Rickey Henderson, RIP: Baseball’s grandest larcenist

Posted on December 23, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

The Man of Steal gets the jump in a 1990 game, as then-Angels infielder Johnny Ray looks as though the right move was premeditated surrender.

“To me,” Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson once said, “the most important thing was stirring things up and scoring some runs so we could win a ballgame.” In more ways than one, he was a virtuoso at both. He made a cliché of the maxim that when he led off his team had a man on second going in. He also had to have the uniform torn off his back after slightly more than a quarter century of professional baseball.

On Friday night, at age 65, pneumonia plus asthma tore the Man of Steal from earthly life. Rest assured that even the Elysian Fields might be hard pressed to contain him, though God and His servant Stengel might be entertained above and beyond expectations.

Once upon a time, the Yardbirds’ drummer Jim McCarty wrote in an album liner note, “It’s been said that Jeff Beck is one of the world’s leading guitarists and I’m inclined to agree with him.” Well, now. It was (and is) said (and how!) that Henderson is the greatest leadoff hitter in major league history, and I’m inclined to agree with him.

So was just about all of baseball world, and it didn’t wait until his death to say it, either. But with the news of his death, here was Howard Bryant, a Henderson biographer, writing for ESPN: “He wasn’t as good as he said he was. He was actually better.”

“Rickey Henderson,” said Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, “was a dream to hit behind as teammate and a nightmare for a catcher as an opponent.” And, a joy to fans who loved watching him turn baseball games into Olympic track and field meets.

Henderson was so prolific at reaching base you almost thought he’d become the first to steal first legitimately. Once he did get aboard, you could pretty much bank the run scoring by hook, crook, and anything else Henderson could think of, short of shooting the infielders and the catchers with tranquiliser darts.

The basics would be his 3,118 major league hits, his 1,406 stolen bases, his 298 major league home runs, scoring fifty runs more than Ty Cobb, and stealing about five hundred more bases than Hall of Famers Cobb, Lou Brock, or anyone else making his living with basepath theft. Not to mention the batting stance—damn near a catcher’s crouch, prompting baseball writing legend Jim Murray to suggest his strike zone was the size of Hitler’s heart.

This wiry guy who sometimes checked into hotels using Negro Leagues legend and Hall of Famer Cool Papa Bell’s name as an alias is thought of first for breaking both the single-season and lifetime stolen base records, each held then by Brock. But neither Brock nor anyone else walked 796 times leading off any inning.

The Man of Steal’s 394 game-opening walks is staggering enough. You can think of players who didn’t or won’t walk that often in their entire baseball lives. But 796 walks leading off innings? That’s as surrealistic as a Dali painting, a Kafka novel, or an extremely early Pink Floyd composition. Cobb did it a mere 153 times.

“I’m 69 years old,” dance and film legend Bill (Bojangles) Robinson told an Ebbets Field crowd on Jackie Robinson Day in 1947, “but never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d stand face-to-face with Ty Cobb in Technicolour.” Mr. Bojangles should have lived to see Henderson. He’d have beamed about standing face-to-face with Funkadelic in spikes.

Henderson’s 81 lifetime game-opening home runs and his 293 bombs batting first in the order were (and remain) impressive enough. His 142 inning-opening home runs might be even more so. Whomever else Henderson had behind him in the lineup, it might have been most true that to beat those teams you had to get through him first, last, and always.

He went to eight postseasons with five teams and posted an .831 OPS. You guessed it: there have been and there are players thought to be heftier hitters who didn’t and won’t post .831 OPSes in their whole careers. By any measure, his 1989 postseason was his personal best, winning the American League Championship Series MVP and posting a 1.514 OPS over that ALCS and the (Earthquake) World Series.

The intentional walk is usually handed to a fellow whose bat should be registered as a lethal weapon. Henderson had 61 free passes in 25 major league seasons, an average of three per year. He didn’t lack long ball power, of course, but neither was he guaranteed to lead off every inning he checked in at the plate beyond the first inning.

Simple enough answer: No pitcher who hadn’t yet lost his marble (singular) wanted to hand Henderson a premeditated base because they knew it meant guaranteeing him three bases on the house before the inning ended. Henderson had 5,356 plate appearances in which he led off an inning and he was never handed an intentional walk in those.

He got his walks the old fashioned way: he earned them. No player was better at reading pitchers and catchers preparing for a day’s larceny. He averaged only 89 strikeouts a season at the plate but 115 walks. Keeping the Man of Steal off base and off the top of baseball’s ten most wanted grand theft suspects compared to keeping a politician from putting his or her foot in his or her mouth.

Henderson was more than a base thief—he hit 81 lifetime game-opening home runs, 142 inning-opening homers, and 293 bombs when listed in the lineup at the number one spot.

No player or man is perfect, and Henderson’s imperfect sides could and did drive players and managers on his own teams as well as the opposition to drink or thoughts of manslaughter, whichever came first. His tendency to whine and fume when he thought he was being underpaid steamed his front offices. His tendency to think of sitting it out when he wasn’t feeling a hundred percent physically caused too many to think he was a born goldbrick or worse.

Just ask Tony La Russa, the Hall of Fame manager who managed against him before getting to manage him. Once when managing the White Sox the first time around, La Russa had to bear Henderson getting in his face and telling him the next time his White Sox decided to brawl with Henderson’s A’s, Henderson was coming for him first.

“Rickey knew his body better than anybody else,” La Russa later told Bryant. “I have to admit I was wrong about him.”

As a manager, I would ask him how he felt and he would tell me, ’70 percent.’ Seventy percent wasn’t good enough for him to play, but I’d tell him 70 percent of Rickey Henderson was better than 100 percent of anybody else I had on the bench. There were times he did not play even when that 70 percent, I thought, could have benefited the team, but when you look at the end results of what he did, the totality of his career achievements cannot be argued.

When Henderson re-joined La Russa, re-joining the A’s for a third tour after winning a World Series with the 1993 Blue Jays, the A’s team bus passed a Toronto billboard showing Joe Carter’s jubilant tour around the bases after hitting the ’93 Series-winning three-run homer. (Henderson and fellow Hall of Famer Paul Molitor were on base when Carter connected.) Bryant wrote that only one voice came from the rear of the bus.

The voice was Henderson’s. “I was on second base!” the Man of Steal crowed.

Yes, he was as funny as he could be infuriating. But as Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley told Bryant, “Rickey was great, sure, but when Rickey put his nose in it—those days when he really wanted to play —there was nobody better.”

“It ain’t bragging if you can do it,” the ancient saying goes. Henderson on the field was the braggart who backed it up. When he spoke to the crowd after busting Brock’s record, he made people fume as well as cheer when he said, “Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing. But today I am the greatest of all time.” It turned out that Brock himself helped Henderson write his day’s remarks. Well.

Henderson even proved at least once that one Hall of Famer had to one-up another Hall of Famer to set an all-time record as unlikely (at this writing) to be broken as his 1,406 stolen bases. He proved it when he turned up as Nolan Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout victim, with then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in the house, “ticking off at least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.” (So said the New York Times‘s George Vecsey.)

That was the summer in which the bulk of Giamatti’s too-brief term in office was consumed with the Pete Rose investigation, which didn’t allow him as much time at the ballparks as he would have loved. But bank on this: Had Giamatti lived to be in the house the day Henderson stood to pass Brock, two years later, there’d have been a Brewer or three carping that they thought they detected Giamatti rooting for Henderson.

Even the larger-than-life need anchorage. Henderson had his wife. “Pamela Henderson never received the credit,” wrote another ESPN scribe, Bradford Doolittle. “While he was building his masterpiece, some players didn’t even know Rickey was married, but she was both the anchor and the captain of the yacht.” You don’t stay together since high school and stay married 41 years without a captain and an anchor. It was as if Henderson’s wife and the mother of his three children reassured herself, “Let him have his fun. When he gets home, we’ll remind him who’s on this bridge.”

Maybe one of Henderson’s true problems was that he really did love the game too much to let it go. After a quarter century plus, most players are long retired to their post-playing lives. At age 45, he was busy stealing 37 bases for the independent Newark Bears. When it all shook out, he probably deserved more than two decades plus a near-year more of life after the batter’s box and the basepaths.

He died five days before his 66th birthday. Somehow, it’s appropriate that he should have been a Christmas baby. At his best, the Man of Steal made every game he played feel like Christmas to his teams.

First published at Sports Central.

A rainy day memorial for Rose

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Cincinnatians still mourning the late September death of Pete Rose file past his urn hoisted in Great American Ballpark Sunday. (The photo on top: Rose pointing skyward on first base after breaking Ty Cobb’s career hits record in 1985.) The Reds enabled them to say farewell to the late legend over fourteen hours—in honour of Rose’s uniform number 14.

From 7 AM through 9 PM Central Standard Time, Cincinnati was handed the chance to visit Great American Ballpark and pay their respects to Pete Rose. Dreary with the rain though it was, several thousand people did just that.

They came to say goodbye to a hometown baseball legend who died September 30 at 83. A hometown legend whose wounding flaws and the sickness that got him banned from baseball and from election to the Hall of Fame many among them still seem to struggle with comprehending.

“As West Siders,” said Molly Good, who teaches at Western Hills High School, which Rose attended, to Cincinnati Enquirer writer Erin Crouch, “we’re like a big family, and he’s one of our family.” (They should have named an alley after me, the way I acted in school, Rose said, memorably, when Cincinnati dedicated Pete Rose Way.)

That wasn’t quite the way a West Sider who contributes to the Enquirer, Jack Greiner, put it the day after Rose’s death. “[M]y sadness is mixed with a heavy dollop of ambivalence,” he began.

I’ve already seen the platitudes from pandering politicians. The theme seems to be that Pete was the living embodiment of Cincinnati’s west side — tough, gritty and hard-working. I can’t argue with that. My ambivalence stems from the fact that in every other facet of his life, Pete in no way embodied the values I consider synonymous with the West Side.

Westsiders are rule followers. With very few questions asked. Pete was not. And while that had its charms, the fact is that he lived his life as though the rules didn’t apply to him. Whether it was gambling on baseball, IRS regulations, or wedding vows, Pete apparently felt unburdened.

The visitation included passing by the urn containing Rose’s ashes, which his family seems not to have finalised concerning burial or scattering. Atop the container sat a copy of the fabled photograph of Rose pointing skyward as he stood on first base, tipping his batting helmet, the night he broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record in 1985 Cincinnati.

Those attending were clad in one or another red garment, under assorted red or red-and-white umbrellas, including Reds jerseys with Rose’s old uniform number 14. Many stopped by the statue of Rose captured in one of his fabled head-first slides into base outside the ballpark. Within a very short time, the figure of Rose hitting the ground hands first was surrounded by assorted Reds paraphernalia tied to Rose explicitly or other objects expressing feelings about him.

Most of the mourners were older Cincinnatians who grew up watching Rose with the 1963-1978 Reds, including the height of the legendary Big Red Machine teams. Reds officials told the press that at least 1500 people turned out for the visitation over its first seven hours; the visitation was scheduled for fourteen hours as a nod to Rose’s old number. Wreaths of roses appeared at various spots, including at least one displaying his number 14.

Mourning Reds fans didn’t let Sunday rain stop them from surrounding the landing hands on Pete Rose’s statue (he’s captured in one of his fabled headfirst slides into base) with assorted paraphernalia, inscribed baseballs, and roses.

The rainy weather may well have kept more from attending the first half, but those first seven hours may have had more attending than the Reds had counted just yet. As I sat down to write, I had no idea what the final turnout would prove to be. The mourners didn’t just pass by Rose’s ashes, they paid respects personally to Rose’s two daughters, Fawn and Kara, who’d cooperated with the Reds and with the team’s hall of fame to bring the event to pass.

“We wanted to do something like this,” said Reds Hall of Fame executive director Rick Walls. “You could see from the turnout, it means a lot to the people here. It’s a moving experience.”

“He was a guy you thought was going to live forever,” said one longtime Reds fan, Bob Augspurger, to Associated Press writer Jeff Wallner. “When I heard the news, obviously it was sad. Baseball lost its greatest ambassador.”

“Westsiders tell the truth. Pete lied for thirteen years about betting on baseball,” Greiner had written. “He did it so naturally that he seemed to believe the lie. Westsiders are accountable. Pete’s ultimate confession was done in a book from which he reaped profits. He continued to deflect, citing to others who in his mind behaved worse than him.”

Let it be said, then, that Queen City people came out to pay their respects to a native son whose greatness on a baseball field was as impossible to forget as the clay feet on which he walked off the field proved impossible to replace or re-shape. A man whose professional achievement and the penultimate honor it should have received could be and was blocked and soiled by only one man.

Somehow, Sunday’s rain seemed a little more appropriate.

This essay was published originally at Sports Central.

Mystique and Aura, kidnapped by the Dodgers

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Walker Buehler (21, far left) about to be swarmed by fellow Dodgers after he locked the Bronx Bumblers down for keeps to finish World Series Game Five.

Has it really sunk in yet that the Dodgers are full-season, no-doubt, take-no-quarter World Series champions? Has it really sunk in yet that the Yankees aren’t just another group of also-rans but a team as fully able to implode at the wrong time as any team in major league history?

Both teams needed the best they had available for Game Five Wednesday night. The Dodgers to win it, the Yankees to stay alive long enough to force a cross-country trip to Los Angeles for Game Six at minimum. When the Dodgers needed reinforcements, they found them, sometimes in places unexpected outside their portal.

Anyone remember Mystique and Aura? The Dodgers kidnapped them with no known ransom demand turning up at this writing. The Yankees needed Mystique and Aura but they got Wobbly and Rickety.

Just one night after showing serious enough life by blowing the Dodgers out of Game Four, the Bronx Bumblers self-dismantled in ways almost unheard-of by any previous World Series contestant. The Series-clinching, Game Five final was 7-6. It was a close game only if you ignore the way the Yankees helped the Dodgers close an early 5-0 Yankee lead.

The Game Five Dodgers almost didn’t need stout innings from their bullpen, a shutdown ninth from projected Game Seven starter Walker Buehler, and too-timely hits enough to matter. If you didn’t know better, you’d be swearing the Yankees were handing it to the Dodgers on a platinum platter.

The 161st Street Stumblers lost the Series to a Dodger team that found ways not to let little things like too many injured pitchers and a half-effective bullpen keep them down for very long. bullpen half of which would be effective keep them down for very long. But Game Five night just might have been the single most surrealistic game of this Series, if not any Series.

Trust me when I say that that’s saying something.

The top of the fifth challenges such sad Series mishaps past as Fred Snodgrass’s glove turning into a trampoline, Freddie Lindstrom’s pebble, Ernie Lombardi being dismantled at the plate, Mickey Owen’s passed ball, Willie Davis losing two Oriole flies in the sun in the same inning, Curt Flood losing Jim Northrup’s drive in the sun, or Bill Buckner’s horror seeing the slow grounder skip beneath his downstretched mitt.

Does anyone remember that the 11-4 Game Four beatdown the Yankees dropped on the Dodgers actually had people predicting with straight faces that the sleeping giants were awakening enough to do the unheard-of and take the next three straight to teach those ornery louts from Los Angeles a lesson in manners and championship?

There went those ideas. Above and beyond the Yankees waiting fifteen years to get back here only to tumble away this time, above and beyond the Dodgers winning eleven out of twelve National League West titles with only one World Series conquest to show for it until now, this is what everyone will remember about this Series in general and Game Five in particular:

They’ll remember Series MVP Freddie Freeman’s Game One-winning ultimate grand salami as the first salvo toward his reaching the seats in the first four games, which marries to his bombs in Games Five and Six in 2021 (when he was still a Brave) to tie George Springer for the longest Series home run streak (six games).

They’ll even remember Freeman overcoming a balky ankle keeping him somewhat calm in the earlier postseason rounds. Somewhat. Because by the time Freeman got finished with his bombing in Game Four, Yankee fans were holding up signs pleading, “Freddie, Please Stop!” As if Freeman had any intention of obeying.

First, Judge was the sleeping giant coming wide awake . . .

They’ll remember Shohei Ohtani jamming his shoulder on a failed Game Two stolen base attempt, leaving himself all but useless for most of the Series, but insisting upon staying in the lineup just in case. If only for the presence.

They’ll remember Dodger starting pitcher Jack Flaherty keeping the Yankees to two runs starting Game One but getting flogged for four before he could get out of the Game Five second—including Aaron Judge, heretofore the Yankees’ first among the sleeping giants, awakening himself and Yankee Stadium with a two-run homer in the bottom of the first, followed immediately by Jazz Chisholm, Jr.’s solo bomb . . . until . . .

They remember the Yankees leading 5-0, and Yankee starter Gerrit Cole striking Gavin Lux and Ohtani out swinging back to back, and not one Dodger hit thus far.

Until . . . come the fifth . . .

* With Kiké Hernandez aboard on a leadoff single, busting any shot Cole had at a no-hitter, Tommy Edman lined one that Judge—who committed only one error all year to that point—normally catches in his sleep. This time, the ball hit the web of Judge’s glove and bounced away.

* Five pitches later, Will Smith grounded one to Yankee shortstop Anthony Volpe’s right. Volpe picked it clean the way a Gold Glover does. Then he threw an awkward short-hopper to Chisholm at third the way a Cold Glover does. Chisholm couldn’t get the handle on that throw. The Dodgers had the bases loaded and nobody out.

* The Mookie Monster singled Hernandez home, on a squibber first baseman Anthony Rizzo had to step back to snag because it was spinning like a gyroscope, practically . . . leaving Cole not covering first because the pitcher took a bad route to the ball, leaving both men resembling raw rookies with signals crossed and knotted.

* Freeman singled Edman and Will Smith home and set up first and third.

* Teoscar Hernández doubled Betts and Freeman home.

* And every last one of those five runs in the Dodger fifth was unearned.

. . . but, then, his unlikely error began handing the Dodgers the fifth inning and beyond.

“This is as bad as it gets,” Cole said postgame. “It’s the worst feeling you can have. You have to keep sometimes willing yourself to believe and give yourself a chance. You keep pushing and pushing, and ultimately, you fall short. It’s brutal.”

“You can’t give teams like that extra outs,” said Judge, who’d made what threatened to be the play of the night when he stole an extra-base hit from Freeman by scaling the left center field fence in the fourth. “They’re going to capitalize—their 1-2-3 at the top of the order, they don’t miss. You give them a chance with guys on base, they’re going to capitalize. You gotta limit the mistakes.”

Then, everyone will remember Blake Treinen, the man who usually gets the final three outs of a Dodger win, coming in a little bit sooner than usual to clean up a mess and keep the Yankees at bay from there. As in, the bottom of the sixth, with the Yankees back in the lead 6-5 but threatening to put the game back out of reach with first and second, two out, and Volpe due at the plate.

The same Volpe who really started the Yankees’ Game Four mayhem—when they were down 2-1 in the third thanks to yet another Freeman flog two innings earlier, but with the bases loaded on two out—by hitting Daniel Hudson’s first service into the left field seats.

Treinen got Volpe to ground out to second for the side this time. Then he retired the Yankees in order in the seventh and squirmed out of a first-and-second jam with a fly out by Giancarlo Stanton and a swinging strikeout on Anthony Rizzo.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Buehler ambled down to the Dodger bullpen. Just call me if you need me, boss. He’d only told any Dodger personnel, from teammates to front office people, that he was available to work in Game Five if need be. He made for the Dodger bullpen after the bottom of the fifth.

Then, Buehler started loosening up. Then, he started warming up in earnest. He may well have thrown the equivalent of the first two and a half innings worth of a quality start by the time he got the call to handle the bottom of the Game Five ninth.

He got Volpe to open with a sharp ground out to third base. He struck Austin Wells out swinging on a full count. He struck former teammate Alex Verdugo out swinging on 1-2. Buehler then spread his arms like an old-time nightclub singer inviting applause for the big finish and his mates began pouring onto the Yankee Stadium infield to start the party.

They survived the early bombs by Judge, Chisholm, and Giancarlo Stanton. They survived their Game Four bullpen game plan getting vapourised, going into sacrificial lamb mode the better to keep their six best relief arms available for Wednesday night. They survived their own recent past of, manager Dave Roberts admitted postgame, losing games that handed them what Game Five had before the fifth inning.

They didn’t stop to ask questions when the Yankees began passing out early Christmas presents one botched out after the other in the top of the fifth. They knew the answers going into the Series.

Their knowledge only began with Betts working on playing caroms off the wall almost as incessantly as he does on his batting swing. It only continued with every Dodger no matter how wounded attacking basepaths rather than just running them. The Dodgers scouted the Yankees and determined they were über talented but fundamentally lacking. They didn’t have to advertise it. They simply exposed it.

The Yankees didn’t pay close enough attention to any reports telling them the Dodgers could match them talent for talent even with their MIAs. The Dodgers, for all their star and firepower, were too grounded fundamentally to let the Yankees treat them like just another poor-relations team.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Freddie Freeman was named the Series MVP. (A home run in each of the first four games, plus tying a Series record with twelve RBIs, does that for you.) Now named for the late Willie Mays, the trophy depicts Mays making his fabled 1954 World Series catch against Vic Wertz.

Most of all—unlike the title they won at the end of the surrealistic, pan-damn-ically shortened season and under-isolation postseason—nobody so inclined can hang any kind of asterisk on this one. These Dodgers went the distance no matter whose interpreter swindled him out of millions to cover debts to a bookie, no matter who hit the injured list, no matter who lost a season to an injury. No matter that they tied and took what proved the winning lead on a pair of eighth-inning sacrifice flies.

The last man standing? A pitcher who once resembled a mound terror until two Tommy John surgeries and other ailments kept him limited this regular season, only to show up in October looking as close to his former self as his age and body allowed and hell bent on doing something, anything, to secure his team the Big Prize.

“This is the only reason I play,” Buehler said postgame, “for games like this. The whole year—the offseason, spring training, the regular season—it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters, but not like these games. To win championships is why I play. It’s the best feeling in the world. I live for this.”

He pitched the ninth to prove it. A ground out and back-to-back swinging strikeouts. Followed by stepping down from the rubber, holding his arms out like a vintage nightclub singer delivering the Big Finish, and being mobbed by a swarm of Dodgers. They all lived for this.

WS Game One: “Those are the scenarios you dream about”

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Freeman won Game One with an ultimate grand slam Friday night. Eat your heart out, Lady Liberty!

Has anyone noticed that this year’s World Series features the best regular-season team against the third-best regular-season team? It certainly beats hell out of last year’s Series, when the eighth-best regular-season team had the pleasure of beating the eleventh-best regular-season team.

Right away, then, the Yankees vs. the Dodgers has something going for it above and beyond the ultimate outcome. Above and beyond even ankle-challenged Freddie Freeman seeing and raising Kirk Gibson in Dodger and baseball lore when he walked it off with an ultimate grand slam—in the Game One bottom of the tenth.

Already the World Series has everything real baseball fans crave, from comedy to drama and back to the absurd. Even if both teams had to grind their way through a small pack of also-rans to get to where the Dodgers could overtake the Yankees, 6-3, to start their eleventh World Series against each other.

“Never throw a slider to a cripple,” lamented Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis (the Menace) Eckersley after the legless Gibson pinch-hit for Dodger reliever Alejandro Peña in Game One of the 1988 Series. After Friday night’s eleventh-hour dispatch, Yankee manager Aaron Boone might have been tempted to lament, “Never throw a first-pitch fastball to the near-cripple you preferred to face over Mookie Betts.”

“When you’re five years old with your two older brothers and you’re playing whiffle ball in the backyard,” Freeman said postgame, “those are the scenarios you dream about—two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game. For it to actually happen, and get a home run and walk it off to give us a 1-0 lead, that’s as good as it gets right there.”

They plus the Yankees only had to go through the flotsam and jetsam to make this Series possible in the first place. The Dodgers had to get through the fifth-best Padres and then the tenth-best Mets to get here. The Yankees had to get through the twelfth-best Royals and then the sixth-best Guardians to get here. Is that any way to treat the long season’s champions?

Most of the cream rose to the top regardless of the current postseason system; the second-best regular-season team (the Phillies) got dispatched by the Mets early enough. (A 3-1 division series dispatch.) Forget the old and getting-tired cliché about short series and what the lessers can do with them.

Phrase it another way, if you dare: Four division winners were also shoved to one side and sent home for the winter a lot earlier than they hoped to be sent. One was the season’s second-best Phillies, of course. The other three: The season’s fourth-best Brewers, sixth-best Guardians, and eleventh-best Astros.

In a saner time and place, the Astros, the Braves, the Brewers, the Guards, the Mets, Orioles, the Padres, the Royals, and the Tigers would have been told, quote, “Thank you all for helping make the regular season one whale of a great run, but now it’s time to say goodbye and wait till next year, because something’s still bloody wrong with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second or third place.”

That’s just in divisional terms. Now put it in overall terms. There’s something bloody worse with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish anywhere from fourth to thirteenth place. Bloody worse about the Dodgers and the Yankees being rewarded for their regular-season efforts by being made to get through their far lessers first.

It’s nothing but wonderful that there are going to be baseball stars in abundance for this Series. Betts vs. Juan Soto. Freeman vs. Giancarlo Stanton. Shohei Ohtani vs. Aaron Judge. Even Commissioner Pepperwinkle isn’t unaware that there’s history blowing in the wind here. “Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson played against each other in a Yankee-Dodger World Series,” he’s told The Athletic. “So did Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax. This one is a continuation.”

Well. If you’re going that way, so did Yogi Berra and Don Newcombe. So did Whitey Ford and Duke Snider. So did Reggie Jackson and Tommy John. So did Don Mattingly and Fernando Valenzuela. The latter pair were part of the last Series between these two franchises, at the end of a season whose postseason experiment nobody predicted might seed today’s mishmosh.

Dodgers starting pitcher Jack Flaherty and Yankee starter Gerrit Cole matched shutouts, mostly, until the bottom of the fifth, and a one-out triple (Kiké Hernandez) leading directly to a sacrifice fly down the right field line (Will Smith). Then Flaherty made the only bad mistake of an otherwise superb mound outing, with one on (Soto, leadoff single) and one out (Judge, swinging strikeout), feeding Stantion a 1-2 curve that landed in the lower zone region Stanton happens to love. It flew into the left field bleachers before Flaherty could finish thinking, “Oh, you-know-what!”

A 2-1 score wasn’t really liable to remain static between these two. Sure enough, once the sides were into each other’s bullpens, Soto misplayed Ohtani’s eighth-inning double into allowing Ohtani to third, ending one Yankee reliever’s (Tommy Kahnle) outing, and Betts whacked successor bull Luke Weaver’s 1-2 changeup for a game-tying sacrifice fly.

The game went to the tenth and the Yankees managed to pry one out of Dodger reliever Blake Treinen by way of a one-out single (Jazz Chisholm, Jr.), a stolen base (Chisholm, second), a free pass (Anthony Rizzo), another theft (Chisholm stealing third), and a run-scoring forceout (Chisholm home, Rizzo out at second).

Every Yankee fan in the house who thought their heroes had it in the bag with a one-run lead for the bottom of the tenth got disabused soon enough. Jake Cousins might have gotten rid of inning opener Smith with a fly out to right, but then he walked Gavin Lux and surrendered an infield single to Tommy Edman.

Oops. Cousins gave way to Nestor Cortes, a Yankee who hadn’t pitched since September. Lux and Edman took third and second on Ohtani’s long foul fly out, with Alex Verdugo making what might have ended up the play of the night as he lunged for the ball, caught it, then rolled over the fence before his momentum ended, allowing Lux and Edman’s advances.

Still. It put the Yankees an out away from winning it. That’s when Boone decided he was in far safer hands putting the Mookie Monster aboard to load the pads and hope Cortes could get Freeman and his still-ailing ankle to whack a game-ending grounder or swing into a game-ending strikeout.

“I know everybody’s focused on Ohtani, Ohtani, Ohtani,” said Cortes postgame. “We get him out, but Freeman is also a really good hitter. I just couldn’t get the job done today.” Cortes threw Freeman a fastball toward the inside of the zone—exactly where Freeman was looking for the pitch, knowing Cortes’s heater can ride like a horseman when thrown right.

The only place this one rode was into the right field bleachers.

Cortes threw the pitch he wanted to throw but, as he said postgame, didn’t get it elevated enough in the zone to keep Freeman from detonating it. Among other things, it caused a lot of Yankee fans to wonder why Weaver, who’d been rested well enough, didn’t get to work a second inning, or why sidearming lefthander Tim Hill wasn’t even a topic against the lefthanded swinger.

Freeman held his bat like the Statue of Liberty holding her torch straight up, until he was several steps up the first base line, then dropped it to take his trip around the pillows. Give us your tired, your not-so-poor, your not-so-huddled but standing-O Dodger Stadium mass yearning to breathe the World Series championship.

He became the fifth man in Series history to end a Game One with a home run, joining Gibson plus Adolis Garcia (Rangers, last year), Dusty Rhodes (1954 Giants), and Tommy (Ol’ Reliable) Henrich (1949 Yankees). But he’s the only man to end any World Series game with a slice of salami.

“When you get told you do something like that in this game that’s been around a very long time—I love the history of this game, to be a part of it, it’s special,” Freeman added. “I’ve been playing this game a long time, and to come up in those moments, you dream about those moments. Even when you’re 35 and been in the league for fifteen years, you want to be a part of those.”

Even when you’ve had a season pockmarked by injuries (hand, ankle) and compromised by your alarm as your youngest child fights Guillain-Barré syndrome. That was then: Max Freeman’s father admitting, “It just puts everything in perspective . . . I would gladly strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the World Series 300 million times in a row than see that again.”

This was now: Max Freeman on the way to a full recovery according to the family’s doctors, and his father standing top of the heap for World Series Game One home run hitting. And just about everyone around baseball seemed to agree it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

You might care to note, too, that every one of those teams getting a Game One-winning home run went on to win the Series in question. The ’49 Yankees in seven; the ’54 Giants in a four-game sweep; the ’88 Dodgers in five; last year’s Rangers in five. No pressure, you understand.

ALCS Game Five: Off, Guards

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Juan Soto and everyone in Progressive Field knew bloody well where what he just hit was going in the top of the tenth Saturday night . . .

A Guardian shortstop trying to will a tenth-inning double play before he had full control of the ball. A Yankee right fielder already in line for one of the biggest paydays in baseball history willing to wait for the fastball an off-speed-throwing Guardian reliever proved only too willing to provide.

Brayan Rocchio lost the handle on the toss leaving two Yankees aboard instead of side retired. Guards reliever Hunter Gaddis struck Gleyber Torres out but wrestled Juan Soto through six off-speed breakers and a 1-2 count before someone, who knows whom, thought Gaddis could sneak a fastball past Soto, if not lure him into an inning-ending out.

Good luck with that. Showing precisely why he’s in line for a mid-to-high nine-figure payday this winter to come, Soto got the fastball for which he probably prayed hard. Then, he launched it into the right center field seats with the Yankees’ fortieth American League pennant attached.

With one swing Cleveland’s Progressive Field went from extra-innings thrill to funeral parlour. If that was the ballpark mood, imagine the Guardians’ clubhouse mood when the game ended, the Yankees had a 5-2 ticket to the World Series in their pockets, and the Guardians could only think about how far they’d come in how little time only to feel the big wrench of having not quite enough.

“Because we were so close,” said left fielder Steven Kwan, referring to those in the Guards’ uniform, not necessarily the now-finished American League Championship Series, “it makes it sting a little bit more.”

For the Guardians and their respected rookie manager Stephen Vogt, it was the worst possible ending to an ALCS in which they’d made a better than decent showing—none of the five games was decided by a margin larger than two runs—but lacked the kind of putaway potency with which the Yankees seemed overendowed. On both sides of the ball.

Consider: Twice, in Games Four and Five, Vogt had the opportunity to keep Giancarlo Stanton from making mischief. He could have walked Stanton instead of pitching to him. He pitched to him. Stanton made him pay with interest.

Especially in Game Five, when Guardians starting pitcher Tanner Bibee kept Stanton in check in the sixth inning with nothing but pitches off the zone but not yet dispatched. That was the moment someone should have told Bibee one of two things: 1) Walk him, be done with it, then get rid of Jazz Chisholm, Jr., a far more feeble plate presence. 2) If you must pitch to Stanton, keep the damn ball off the zone.

Bibee tried. The slider aiming for the lower corner ended up hanging up under the middle. Stanton sent it hanging over the left center field fence. Tie game at two each.

Soto slammed home the pennant-clinching exclamation point (did anyone really doubt after that blast that the Guards would go quietly into that not-so-good gray night in the bottom of the tenth?), but there are reasons Stanton ended up as the ALCS Most Valuable Player award winner. In a word, he made it impossible for the Guards to contain him. Still.

This series: Four hits, every last one of them clearing the fences. Eight hits lifetime against the Guardians in the postseason, every last one of them bombs. Three set-clinching wins against the Guards (2020, 2022, Saturday night), and Stanton has dialed the Delta Quadrant in each one of them.

That was the last thing the Guardians needed in a set during which their biggest bopper, third baseman José (The Most Underrated Player in the League ) Ramírez, was practically the invisible man. Oh, he had two doubles and a homer in the series, scored a pair, sent three home, but on a Saturday night when the Guards needed every man to patch the sinking ship Ramírez went 0-for-4 with an intentional walk.

Ramírez wasn’t the number one Guard culprit, though. Their closer Emmanuel Clase recovered his regular season form too little, too late to make a big difference. Rocchio was a little too tentative at shortstop. The rest of the Guardian bullpen seemed gassed by the middle of Game Four.

None seemed more so than Cade Smith—who had the dubious honour of not being told to walk Stanton to set up a likely double play in the Game Four sixth, and being allowed instead to serve Stanton a rising fastball that didn’t rise enough for Stanton to miss planting it out of sight.

Those late home runs from Jhonkensy Noel and David Fry in Game Three sure seemed like last year’s news suddenly. And that Guardian bullpen dominance during the season sure seemed like a figment of somebody’s warped imagination now.

Clase and Smith didn’t surrender three homers all season—but they got ripped for three in this set. Gaddis couldn’t be touched with anything including subpoenas all season—but there he was on the wrong end of Soto’s proved-to-be-pennant-winning detonation.

The team called it, invariably, a season of growth. The Guardians did indeed grow into themselves this year, even if they now face of winter during which they may have to think of a tune-up or three. They own a generally weak AL Central division, but they can’t afford to perform a hot stove league disappearing act.

That they got here at all despite losing their ace starter Shane Bieber for the season to Tommy John surgery tells you something about their resilience and their will. Not to mention losing Triston McKenzie to so much struggling after his 2022 breakout that he was disappeared into the minors. Not to mention Logan Allen lost likewise. Alex Cobb and Matthew Boyd weren’t quite enough to make up for that.

So Vogt had to over-rely on his stellar bullpen. On the regular season they were bank. In the postseason their exhaustion collapsed them slowly but surely. To the point where there’s speculation now that Clase might be considered tradeable for some rotation reinforcement. Might.

The Guards needed more against these Yankees and simply couldn’t find or keep it. In Game Five, they needed more than the brothers Naylor collaborating on a run in the second and Kwan singling Andres Gimenez home in the fifth. A 2-0 lead with elimination on the line isn’t enough against these Yankees.

Not that the Yankees took them for granted. Just ask their oft-criticised general manager, who’s had his job so long some Yankee fans might actually believe he was the guy who first hired Miller Huggins away from the Cardinals to manage them.

“I remember just going, ‘Oh my God’,” said Brian Cashman when Soto dropped the big bomb. “Did the prayer sign. And then knew that we had to somehow put them down in the bottom of the inning, because these guys don’t go easy.” Not even when Lane Thomas hit into the final out of the set, a long fly ball . . . to Soto himself in right field.

All that without Aaron Judge swinging one of the big Yankee bats. He managed to hit a pair out this ALCS but the Leaning Tower of 161st Street was otherwise one of the sleepiest Yankees at the plate. (5-for-31; thirteen strikeouts; two double plays.) His awakening in the World Series would be anything but welcome in the opposing dugout.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball