“I’ve just traded hamburger for steak”

Posted on by
Reply

Rocky Colavito (left) and Harvey Kuenn in their new 1960 wardrobes. Could showing this photograph around Cleveland still get you run out of town . . . after you’ve been broiled, basted, batter-fried, braized, and beaten into a froth?

The American League’s 1959 home run champion wanted a $5,000 raise for 1960. His team’s general manager forced him to haggle yet again, signed him to a 1960 contract with the raise . . . and traded him out of town for the American League’s 1959 “batting champion” on the final day of spring training.

“We’ve given up forty homers for forty doubles,” said that general manager, Frank Lane of the Indians. Actually, it was 42 home runs for 42 doubles in 1959, but let’s not get technical.

To this day, Rocky Colavito (the 42 homers) thinks Frank Lane is a seven-letter euphemism for a male sexual prophylactic. Cleveland citizens probably call Lane far worse. To them, Colavito for Tigers veteran Harvey Kuenn (the 42 doubles) was even worse than Chicago would come to see Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio.

As Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Terry Pluto observes, Colavito was an Indian on his first Opening Day 65 years ago though he didn’t play in that game. The Indians wanted to return him to the minors for a spell, but Colavito balked until the team’s then-GM, Hank Greenberg, a Hall of Famer Colavito admired, assured him: let us fix this little roster problem we have and you’ll be back in three weeks.

Greenberg proved as good as his word and then some, which meant the world to the straight-shooting Colavito, like Greenberg a native of the Bronx. Colavito appeared in only five 1955 games, but in 1956 he hit 21 home runs to crown a full, fine rookie season and he asked Greenberg for a $3,000 raise. Greenberg gave it to him: $1,500 immediately, with a promise of a second $1,500 if he played 100 or more 1957 games. He did.

“I went right up to his office,” Colavito told Pluto. “Hank looked at me and said, ‘I know why you’re here.’ He then told (Indians traveling secretary) Bob Gill, ‘Get Rocky his check for $1,500.’ Hank Greenberg was the greatest general manager I ever had. He always was a man of his word.”

Not so Lane, whom Pluto once recorded in The Curse of Rocky Colavito as having reneged once too often on this or that assurance for Colavito’s taste. Right down to Lane’s late spring training 1960 assurance that the last thing on his mind was trading his right field star. Until he made the deal.

Colavito, the matinee idol with the big swing, the fine throwing arm, and the reputation for fan friendliness that went so far as to insist children clamoring for his autograph line up properly and say “please” and “thank you.” (What a surprise that Indian fans lived by the watchword, “Don’t knock the Rock.”) For Kuenn, the grizzled shortstop-turned-outfielder with the persistent clump of chewing tobacco in his cheek, the increasingly persistent leg issues, and a similar contract haggle approaching the 1960 season.

Lane had another issue with Colavito, which Pluto also recorded in the aforementioned book. Lane preferred baseball players who lived and drank hard. Like his best friend and ill-fated Indians roommate, pitcher Herb Score, Colavito was anything but the hard-living, hard-drinking type.

Even before taking the Indians’ GM job, Lane was infamous around baseball for treating trading as the most persistent itch that required a scratch. As the Cardinals’ GM previously, Lane was notorious for building a trade involving Hall of Famer Stan Musial that was stopped only by the intercession of owner Gussie Busch, who knew St. Louis would send him and anyone else associated with the team to the rack if it went through.

“Some of [Lane’s] trades were nuts, and some were good,” said longtime Cardinals GM Bing Devine. “Frank Lane was a great trader,” said longtime Dodgers GM Buzzie Bavasi. “But when I say that, I don’t mean the trades he made were great.”

Indians manager Joe Gordon walked out to first base after Colavito arrived in the team’s final exhibition game to tell him he’d just been dealt to the Tigers. “I’ve just traded hamburger for steak,” crowed Lane, who’d been trying to pry Kuenn out of the Tigers for several years.

Lane was also a typical baseball man of the time in that he tended heavily to rate players according to their “batting averages” alone. For all we know, Lane shrugged it off if he didn’t laugh his head off when Branch Rickey published a Life essay that said among other things that “[b]atting average is only a partial means of determining a man’s effectiveness on offense”—in 1954.

To Lane, trading the AL’s 1959 home run king for the league’s 1959 “batting” champion trading as he also said “forty home runs for forty doubles” made all the sense in the world:

We’ve added fifty singles and taken away fifty strikeouts . . . I’ll probably make bobby-soxers mad at me, but they’ve been mad at me before . . . I realise Colavito is very popular. There were many people who came to the park to see him hit a home run, whereas they wouldn’t come to the park just to see Kuenn hit a single. But those singles and doubles win just as many games as home runs . . . Rocky’s best year was 1958 when he batted over .300 and hit 41 homers, but our attendance was only 650,000 because we didn’t have a contending club.

“Where do you begin to shovel through this pile of public relations pap spewed out by Lane?” Pluto asked in his book. “Last time I checked,” said Sporting News writer Hal Lebovitz, whom Pluto also cited, “a single doesn’t count as much as a home run.” The last time I checked, the 1959 Indians were second in American League home attendance (1.50 million fans) to the Yankees (1.6 million).

Let me show you Hamburger vs. Steak in 1959 according to my Real Batting Average metric. (Total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches / total plate appearances.)

1959 PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Rocky Colavito 664 301 71 8 3 2 .579
Harvey Kuenn 617 281 48 1 7 1 .547

Now, let me show you Hamburger vs. Steak from Colavito’s first full major league season through the end of 1959:

1956-1959 PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Rocky Colavito 2166 992 275 14 16 7 .602
Harvey Kuenn 2572 1049 201 16 18 4 .501

This may have been one of the more polite Cleveland protests after the Colavito-for-Kuenn trade. (Akron Beacon-Journal.)

Both players dealt with nagging injuries in those four seasons, though Kuenn probably had the harder time of it. He depended as much on his legs as anything else to succeed and those were his most often injured parts. He’d pounded them, too, playing shortstop in his first few years, though it did him little good: as a shortstop, Kuenn was worth 27 defensive runs below his league average.

Colavito was also a superior defender; as a corner outfielder, his lifetime numbers show him worth 61 defensive runs above his league average.

What Lane also didn’t either think about or comprehend if he did think was that Colavito was hurt somewhat by Municipal Stadium, that pitching paradise and hitting challenge. Colavito hit far better on the road. Kuenn had the opposite issue: Tiger Stadium was a hitting haven. He hit far better at home, but coming to Municipal Stadium was likely to be a nightmare.

Well, now. Kuenn missed quite a number of 1960 games thanks to further nagging injuries and, yes, when he could and did play he did hit better on the road than at home. The split isn’t glaring since he was essentially a singles-and-doubles hitter with about as much power as a push mower, but “batting average” Nazis should note that thanks to age and injuries Kuenn would never hit as high as .308 again (his 1960 “batting average”) the rest of his career.

According to Pluto’s book, Colavito was given another stab in the back by Gordon, who seems to have told those who would listen that Colavito’s immediate reaction to the trade was, “For Kuenn and who else?” Colavito denounced the remark as the biggest. lie. ever.

I never said anything negative about Harvey Kuenn. After that, I never had any stomach for Gordon or Lane . . . I feel bad for Harvey because he caught some of the public backlash from the deal. Harvey was a helluva player, and he could really run when he was younger. He once got five infield hits in one game. I don’t know if I got five infield hits in my career. If I could run like Harvey I would have been a lifetime .300 hitter. But Detroit wanted to trade Harvey for me because they weren’t sure how much longer his legs would hold up. That was a big factor in the trade, and no one talked about it until long after the deal had been made.

Devastated as he was by the trade and by the betrayals he felt, Colavito’s 1960 opening with the Tigers had to make him feel worse: the Tigers opened against the Indians. He had to fly with the Indians from spring training to Cleveland and then change sides. He went hitless in the first of the two games but smashed a three-run homer in the top of the fourth off Jim Perry in the second game.

“The first year in Detroit was rough for me because I had left a place and a team that I loved and the fans in Cleveland loved me,” Colavito told the Detroit Free Press in 2020. “I am sure it was the same for Harvey, who was a really good man. Even my neighbor at the home I rented in Detroit said to me: ‘I don’t care who you are, I was a Harvey Kuenn fan.’ That was the last time we ever spoke. In the home opener in Detroit, I remember it was a very warm day and that I hit a two-run homer and we won.”

Yet when 1960 finished shaking out, Colavito still came out ahead of Kuenn, according to RBA:

1960 PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Rocky Colavito 616 263 53 4 3 4 .531
Harvey Kuenn 537 197 55 6 3 4 .493

No wonder then-Tigers GM Bill DeWitt, who’d partnered with Lane on the Big Trade, crowed back, “I like hamburger.” Even though DeWitt’s 1960 Tigers weren’t exactly world beaters at hitting or reaching base overall, even though four of his top five players by wins above replacement-level player were pitchers. (Hall of Famer Jim Bunning plus Frank Lary, Don Mossi, and Dave Sisler.)

Neither Colavito nor Kuenn would be quite the same player they’d been before the Big Trade, though Colavito hit 139 home runs in four seasons as a Tiger. As a matter of fact, Colavito was anything but a Detroit breakdown:

Hold That Tiger! PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Rocky Colavito 2723 1171 346 22 26 9 .578

In due course, Colavito would have an encore in Cleveland, under a far different regime, but also far from his early seasons when the Tribe remained serious American League contenders. Lane had much to do with reducing the team to also-rans, of course.

Kuenn would learn the hard way what it was like when Lane decided you didn’t fit into his plans. After a 1960 in which he finished fifth in the American League with that .308 “batting average,” but missed most of September due to injuries, Kuenn signed a 1961 contract. Lane called him “untouchable”—until he wasn’t, trading him to the Giants for pitcher Johnny Antonelli and outfielder Willie Kirkland.

Antonelli turned up with arm trouble and the coming end of his career. Kirkland would average 25 home runs a season as a three-year Indian but offered not a lot else other than plus defense in the outfield, then tapered away in Baltimore and Washington before going on to play six seasons in Japan.

Kuenn would remain a respected veteran who still knew how to hit when he was healthy. But he’d also finish his career with the strange distinction of having made the final outs in two no-hitters by Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax: in 1963, as a Giant; and, more famously (Two and two to Harvey Kuenn!—Vin Scully), in 1965 as a Cub.

He’d also be one of the four-man committee (with his old teammate Bunning plus Pirates pitcher Bob Friend and Hall of Fame former Phillies pitching great Robin Roberts) who ended up finding and hiring Marvin Miller to run the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Lane had one final dagger to stick into Colavito, in 1965, when the two men bumped into each other by happenstance after the Kansas City Athletics—for whom Colavito played one season, 1964—traded Colavito back to Cleveland. As Colavito told Pluto, Lane told him the A’s traded him because owner Charlie Finley didn’t want to negotiate a contract with him.

“Who knows if that’s true?” Pluto asks. Who knows, given what’s only too well known of Lane, if it’s not true? This was the man who once said his best trade was sending a kid named Roger Maris to the A’s for infielder/outfielder Woodie Held and first baseman Vic Power.

Well, now. Held was a versatile player with some power; Power was a flashy first baseman with a little less power but enough defense and four All-Star teams while he was at it. You’ve probably heard Maris had a little more to come. When he ended up in New York, as a back-to-back American League Most Valuable Player, and smasher of ruthsrecord, Lane’s tune changed faster than a disc jockey’s patter.

“If I’d known Maris would end up a Yankee,” Trader Lane sniffed in due course, “I never would have made that deal.”

By 1964, Lane had this to say about trading Hamburger for Steak: it was “the most unfortunate I ever made—not from a baseball standpoint but from the fans’ standpoint. The gals loved that boy with his boyish grin.” The gals and everyone else might also have loved the forty home runs a season Colavito averaged as an Indian between 1956 and 1959. Chicks dug the long ball even then, but they weren’t the only ones.

When Lane died at 85 in 1981, only one baseball person showed up for the funeral, and that only at the request of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn: Bobby Bragan, whom Lane fired as the Indians manager in 1958. Bragan denied the long-holding Cleveland legend that he put a curse on the Indians upon his departure.

“I didn’t put a hex on the club,” he said in his memoir, You Can’t Hit the Ball with the Bat On Your Shoulder. “Having Frank Lane as the general manager was curse enough.”

Especially when he really traded prime rib for meat loaf. From a baseball standpoint.

This Mercedes hit the road swinging

Posted on by
Reply

Yermin Mercedes’s only flaw so far is that, unlike several of the cars with whom he shares a name, he can’t go 0-60 in three seconds flat.

The question before the house (well, my house, anyway) is, what will happen if Yermin Mercedes hits a slump? Will the boo birds of Guaranteed Rate Field and on the road begin to call him Vermin Mercedes?

That was then: The rookie White Sox catcher/designated hitter went 0-for-2020. OK, that’s a ringer: he had but one plate appearance last irregular season. This is now: He went 8-for-2021 through the top of the sixth Saturday in Angel Stadium. Eight plate appearances, eight hits.

It was enough to put Mercedes all the way into the record books. He’s the lone major league baseball player in any league since 1900 to open a season 8-for-8. It was also enough to make him the most must-see baseball television of the new season’s first two or three days.

Mercedes isn’t as sleek looking as the automobile with which he shares a name, unless you mean the Mercedes-Benz GLA-class SUV series. But he doesn’t have to be, so far. Not when he delivered the way he did in the first two games between the White Sox and the Angels.

He’s not exactly a little green sprout otherwise, either. He’s a veteran of three Show organisations who saw no major league time until that lone 2020 plate appearance; the White Sox signed him in 2018 after he’d bumped around the minor leagues for the Nationals and the Orioles. At age 28, he’s a rather late bloomer. But what a bloom he showed in Anaheim to open the season.

He premiered Friday night, in a game the White Sox managed to win because the Angels’ pitching seemed determined to hand the White Sox a game the White Sox early on seemed bent on handing the Angels with defensive miscues. When he lined an Andrew Heaney changeup with one out in the top of the third, it didn’t necessarily suggest a date with the record book was on his schedule.

But then Mercedes punched one through the hole at shortstop for an RBI single in the top of the fourth off Angels reliever Javy Guerra’s sinker. From there he lined a single off a Chris Rodriguez cutter in the top of the sixth, lined another single off a Mike Mayers cutter in the top of the eighth, and tore a two-run double out of an Alex Claudio changeup in the top of the ninth.

Come Saturday night he made Friday’s proceedings resemble extended batting practise. He premiered in the top of the second against Alex Cobb, timed a splitter on 2-2, and sent it down the left field line and into the corner seats fair. He poked a Cobb sinker through the hole at second for a base hit in the top of the fourth and sent another Cobb sinker to the back of left center for an RBI double in the top of the sixth.

As God and His servant Frank Robinson are our witnesses, Angel Stadium fans must have thought, is there anybody who can get this sonofabitch out?? The answer proved to be another Angels bullpen bull, Tony Watson, with a little help from Mike Trout hauling down Mercedes’s one-out fly to deeper center in the top of the eighth.

So Mercedes proved only human, after all. Someone not watching the games but noticing his numbers in Sunday morning’s box scores or aboard Baseball Reference’s more complete updates could say, quietly but firmly, “Somebody’s getting him out—the bastard’s only hitting .888!”

The bastard was only a .302 hitter in eight minor league seasons, with a Real Batting Average (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by plate appearances) of .551. He seems to have been there always, just waiting to be called upon. The White Sox haven’t regretted the call. So far.

At least a few social media someones actually began pondering his Hall of Fame chances to be. Oh, brother. Aside from the never-edifying hyperbolics, that kind of thinking doesn’t always prove satisfying when all is said and done.

Before Mercedes, the only player to go 5-for-5 in his major league premiere was Washington Senators infielder Cecil Travis in 1933. Travis went on to have a fine career, rudely interrupted by three and a half years’ military service during World War II—during which he suffered frostbite in his feet as one of the Battling Bastards of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

While Hall of Fame pitcher-to-be Warren Spahn earned a Purple Heart and a battlefield commission at the same battle, Travis’s feet were saved by immediate surgery but it cost him his balance. It ruined him in the infield and made him a sadly simple out at the plate. Considered the American League’s third-best player in 1941 when he led the league with 218 hits—Hall of Famer Ted Williams compared Travis’s swing at the plate favourably to that of 1990s star first baseman John Olerud—Travis retired in 1948.

Wish nothing of the Travis sort to happen to Mercedes before his major league playing days end, whenever they end. Not in battle, God forbid, or any other way. But while you savour the extraterrestrial feat he delivered in his first two 2021 games, pray that even as he returns to earth Mercedes keeps the head he displayed after the 5-for-5 night.

“I’m just trying to wait for my pitch and not do too much,” he told reporters. “Just stay right there and swing hard. It doesn’t matter if it is two strikes or no strikes, I just want to see the ball.” After consummating the 8-for-8 start and the 8-for-9 overall, Mercedes will need such a well-leveled head to continue effectively.

Most likely, Mercedes projects as a solid player with a solid plate approach who’ll be able to afford more than one model of his namesake car. If he proves he’s really only human, after all, please resist the sure-to-be-overwhelming temptation to call him Vermin.

Fun Police lives matter?

Posted on by
3

Even after Yadier Molina (left) shoved him from behind after he objected to Jack Woodward’s (left) driller, Nick Castellanos (second from right) would still ask Molina for a signed jersey. A little cray-cray?

I guess the Cardinals showed him. Reds right fielder Nick Castellanos sure knows who the men around here are now. Right? Wrong.

For the crime of flipping his bat after hitting an Opening Day home run with his team trailing the Cardinals two days earlier, Castellanos got himself first-pitch drilled, wild-pitched home, and ejected in the fourth inning Saturday afternoon.

He also got shoved from behind by Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina for his trouble, but—rather inappropriately—nobody sent Molina to his room for that.

Apparently, it’s not nice to call out the Fun Police’s St. Louis division.

All that began after Castellanos seemed to let Reds pitcher Jack Woodford covering at the plate how little he thought of taking one in the ribs two days after he hit a two-run homer off Jack Flaherty in the third inning—two outs after Flaherty opened the inning by hitting Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart with a 1-1 pitch.

With Castellanos on third after the drill, Mike Moustakas at the plate watched Woodford’s wild pitch sail up, up, and away, off Molina’s mitt. Castellanos shot home and dove across the plate. Woodford hustled to the plate to cover as Molina scrambled for the ball and tossed high to him.

The pitcher slid on one knee trying for a tag as Castellanos beat the play and began to pick himself up, barking at Woodford about . . . who knew precisely what? Was it umbrage over getting drilled? Was it saying he just had to score by hook, crook, or anything else the Reds could come up with (it was a base hit by Joey Votto to send him to third before the wild pitch to Moustakas) after taking an unwarranted plunk like that?

No. It turned out almost precisely the way the Reds’ broadcast team suggested: “I said ‘let’s [fornicating] go! and then I walked off,” Castellanos told the press post-game.

That’s when Molina hustled over as the benches began to empty and gave Castellanos an apparent shove while Castellanos still had his back turned to him. The Reds separated Castellanos from Molina while Moustakas tried to keep Molina from charging Castellanos further.

The lone ejection was Castellanos, though it wasn’t known until the Reds sent Aristedes Aquino out to play right field in the top of the fifth. Woodford got only a warning, apparently, after throwing the driller in the first place. Molina, whom some fans with troths not plighted to the Cardinals believe receives special dispensation even when he behaves like an ass, got nothing.

Cardinal teammates kept holding Woodford back from further attempts to settle Castellanos’s hash. Then the bullpens emptied, providing room for Cardinals relief pitcher Jordan Hicks to enjoy a brief shove upon Reds infielder Eugenio Suarez before the bulls returned through a little more shoving all the way to the pens.

Then, the Reds—who’d dropped a third-inning six-spot on Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright, including Castellanos himself singling and then scoring on another base hit—got to finish the 9-6 win they’d started. Putting the only damper that really counts on the day Nolen Arenado, the Cardinals’ new third base toy, parked Reds reliever Sean Romano’s full-count, one-on pitch in the left field seats.

After the big dance around the plate area, Woodford walked Moustakas to load the bases and hit Jonathan India with a 1-2 pitch to nudge Votto home with the eighth Reds run before striking Tyler Naquin out for the side at last.

Aquino at least had something else to say about his unlikely mid-game insertion under such troublesome circumstances. He led off the sixth against Andrew Miller, the former Indian who still hasn’t really regrouped too well following his heralded, almost entirely effective, but still unconscionable overuse in the 2016 postseason. Aquino looked at a strike down the pipe before timing a second such pitch and sending it over the left field fence.

The good news is, Castellanos didn’t take Molina’s shove from behind personally. As C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic tweeted after the game, Castellanos said of Molina, “That guy could punch me in the face and I’d still ask him for a signed jersey.”

Maybe Castellanos does know who the men around here are, including the one who smiles back to him from the mirror while he trims his beard. How would Molina sign that jersey, then—“Fun Police Lives Matter?”

Short, sweet, and encouraging enough

Posted on by
Reply

From Dark Knight to dark horse. So far.

Going from the Dark Knight to a dark horse isn’t the worst thing that could have happened to Matt Harvey. The Orioles have had worse happen to them the last few years than a dark horse pitching up well enough to send them on the way to a second straight season-opening win, too.

Looking resplendent enough in the Orioles’ orange and black, mustachioed but no longer bearded, Harvey started and pitched three shutout innings before running into a little trouble in the fourth and tiring after 86 pitches with two out, two aboard, and a one-run Oriole lead in the fifth.

For other pitchers it might be cause for caution tape. For Harvey, it might be a giant step forward in the second act that’s been harder to find than Harvey once found the bright New York lights that finally helped sear him when his shoulder didn’t.

The righthander threw 56 strikes, including eleven first-strikes and fifteen called strikes, and looked generally like he was anything but the increasingly lost cause who left the Mets for a brief resurrection in Cincinnati but a collapse in Anaheim.

To the Orioles, this is the next best thing to hitting a jackpot on a slot machine. To Harvey, it’s one step at a time even now. Don’t doubt for a moment that he won’t take it.

He certainly won’t spurn the help he got from his new friends. Not when two runs score for him in the top of the fourth on an infield hit, not when another run scores for him on another infield hit in the top of the fifth, not when a seventh-inning sacrifice fly re-claims a two-run Oriole lead, and not when the first of those two fourth-inning runs was set up by an unlikely throwing error by Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers.

Maybe the only real mistake involving Harvey was Oriole manager Brandon Hyde electing to let him pitch to J.D. Martinez in the fifth after back-to-back one-out walks to Kevin Plawecki and Enrique Hernandez. Martinez didn’t exactly murder Harvey, but his wicked-hopping comebacker bounced off Harvey’s body enough to let Plawecki score.

The so-far-surprising Oriole bullpen took it from there shutout style, not letting even the extremely few hiccups along the way stop them from stopping the Red Sox.

Harvey isn’t unappreciative. “Overall I think it was a solid first start and I’ll try to build off that next time,” he told reporters after the game. “Anytime you win the first series of the year, it’s big, so we’ve got some good momentum now. To come in here against a good ball club, you’ve got to play well and our guys came in and pitched great after me.”

That’s a far different tone than the one for which Harvey was once notorious. He’s no longer the howitzer-armed Dark Knight whom Met teammates sometimes accused of big-timing them while chasing the demimonde. He’s not the guy who thought the world was his to conquer until thoracic outlet surgery, diminished speed, and especially a crash and burn out of the demimonde and off the Mets brought him down to earth with a resounding crash.

When Harvey missed last year without a major league job, pondering and even making a video for consideration by the Korean Baseball Organisation, he spoke with an introspection many who knew him as a Met might have thought unlikely.

“There are a lot of things I’d do differently, but I don’t like to live with regret,” he told the New York Post.

There were just things I didn’t know at the time. Now, obviously, I’ve struggled the last few years. And what I know now is how much time and effort it takes to stay at the top of your game. I wouldn’t say my work ethic was bad whatsoever, but when you’re young, it’s not like you feel invincible, but when everything is going so well, you don’t know what it takes to stay on the field. It’s definitely more time consuming and takes more concentration.

The beginning of wisdom too often arrives after great pain and self-demolition. Harvey began acquiring it before he stepped on the mound for the Orioles. He pitched like it Saturday afternoon. All he has to do now is continue acquiring more hard-arrived wisdom and pitching every few days like he’s not kidding.

Georgia on our minds

Posted on by
1

Commissioner Rob Manfred congratulating 2019 All-Star Game MVP Shane Bieber. Did he think deep or hard before moving this year’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta?

Most of us, generations be damned, grew up hearing the two most certain of life’s certainties are death and taxes. Everyone has candidates for the third certainty, including that which reminds us of one thing that crosses partisan lines even if the partisans forget the other side does it, too.

Translated to baseball terminology, that thing seems to be demanding a replay review when ball four is called in election races on what they think they threw for strike three. When such a review turns into something such as a new state election law, as in Georgia, there comes a fourth guarantee: somebody isn’t going to like it.

A lot of somebodies don’t like the law. Such somebodies as former Georgia state lawmaker Stacey Abrams and President Joseph Biden. A lot of not-so-much-somebodies don’t like the law, either, and their agitation as much as any other factors have prompted among other things major league baseball’s government moving this year’s All-Star Game and college draft out of Atlanta’s Truist Park.

Abrams had skin in the game going in. She lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, who signed the omnibus bill into law earlier this month, by 50,000 votes, claiming then-Georgia secretary of state Kemp erased thousands from state voter rolls.

Kemp had skin in the current game going in, too. For the heinous offense of certifying that now-former president Donald Trump didn’t push the winning run across the state plate in the bottom of the twelfth, regardless that Kemp wasn’t exactly known to favour anyone other than Trump, Kemp faced Trump’s none-too-silent wish to see him thrown out of the league.

The most understandable result of Trump’s post-campaign campaign to overthrow his loss to Biden might have been Georgia and other states reviewing and tightening up their election laws. The only place where fury and back-and-forth charges of foul get more furious might be a baseball game decided (in truth or in allegation) by a close call for or against one or the other side at the final out.

Election shenanigans have been as common in American politics as yard signs, and they didn’t begin or end with such ancient players as New York’s Tammany Hall, Chicago’s Daley Machine, Kansas City’s Prendergast Machine, or Nassau County’s (Long Island) Margiotta/D’Amato Machine. Wherever you landed observing Trump vs. Biden, your least shocking revelation would have been one or another state addressing their election laws in the aftermath.

When Kemp signed the new Georgia election law, Abrams charged that it “suppresses voters, criminalizes compassion & seizes election authority from local + state officials.” That statement wasn’t half as incendiary as Biden’s prompt denunciation of the law as both un-American and as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Georgia’s real history with Jim Crow is grotesque enough, from state poll taxes (1877) and literacy tests from which descendants from Confederate and Union soldiers were exempt (1907) to the “white primary” rule (1908) that prohibited non-white voting explicitly. Jim Crow in any southern states was (and remains) a portion of American history for which the nation can never be proud.

Now, about the new Georgia election law. Examine deeper than what you see excerpted in the press and aboard social media. Comparing it to Jim Crow is nebulous. It only begins with the fact that mandating seventeen days pre-election (two Saturdays included) for early voting—with mandatory eight-hour-minimum open times and allowance for twelve-hour (7 a.m.-7 p.m.) times—doesn’t exactly “suppress” voters.

A good number of states lack that allowance, including Biden’s home state Delaware which isn’t going to put it in place before the next Congressional election year 2022. Biden himself—with different priorities and a far less grotesque personality, he’s like Trump in showing you wisdom by standing athwart it—also said the Georgia law imposes limits on absentee voting that “effectively” (his word) deny voting to “countless” people. That’s not exactly what the law says or does.

For one thing, no-excuse absentee voting stays in place with just a couple of adjustments. I’d be hard pressed to think a voter is being “suppressed” because the absentee ballot application window is a “mere” 67 days, or because such applications you can now do online, because the state secretary of state is now required by law to offer them online. Or, because the absentee ballot must be received by election officials at least eleven days before Election Day.

Some of the new law’s critics harp about the voter identification portion, which has now shifted it from matching signatures to identification numbers from a voter’s driver’s license or free voter identification card. Lacking either, a Georgia voter can present a photocopy of a utility bill, a bank statement, a paycheck, a government check, or an official document that includes his or her name and address. All they have to do is include the last four digits of their Social Security numbers if they don’t have driver’s licenses or previous voter ID numbers.

If that’s “voter suppression,” I’m Willie Mays. And if that’s something designed to keep non-white voters from voting, I’m hard pressed to comprehend the 2016 Gallup survey that found 77 percent of non-white voters supporting photographic voter identification. You’d think (properly) that non-white voters have just as much stake in preventing real (not alleged) voter fraud as white voters have. And you’d be right.

The new Georgia election law also puts the famous drop boxes into law. They showed up in Georgia for the first time last year thanks to the pan-damn-ic, and now they’re legally mandatory with or without the coronavirus. The new law requires one drop box for every one hundred thousand registered voters or one for every advance vote location in any Georgia county, whichever number is smaller.

Abrams was right about one thing: the new law does “criminalise compassion,” sort of. Giving, offering, or helping give food and/or drinks to people within 150 feet of polling places or within 25 feet of voters in line to vote becomes a legal misdemeanor. Even, seemingly, when the benefactor isn’t discussing the election or particular favoured candidates.

The law also bars ordinary Georgians from photographing or recording their own votes. Guess who gets an exemption from that: the state secretary of state, whom the law requires to create “a pilot program for the posting of digital images of the scanned paper ballots created by the voting system,” with the images becoming “public records subject to disclosure.”

I’ve read about enough early proposals for inclusion in the law that were foolish at minimum, dangerous at most, and thrown out of the bill before it became a final product. But how the hell did that one slip in? How close do you think that one gets to the kind of thing you thought was reserved for the Third Reich, the Soviet Empire, and other authoritarian/totalitarian states who’ve used ballots when allowed at all against their citizens?

Kemp and any Georgia governor has a line-item veto power—but it affects only statewide and state executive budget items. Even he can’t be comfortable with the idea that his or any Georgia secretary of state can come that close to crossing the line from scanning paper ballots to making Georgians’ votes public.

You can bank it. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and his minions probably didn’t read the new Georgia law in almost any way, shape, or form. You can understand why, since the law’s volume is 68 percent (92 pages if you’re scoring at home) the length of Philip Roth’s legendary novella Goodbye, Columbus. But the mis- or mal-excerpting of the law did them no favours and puts baseball into a precarious position.

For one thing, the Atlanta Braves themselves aren’t thrilled with baseball pulling the All-Star Game out of their home playpen. Indeed, even Abrams herself has said Georgia companies shouldn’t jump all the way into boycotts but first “use the chance to publicly condemn the law, invest in voting rights expansion and support wide-ranging federal election legislation before they’re targeted with a boycott movement,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution puts it.

For another thing, former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor Andrew Young demurs from any such boycott, especially involving Atlanta, whatever he thinks of the new law, telling The Athletic, “Everything doesn’t depend on sports. But if you hurt the sports, you hurt the hotels, you hurt the airport, you hurt every business in town . . . [Atlanta’s] the 44th largest economy in the world — and, you can quote me, I don’t know why anybody wants to [fornicate] with that.”

Manfred and his look more like knee-jerkers than thoughtful protesters who considered the whole thing reasonably. (They look, in other words, much the way Trump looked when thundering against Maximum Security’s 2019 Kentucky Derby qualification or on behalf of Pete Rose’s Hall of Fame entry without troubling himself with the deets on both rejections.) Lacking an immediate suggestion for an alternate All-Star Game site this year is the least of Commissioner Nero’s largely self-imposed problems.

On Wednesday night, some Republican lawmakers in Georgia’s state House of Representatives voted to cancel a tax break for Georgia-based Delta Air Lines, on the grounds that Delta objected to the new election law. “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand,” said Georgia’s House speaker David Ralston. “You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”

Imagine the furies if Democratic officials behaved likewise. Oops . . . Lois Lerner, for openers, call your office.

Wherever you sit about the law itself, the thought of governing officials deciding a private entity needs to be punished for taking any position regarding any legislation or policy should scare the hell out of you. If they can do it to an airline, they can do it to anything, including the business of a game.