s actual major league statistics do portray him the way the stats so often portray outsize talents that don’t turn them into performance at the plate or on the field:

A very fine hitter. Well, Chase won a batting title in 1916 and had four other top-ten finishes. That might speak well of a player with a short career, but Chase played fifteen major league seasons. He finished third in the batting race once, eighth once, and tenth once. For eleven major league seasons (including his Federal League years) he wasn’t a top-ten guy for batting average.

Aside from Ty Cobb, he was the best baserunner. This one’s tricky, because the stats are incomplete on how often Chase was caught stealing while he did steal 363 bases and finished in the lower third of his league’s top ten three times.

He was worth the price of admission just to watch him toe-dance around first base and pick those wild throws out of the dirt. Ruth’s hardly the only Chase contemporary or semi-contemporary to praise Chase as a fielder. But considering the full story, isn’t it possible that Chase flashed that amazing ability selectively, delivering the goods just as Pomrenke observed, when he bloody well felt like it or when it was in his personal as opposed to his teams’ interest?

Think of this, too: Forgot for the moment how dubious “errors” are (think deep and ponder that an “error” is some official scorer’s notion of what should have happened on a play no matter how tough) and consider that Chase led his league eight times (it’s the most black ink on his record), finished second three times, third twice, fourth twice, fifth once, and seventh once. All fifteen major league seasons he played show him with top ten finishes including eight league leaderships in fielding errors.

Christy Mathewson

Christy Mathewson—the charter Hall of Fame pitcher turned manager may have been the only man in pre-Landis baseball willing to challenge and try purging Chase and other gambling-corrupt elements in the game before the Black Sox scandal forced the game’s hand.

The final stats show Chase shaking out as the 124th best first baseman who ever played the major league position. I think the entire body of evidence shows that he didn’t just hurt his teams and his game with his game-fixing actions.

Writing The New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James ranked him number 76, but that was published in 2001. “[W]hat greatness as a baseball player comes down to is, ‘What did he do to help his teams win?’ If you were trying to win a pennant, how badly would you want this guy? Hey, this is not Joe Jackson that we are talking about here. This is not the corrupted. This is the corrupt.”

As James pointed out further, Chase never played on a pennant winner, “and most of the teams he played for declined precipitously when he joined them and improved dramatically after he was gone.” Let’s look at that all the way. Was James right? The following table shows where Chase’s teams finished the year before he joined, right after he joined, and the year after he left:

Joined Before After Left Year After
New York (AL) 1905 2nd 6th (-) 1913 6th (push)
Chicago (AL) 1913 4th 5th (-) 1916 3rd (+)
Cincinnati (NL) 1916 7th 7th (push) 1918 1st (+)
New York (NL) 1919 2nd 2nd (push) 1919 2nd (push)

Two Chase clubs finished farther out of the race after he joined them than they finished the year before. Two finished exactly the same after he joined, but one (the 1916 Reds) won the pennant the year after he left. One (the 1919 Giants) finished the same before, with, and after Chase.

What we have is a baseball talent who elected to undermine his own skills on behalf of the worst elements in baseball during the era that climaxed with the disgraces of the Black Sox scandal. (Chase had no part in the 1919 World Series fix attempt himself, but it’s on the record that he made $40,000 betting against the White Sox.) He was avariciously corrupt enough to undermine his own abilities and thus his own final statistics.

You can run down baseball history and find scores of players who had all the talent but none of the final results that equaled the talent. Many were undermined by injuries, many squandered or eroded their talents by themselves. For every truly talented player who worked concurrently on the team-first ethic, there’s another who placed himself well beyond the team need.

Chase was a team player in the sense that he enlisted teammates and even opponents to be part of a game-tanking for profit fraternity whose purpose was to continue undermining the very essence of honest competition for his and their own profit.

Ruth and other contemporaries praising Chase’s skills so extravagantly begs the question of just how far they were willing to look the other way. How far were they willing to ignore the dark side leaving Chase with a statistical record on both sides of the ball that’s nowhere near what you expect or hope of a ballplayer that gifted who exercises and advances his talent.

You’d be as hard pressed to find a player as simultaneously gifted and corrupt as Chase as you’d be to understand what about him (other than equally corrupt or corrupted officials) enabled him to skate on numerous attempts to run him out of the game. Except perhaps his personal popularity.

Rose’s gambling issues traced back at least to the mid-1970s. But as John Helyar wrote, in The Lords of the Realm, “baseball let him get away with it. GMs wouldn’t mess with a gold-plated gate attraction. Writers had no need to expose the best quote in the business. And baseball’s security director then, Henry Fitzgibbon, limited himself to Dutch-uncle talks with Rose.”

Only when it became too flagrant to dismiss did baseball finally take steps forward. But in Peter Ueberroth’s final days as commissioner he called Rose in, listened to Rose’s flat denials, then told a reporter, “There’s nothing ominous, and there won’t be any follow-through.” Not so fast, we came to learn the hard way soon enough.

Chase was insulated similarly long enough. He was popular, according to most accounts from his time; in fact, he was the first homegrown star of the Yankee franchise. (They were known as the Highlanders when he came up; the name changed in 1913.) A game that deep in gambling corruption wasn’t that anxious to make an example of Chase, no matter how earnest the equally popular Mathewson was—and he might have been the only man in pre-1920 baseball willing to stand up to the gambling cancer—in trying to purge him and similar elements.

Only in 1919 as a Giant did Chase’s major league career come to a halt. Technically, he suffered an injured wrist, but even McGraw couldn’t look the other way anymore when he’s said to have caught Chase and third baseman Heinie Zimmerman trying to bribe teammates to tank a few games.

The following spring, Chase was home on the west coast playing semipro ball when his old Reds teammate Lee Magee blew the whistle: Magee and Chase conspired to throw games in 1918. Chase was also caught trying to bribe players in the Pacific Coast League in 1920. The only thing knocking those out of the headlines was the slowly revealing scandal of the 1919 World Series.

The PCL banned Chase for life. (Chase came to the Highlanders/Yankees attention originally when he starred for the PCL’s Los Angeles Angels.) Incoming baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis didn’t ban Chase formally from the rest of organised ball, but the hammer upon the Black Sox plus Chase’s age (37), injuries, and flagrant corruption meant he wasn’t going to be seen in the majors again.

Chase didn’t inaugurate baseball’s gambling corruption. That was established before he emerged as a major league first baseman. He merely found himself at home on the corrupt side. His major league statistics aren’t meaningless. They’re the outcome for a genuinely talented player who embraced instead of rejecting the game’s pre-1920 corruption.

Mr. Commissioner, meet the real faces of the game

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Rob Manfred, Liam Hendriks

Commissioner Rob Manfred with White Sox relief pitcher Liam Hendriks before last year’s Field of Dreams game. (The Athletic.)

Having a read of ESPN writer Don Van Natta, Jr.’s profile of commissioner Rob Manfred, I was almost convinced that maybe, just maybe, there really was more to Manfred than met the eye. Or, more than what comes forth in his stiff presence and often clumsy remarks.

Just maybe, the man isn’t the baseball-hating or baseball-illiterate Rube Goldberg-like abecedarian the caricatures so often portray. He did, after all, grow up a Yankee fan in upstate New York and can say proudly enough that he’s the only baseball commissioner ever who played Little League baseball. “All glove, no bat,” he remembers of being a Little League infielder.

My parents received a set of classic Revere copper-bottom cookware as a wedding present eight years before Manfred was born. (I still remember the fragrance of that special powder used to clean the copper bottoms, too.) Who knew Manfred (three years my junior) was the son of Revere’s production supervisor at their home plant in Rome, New York? An hour’s drive from Cooperstown, as it happens.

Born in 1958, Manfred took in his first live major league game at Yankee Stadium with his sports-obssessed father, sitting between the plate and first base on an Old Timers’ Day. Come game time, Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle crashed a pair of home runs and the Yankees beat the Twins, 3-2. When he finally became the game’s commissioner, he handed his father the first baseball with his stamp upon it.

“This is really an unbelievable thing,” Manfred, Sr. told his son. “I can’t say I disagree,” Manfred, Jr. told Van Natta.

A couple of hundred fathoms down, though, Van Natta noted that “more than once” Manfred told him what few baseball commissioners have dared to admit, that being the buffer absorbing the heat that should go to his bosses, the owners, is part of his job. Even if it’s about as pleasant as your private parts being caught in the vacuum cleaner’s handle.

And then it came.

“Every time it’s me, it ain’t one of those 30 guys—that’s good,” Van Natta quoted Manfred as saying. “Look, who the hell am I? I don’t have $2 billion invested in a team. I’m just a guy trying to do a job. I mean it. [The owners] deserve that layer. I believe they deserve that layer of protection. I’m the face of the game, for good or for bad.”

Mr. Manfred, unless it’s to boo and hiss your heads off over this or that piece of mischief, you may rest assured that no baseball fan anywhere in this country is paying his or her hard-earned money to head for the ballpark to see you or your bosses.

But I’m going to do you a small favour, as if you know me from the greenest bat boy on any professional baseball team. I’m going to introduce you to the true faces of the game. The ones whom those fans do pay their hard-earned money to see at the ballpark regardless of the machinations and deceptions of your bosses and theirs.

Mr. Manfred, meet Mike Trout. This is the guy you blamed once upon a time for not being baseball’s face, based upon his committing no crime more grave than letting his play and his clubhouse presence and his agreeability with fans before and after games speak for themselves, with no jive about the magnitude of being him.

Meet Shohei Ohtani. This is the two-way star who lights up the joint just by flashing that thousand-watt grin of his, never mind when he strikes thirteen out on the mound one night and belts baseballs onto the Van Allen Belt the very next. Between himself and Mr. Trout, you should be asking what on earth is wrong with the Angels that they still can’t find quality pitching enough to keep them in a race after they start in one but sputter unconscionably.

Meet Aaron Judge. This is the Leaning Tower of River Avenue who sends baseballs into the Delta Quadrant one moment and then, when made aware, goes out of his way to meet a Canadian kid to whom he’s number one among baseball men and who was handed one of his mammoth home run balls by an adult fan who knew the boy wanted nothing more than to catch one Judge hit out.

Meet Joey Votto. This is the future Hall of Fame first baseman who got himself tossed from a game early last year, but—after he learned his ejection broke the heart of a little California girl to whom he’s a hero above heroes—sent her a ball with his handwritten apology and autograph on it, prompting his team to drop game tickets and a little extra swag upon her the very next day.

Meet Bryce Harper. This is the guy who never apologised for being on board with letting the kids play. The guy now on the injured list with a thumb fracture and surgery to repair it after getting hit by a pitch thrown with one of the baseballs you and yours still can’t see fit to manufacture uniformly and with allowance for fairness on both sides of it, fairness for the pitchers and for the hitters alike.

Meet Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. and Bo Bichette. One is the son of a Hall of Famer who did last season what even his old man never did: led his league in on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+, and led the entire Show in total bases. The other is the son of a respected major league slugger, has quite a lethal bat in his own right when his swing is right, and currently leads his league in trips to the plate. Together they’ve put some zip back into the Blue Jays.

Meet Oneil Cruz. The bat has yet to come to full life but the footwork, the glove, the throwing arm, have shown so far that you can be as tall as Frank Howard, J.R. Richard, and Randy Johnson and still play shortstop as though the position was created for you and not the Little Rascals in the first place. They’re falling in love with him in Pittsburgh, which needs all the love it can get, but they ought to fall in love with him all around the Show—except when he’s going so deep into the hole grabbing a grounder or a hopper that an enemy batter loses his lunch when he’s had a base hit stolen from him.

Meet Clayton Kershaw. He’s been around the block a few times. He’s a Hall of Fame lock as maybe the best pitcher of his generation. He’s still a quality pitcher and a class act. They still buy tickets on the road when they know he’s going to take the ball for the Dodgers. He’s faced his baseball aging curve with grace under pressure. And, for good measure, he’s the one active player who was seen fit to be part of the ceremony when the Dodgers unveiled that statue of their Hall of Fame legend Sandy Koufax this month, and you know (well, you damn well should know) what a class act Koufax was on the mound and has been in the decades since off it.

(You’re not still P.O.ed that Koufax waxed your Yankees’ tails twice while his Dodgers swept them in the 1963 World Series when you were seven, are you?)

Meet Justin Verlander. Missed a year plus recovering from Tommy John surgery. He has a 2.23 ERA and a 3.53 fielding-independent pitching rate so far this season. For any pitcher that’d be a remarkable return so far. For a future Hall of Famer who’s still suiting up at Jack Benny’s age (that’s a joke, son), it’s off the chart so far.

Meet Verlander’s 25-year-old Astros teammate, Yordan Álvarez. He’s leading the entire Show with his .667 slugging percentage, his 1.081 OPS, and his 206 OPS+. If there’s one untainted Astro who’s must-see viewing whenever he checks in at the plate, it’s him.

Meet Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers. The left side of the Red Sox infield is a big reason why the Olde Towne Team yanked themselves back up from the netherworld into second place in that rough and tumble American League East. Did I mention that Devers currently leads the entire Show with 177 total bases?

Meet José Ramírez. The Guardians’ third baseman is giving Devers a run for his money in the All-Star balloting that closes today. That thumb injury has put a crimp into his bat for now, and it’s had its role in the Guardians’ sudden deflation at the plate, but this guy just may be the face of his franchise right now. He ought to be one of the faces of this game.

Meet Mark Appel. This is the guy who went from number one in the draft to injuries as well as pressures and even to an exit from the game only to try giving it one more try—and finally coming up with the Phillies, nine years after that draft, and tossing a scoreless inning . . . at age 30. That’s as feel good a story as it gets for the oldest former number one to make his Show debut, no matter what happens with the rest of what remains of Appel’s career. They don’t all go to hell and back.

Those are only some of baseball’s faces, Mr. Commissioner. They’re the ones the fans want to see and pay through the nose to see. Despite your tinkerings. Despite your often erroneous readings of the room. Despite your inability or unwillingness to demand the same accountability of umpires that you do of players, coaches, and managers.

Despite your inability to let your professed deep love of the game come through without tripping over itself because, as an improvisor, well, if you were a musician the consensus would be that Miles Davis you ain’t.

Another year, ejection, and autographed ball

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Jesse Winker

Jesse Winker (27) triggering a bench-clearing brawl after taking a leadoff pitch on the can in the second Sunday . . .

When pondering how to attract and keep today’s youth bound to baseball, I’m pretty sure a bench-clearing brawl depriving a particular young fan from southern California of seeing a favourite player all game long isn’t exactly what we should have had in mind. It’s hard enough being a Reds fan anywhere these days without that.

Last year, a little California girl named Abigail Courtney got to see her first live major league game when her beloved Reds hit town to play the Padres. She really wanted to see her personal favourite, first baseman (and future Hall of Famer) Joey Votto. Except that Votto got tossed from the outset after arguing a nebulous pitch call.

The girl’s heartbreak went viral, enough so that it reached Votto himself. He promptly sent her a ball that he signed, “I am sorry that I didn’t play the entire game. Joey Votto.” The next day, Votto granted Abigail a personal audience when the Reds blew her family to tickets for that game.

Abigail’s Reds rooting includes sticking with players after they move on, as several did when the Reds decided to push the plunger on 2022 before the lockout-threatened season even began. And there the Courtneys were in Angel Stadium Sunday afternoon, where Abigail wanted to see two of her now-former Reds heroes, Mariners left fielder Jesse Winker and infielder Eugenio Suárez.

If the little girl has been taught anything about Hall of Fame catcher/malaproprietor Yogi Berra, don’t be shocked if it includes one of the most fabled Berraisms flashing in neon before her pretty eyes in the second inning: It’s déjà vu all over again.

She either didn’t know or didn’t quite comprehend that there might be a little bad blood between the Angels and the Mariners after the Angels’ future Hall of Famer Mike Trout was almost decapitated in the ninth inning Saturday night. She didn’t know Angels opener Andrew Wantz was going to send a return message or two, zipping one past Julio Rodriguez’s head in the top of the first before drilling Winker on the right butt to open the top of the second.

She certainly didn’t know Winker would slip the umpires trying to restrain him and charge the Angels’ dugout on the third base side of the ballpark, luring the rest of the Mariners to pour over for a rumble against the dugout rail after the Angels—who looked to have been chirping at the Mariners after Winker took it on the cheek—came out to defend themselves.

Nor could she know yet that the umpires’ crew chief Adrian Johnson would tell a pool reporter, “I’m not aware of the incident with Trout from last night. You’re talking about the pitch that went over his head. That was nothing for us to issue warnings today. What happened today was a guy got hit. We had warnings in.”

A week earlier, while the Angels took four of five from the Mariners in Seattle, Angels pitcher (and yet another former Red) Michael Lorenzen reeled in horror after a pitch coned former Angel Justin Upton upside the head. Post-game, Lorenzen thundered over the inconsistent baseballs that pitchers were having numerous issues gripping properly including the ones they couldn’t grip well enough to control.

Abigail Courtney

. . . meant a second broken heart over an early ejection of a current or former Reds favourite for Abigail Courtney in slighty over a year . . .

Maybe for the Mariners the Upton splat meant beware. Maybe they didn’t necessarily accept Lorenzen’s post-game commentary as sincere. Maybe both sides pitching inside and tight this weekend was a little bit of mutual messaging. But just how Johnson could have figured that that didn’t mean buzzing Trout’s tower in the ninth Saturday merited pre-game warnings Sunday escapes.

A pre-game warning would have dispatched Wantz post-haste after he’d zipped Rodriguez’s head. It also would have knocked into the proverbial cocked hat any suspicion that Angels manager Phil Nevin elected to go with an opener just to have him take one or two for the team and send the Mariners messages without costing himself too heavily.

Considering the Angels’ usual wounding flaw of inconsistent-to-insufferable pitching rearing its head yet again this season—and contributing well enough to that fourteen-game losing streak that deflated their earlier-season success—Nevin was playing with matches if that was really his plan.

Abigail Courtney knew none of that going in. All she knew in the moment in the top of the second was that here she was at the ballpark to watch a couple of her favourite former Reds (we presume Votto remains her number one man in Cincinnati) and one of them got a shot in the ass, triggered one of the wildest brawls of the season, if not the wildest, then got thrown out of the game.

So did Winker’s fellow Mariners Rodriguez and J.P. Crawford, not to mention Mariners manager Scott Servais. So were Nevin and Angels Wantz, Raisel Iglesias, and Ryan Tepera. (Iglesias had a message of his own to send after his ejection, throwing a large tub of sunflower seed bags out towars the third base line in protest. Brilliant.)

Winker didn’t exactly go gently into that good not-so-grey afternoon. Before he disappeared into the Mariners clubhouse, he flipped the double bird to a section of the seats behind the dugout.

“The only thing I’m gonna apologize for is flipping the fans off,” the left fielder said after the game. “That’s it . . . They pay their hard-earned money to come and see a game, and they didn’t deserve that, so I apologize to the fans, especially the women and children.”

Lucky for Abigail that her mother is a psychologist by profession. “One of the first things I said was, ‘Honey, everybody’s fighting, but they’re all going to be OK’,” Kristin Courtney told Athletic writer Stephen J. Nesbitt. “‘Nobody’s going to get seriously injured. But Jesse’s not going to be playing anymore today’. So, there were more tears.

Abigail Courtney

. . . and, a second apologetically-autographed baseball to Abigail from a chastened player.

“She has a sensitive heart, and she really cares about baseball,” the lady continued. “She feels for everybody, and I know she was disappointed for herself because she’s been waiting to see Jesse. I kept telling her, ‘I don’t think Eugenio is going to get thrown out. I think he’ll be OK. You can cheer for Eugenio’.”

Concurrently, someone made Winker aware of Abigail’s second such broken heart in a year and eight days. And he did something about it.

When Votto got tossed in San Diego last year, he sent her the ball and made a point of meeting her before the next day’s game. When Winker was made aware Sunday, before the game ended in a 2-1 Angels win, he sent Abigail a ball he signed, “Sorry I was ejected! I hope to see you at another game soon.”

If Votto’s precedent is any indication, it’s a consummation devoutly to be wished. Before his ejection broke Abigail’s heart in San Diego, Votto was in something of a 41-game slump. After redeeming himself with her the following day, he went nuts enough to hit 19 home runs with a .674 slugging percentage over the following 52 games.

Winker could use a little of that kind of mojo. Even more than he could have used the pizza an Arkansas fan named Sofie Dill sent to him in the clubhouse. (When Winker texted her thanks, she texted back, “Thank you for being awesome, Jesse! There’s a ton of people on Twitter who love you right now man.”)

The bad news: Winker has a respectable .353 on-base percentage thus far this season, but he’s slugging 153 points below his career percentage. The next time the Mariners might have a chance to see Abigail will be the Fourth of July, when they visit the Padres on her home turf.

I suspect it’s very safe to say that, while she might appreciate the balls she got from Votto and Winker after their ejections broke her heart, Abigail would much rather watch them play baseball when she gets to the ballpark. Autographed baseballs aren’t half as much fun as baseballs diving for line drive hits or flying for home runs.