“I’d rather treasure the memories”

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Before the World Series, Vin would go to church and pray. Not for a win, but there would be only heroes in the World Series, no goats.
—Sandy Koufax, on Vin Scully Day.

If Roger Angell isn’t baseball’s homer but Homer is ancient Greece’s Roger Angell, than Vin Scully isn’t baseball’s Cicero—Cicero was ancient Rome’s Vin Scully. If you’re inclined this way, you’re about to have a piece or three of Scully himself.

The broadcast virtuoso without whose voice baseball in Los Angeles and elsewhere has seemed lacking since his retirement is about to auction as much of his personal memorabilia as can be auctioned, through Hunt Auctions in Exton, Pennsylvania.

“I would much rather treasure the memories,” says the 92-year-old Scully to the Associated Press. “It’s not just a collection of cold, inanimate objects. There are things that mean a great deal to me, but now it’s time to let someone else treasure them.”

Collectors will have a chance to bid on anything from Scully’s 2016 season scorebook, the last he sustained before he retired at last, to a book about Theodore Roosevelt that the 26th American president signed for Scully’s father, who worked in Roosevelt’s law office and who died when Scully was four.

The items also include the scrapbook Scully’s mother kept of 1950s newspaper clips about her son, from just about the moment he first joined the Brooklyn Dodgers’ broadcast team as Red Barber’s find and protege. And, yes, the auction lots will include a generous selection of bats, balls, baseball cards, trophies, and awards. Including numerous plaques honouring Scully as a broadcaster of the year finalist.

“I put them up for humility,” he says, “to remind me, ‘Hey, I was in the race but I didn’t make it’.” That’s from the man who won thirty-three California Sportscaster of the Year awards and four National Sportscaster of the Year awards from the National Sports Media Association.

Scully has several reasons for sending his memorabilia to the auction block. His wife, Sandra, “suffers from a condition related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” the AP says. The UCLA will watch the auction closely enough; the Scullys plan to donate a sizeable amount of the proceeds to them for neuromuscular research.

The couple also plans to use a good amount of the proceeds, the AP continues, to help five children, sixteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren with expenses that include parochial educations. It’s also one way to avoid a family feud when—many, many years hence, we hope in all sincerity—Scully goes to his reward and the memorabilia might be there otherwise to trigger unexpected battles.

“I didn’t want to cause bad feelings among great kids,” Scully says.

This is the same man whom Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax would remember for going to church just before a World Series and praying. “Not for a win, but there would be only heroes in the World Series, no goats,” Koufax told a Dodger Stadium throng on Vin Scully Day in 2016. “He didn’t want anybody in the future to be tarnished with the fact that they lost the World Series for their team.”

Earlier this year, Scully offered a few videotaped messages to Angelenos and others learning to cope with the impositions of the coronavirus world tour. In April, he suffered a fall at his driveway’s end while retrieving his mail, incurring a concussion, a nose fracture, and a rib fracture. “It was a learning experience,” he tells the AP. “I hold on to my walker.”

Age can compromise Scully’s body and way of life (“I heard a door close in my life,” he said as he saw two sets of the golf clubs he can no longer swing loaded aboard a truck) but not his spirit. This warm, loving man, who once had to overcome the accidental death of his 35-year-old first wife and the death of a 33-year-old son in a helicopter crash over two decades later, allows no despair in his world.

“Were you among the crowd that groaned at one of my puns?” Scully said, in his final videotaped message to his listeners on 2 October 2016—eighty years to the day after he walked home from school in New York City, saw a World Series game score posted in the window of a Chinese laundry, pitied the Giants, and fell in love with baseball itself.

 Or, did you kindly laugh at one of my little jokes? Did I put you to sleep with a transistor radio tucked under your pillow? You know, you were simply always there for me. I’ve always felt that I needed you more than you needed me, and that holds true to this very day. I’ve been privileged to share in your passion and love for this great game . . . You folks have truly been the wind beneath my wings, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me on this incredible journey of sixty-seven years of broadcasting Dodger baseball.

You can have such pieces of that journey as you might wish or can afford now; Internet bidding begins on Friday.

But it won’t be quite the same as having Scully himself on the air, amplifying a baseball game without detracting from it, ordering a camera to train upon a small child in his or her parents’ arms at the park, or spontaneously delivering exactly the right description of a play, a pitch, a hit that goes beyond the powers of even the most blessed of poets.

Such are the periodic reminders that knowing Vin Scully isn’t in the booth, at the mike, calling a game, telling the stories within the stories around the stories behind the stories, is just like knowing Yogi Berra no longer lives among us on this island earth. America sometimes just isn’t America anymore.

Was your cutout there? Bully!

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Lucas Giolito, the big bully.

When Lucas Giolito’s Tuesday night no-hitter is remembered twenty years from now, and the coronavirus world tour has long been a not-so-pleasant memory, bank on one thing. Ten times the capacity of Guaranteed Rate Field will solemnly swear that their cardboard cutouts were at the game.

Much remarked for coming from a high school baseball team where his pitching teammates included Max Fried and Jack Flaherty, the Chicago White Sox righthander nailed thirteen strikeouts, walked a measly one, and threw 20 first-pitch strikes out of 28 batters faced.

Yes, it was the first no-hitter of the pandemic-truncated season other wise known as The Inner Sanctum of the Outer Limits of The Twilight Zone. And, it still counts as a bona-fide no-hitter now and for all time. But you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m not exactly in the mood to blast fireworks over it for ten good reasons.

The ten reasons are the number of Pittsburgh Pirates Giolito faced Tuesday night. They weren’t exactly the Big Red Machine, the Swingin’ A’s, the Pittsburgh Lumber Company, or this year’s Dodgers (who have yet to be nicknamed) Giolito had to face for the nineteenth no-hitter in White Sox pitching history.

They may not have even been the 1962 Mets, and these Pirates wouldn’t exactly go over big at the Hungry I or the Improv. Those Mets had Who the Hell’s on First, What the Hell’s on Second, You Don’t Want to Know at Third, and You Don’t Even Want To Think About It’s at shortstop. These Pirates barely fielded a cast of The Real Househusbands of Allegheny County. (That’s a joke, son. I think.)

These Pirates could accuse Giolito plausibly of bullying them. On Tuesday night, their lineup included nobody with an on-base percentage higher than .295. They have one .406 slugger (shortstop Erik Gonzalez, batting leadoff) and he has a .271 OBP. The collective OBP of Tuesday night’s Pirates was .234—fifty points lower than the 1965 Mets. (In due course you’ll see why I now mention that edition and not the 1962 comic opera—who actually had a team .329 OBP among non-pitchers.)

Come to think of it, said .406 slugger was the night’s only Pirates baserunner, reaching on a four-pitch walk to open the top of the fourth, right after James McCann’s sacrifice fly provided what proved the final 4-0 score. His reward for that walk was a first-pitch pop out behind the infield, a four-pitch strikeout, and an 0-2 line out to third base.

These Pirates strike fear in the hearts of nobody except their own fans watching on television and the cardboard cutouts that bother showing up this year. And maybe their own manager. What should have been shocking would have been if Giolito didn’t no-hit them.

“2020 has been a very strange year,” Giolito told reporters after the game from behind his mark. “Obviously a lot of weird stuff going on with COVID and the state of the world, so may as well throw this in the mix.” It’s baseball’s first-ever no-hit, no-run, no-fans-in-the-stands game.

“After the seventh, six more outs, looking at who I was facing, became very, very, very possible, and then we were able to get it done,” Giolito said. “Just staying with the same, like, mental routine for every single pitch. One pitch at a time. Full focus, full execution, straight through the target.”

It couldn’t have hurt that these Pirate targets were big enough that Dr. Anthony Fauci could have no-hit them if he’d thrown from halfway between the pitching rubber and the front of the plate.

For the longest time I thought the no-hitter Cincinnati Reds pitcher Jim Maloney threw at the Chicago Cubs one fine afternoon in Wrigley Field in 1965 was the single most ridiculous no-no I’d ever see or know. And that was a little more than half a month before Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax made those Cubs prove that practise makes perfect.

Until shoulder issues kicked into overdrive for him, Maloney might have been a genuinely great pitcher—but on 19 August 1965, Maloney did everything in his power to give the Cubs a break (those Cubs’ OBP, non-pitchers: .318)—and his Reds did everything in their power to get Cubs pitcher Larry Jackson on and off the hook.

Maloney’s good news: He struck out twelve in ten innings. His bad news: He walked ten. Jackson scattered nine Reds hits but a) only one of the nine came with a baserunner aboard (Vada Pinson, in the top of the ninth); and, b) the only one that mattered was Leo Cardenas hitting one into the left field bleachers with one out in the top of the tenth.

Then Maloney opened the bottom by walking Doug Clemens before getting rid of two Hall of Famers, Billy Williams and Ernie Banks, on a fly out to left and an Area Code 6-4-3. At least that time Maloney nailed the extra-inning no-no. Two months earlier, he lost one to the Mets when Johnny Lewis opened the top of the eleventh with a shot over the center field wall, and Mets reliever Larry Bernearth held fort in the bottom for the 1-0 Mets win.

Giolito is a pitcher who went from nothing special (5.68 fielding-independent pitching in his first three major league seasons) to a very good pitcher (3.29 FIP since last season opened) with outsize potential if he stays healthy. Unlike Maloney against the ’65 Cubs, Giolito wasn’t his own worst enemy Tuesday night, and he faced an aggregation who made those Cubs and the same season’s Mets resemble Murderer’s Row.

During the second inning, the power in Guaranteed Rate Field went out for a moment, a very brief moment. The power of the Pirates was already out to stay.

The suddenly Luddite Hall of Fame

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Allen’s Hall candidacy waits an extra year since the Hall won’t Zoom.

Dick Allen used to hit home runs that zoomed into earth orbit. Thanks to the Hall of Fame’s unexpected allergy to Zooming, Allen’s and others’ Cooperstown candidacies will have to wait another year.

Among other changes fun and dubious the pandemic has imposed upon baseball, two Era Committees—the Golden Era Committee on which Allen would now be a candidate, and the Early Baseball Era Committee—now won’t meet until winter 2021, with those they elect if any inducted in 2022.

It seems the old fogies who think baseball is headed into an abyss with newfangled analytics aren’t the only ones who think technology and the old ball game are a match made in hell. Hall of Fame chairman Jane Forbes Clark seems to think, erroneously, that technology mustn’t overcome the coronavirus’s travel confusions and constrictions to compromise Era Committee nominations and elections:

With the nation’s safety concerns, the travel restrictions and the limitations on group gatherings in effect for many regions, it is not possible to ensure that we can safely and effectively hold these committee meetings. The Era Committee process, which has been so effective in evaluating Hall of Fame candidates, requires an open, yet confidential conversation and an in-person dialogue involving the members of the 16-person voting committee.

Is Clark telling us that members of the Era Committees or the Baseball Writers Association of America (who determine their candidacies) can’t Zoom what numerous schools and non-retail businesses have arranged, managed, and zoomed since the coronavirus world tour kicked into overdrive in earnest a few months ago?

It really is so simple a child of five can do it. (Sorry, Groucho.) Lots of children of five in kindergartens are doing it.

When the Today’s Game Committee elected Harold Baines to the Hall of Fame so controversially two years ago, the committee members included Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa, a man who is about as allergic to high technology as Donald Trump is to self-congratulation. And, Dave Dombrowski, last seen as the Boston Red Sox’s general manager until late last season.

Surely Clark and the Luddites among Hall governors don’t think a manager who helped introduce the computer to baseball thinking and strategising would have run home to Mommy at the idea of Zooming about Hall candidates? Or, a general manager who last worked for a team 20,000 leagues deep into analytics that require computers as much as other tools?

Technology isn’t always a gift, of course. There probably isn’t a baseball jury on earth that would say artificial turf was a baseball blessing. But if Clark thinks confidentiality would be compromised by a Zoom remote conference call, what does she think when, almost invariably, certain Hall of Fame doings and undoings get leaked to the working press routinely enough?

Fair disclosure: I have a little skin in this game. I’ve championed Dick Allen for the Hall of Fame for quite awhile now, after once being skeptical about it myself. (I’d also like to see elected his great contemporary Tony Oliva plus Minnie Minoso, both of whom deserve the honour.) But a long time reviewing the record as it was and remains convinced me that Allen belongs in Cooperstown.

I’m convinced with no further questions asked that his Hall case was compromised way less by the racism against which he waged war in Philadelphia than by a series of injuries he was sometimes foolish enough to try playing through, and that those injuries kept him (as Rob Neyer and others have observed) from posting better late-career numbers that might have solidified his Hall case.

Jay Jaffe, in The Cooperstown Casebook, says it better in prose than I could (and did) say it:

[C]hoosing to vote for him means focusing on that considerable peak while giving him the benefit of the doubt on the factors that shortened his career. From here, the litany is sizable enough to justify that. Allen did nothing to deserve the racism and hatred he battled in Little Rock and Philadelphia, or the condescension of the lily-white media that refused to even call him by his correct name. To underplay the extent to which those forces shaped his conduct and his public persona thereafter is to hold him to an impossibly high standard; not everyone can be Jackie Robinson or Ernie Banks. The distortions that influenced the negative views of him . . . were damaging. To give them the upper hand is to reject honest inquiry into his career.

 

I can and did say it statistically, too. I determined on my own that if Dick Allen had been allowed fifteen completely healthy seasons and a normal late-career, uncompromised decline phase, he might have finished his career with as many as 525 lifetime home runs instead of the 351 he did hit. (Oliva wasn’t Allen’s kind of power threat but the same healthy fifteen seasons and uncompromised decline phase might have left him with 315 lifetime homers.)

According to my Real Batting Average metric—which I’ve since modified to disallow sacrifice bunts (sorry, but intentional outs don’t and shouldn’t count) but retain sacrifice flies; and, which allows the complete look at a player that traditional batting average (treating all hits equal and factoring only “official” at-bats) denies—this is Dick Allen in his absolute nine-season peak period, and bear in mind that he missed an average twenty games per season in that period because of injuries:

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Dick Allen, 1964-1972 5,457 2,592 685 120 33 11 .631

Forty-one percent of Allen’s hits went for extra bases, too, and they weren’t all those orbital belts that once inspired Hall of Famer Willie Stargell to suggest one reason Allen was booed by the notorious Philadelphia boo-birds (Those people would boo at a funeral—Bo Belinsky, briefly a Phillie) was that his home runs traveled too far to become souvenirs.

“What I’ve done, I’m pretty happy with it,” Allen told his biographer/Phillies historiographer William C. Kashatus once. “So whatever happens with the Hall of Fame, I’m fine with. Besides, I’m just a name. God gave me the talent to hit a baseball, and I used it the best I could. I just thank Him for blessing me with that ability and allowing me to play the game when I did.”

Whatever happens with the Hall of Fame, Allen, Oliva, Minoso, and others covered by the Golden Days and Early Baseball Era Committees, the Hall that includes members who were elected on behalf of being innovators (Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck) or pioneers (Albert Spalding, Barney Dreyfuss) is suddenly allergic to a little pioneering.

This just in: Jack Clark is . . . still alive.

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Thirty-five years after he killed the Dodgers, Jack Clark was reported dead—falsely.

At this writing, Thom Brennaman’s final fate isn’t known. Though Fox Sports suspended him from its team of National Football League announcers, and the Cincnnati Reds suspended him from their broadcast team, neither have determined his final outcome just yet.

But when Brennaman’s observation of “one of the great f@g capitals” went over the air thanks to a microphone he didn’t know was hot and live, it wasn’t the first time Brennaman’s mouth surrounded his foot this year.

In late July, Brennaman was calling a game between the Reds and the Detroit Tigers when he said long-retired major league slugger Jack Clark went from retired to expired. “He just passed away recently, right?” said Brennaman in the middle of an anecdote. “I thought I read that.”

It wasn’t long before Brennaman was corrected about the former San Francisco/St. Louis/New York/San Diego/Boston bombardier and compelled to apologise on the air: “[I’m] so glad that’s not the case.”

Jack the Ripper is many things at 64. Not all of them have been edifying, but more of them than you may have thought have been admirable. Brennaman’s mistake to one side, there have been times in Clark’s life all the way back to his harsh childhood when thoughts of imminent demise might have seemed sweet relief.

I’m brought to these thoughts thanks inadvertently to The Athletic‘s Joe Posnanski’s entry this morning on Jose Bautista’s 2015 American League Championship Series bat flip, in Posnanski’s series on baseball’s greatest moments. Not because Posnanski mentioned Clark (he didn’t), but because a reader did.

“Greatly admire Bautista’s handiwork . . .But I think I prefer understatement because I still think Clark’s 3 run homer against the Dodgers followed by the dismissive bat flip is the height of cool,” the reader wrote among the comments. “Then Pedro heaving his glove into the ground in disgust just finishes the moment.”

The reference is to the top of the ninth in Game Six, 1985 National League Championship Series. With Willie McGee on third, Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith on second, the Los Angeles Dodgers standing one out from forcing Game Seven, Dodgers relief pitcher Tom Niedenfuer on the mound, Clark checking in at the plate, and Dodger Stadium making a racket audible as far away as Las Vegas.

If Posnanski’s reader meant “Pedro” to mean Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, he should know that—when the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda decided for whatever reason that Niedenfuer pitching to Clark with first base open and the pennant on the line was safer than a baby in a crib—Martinez was a fourteen-year-old Dominican Republic lad, looking up to older brother Ramon after their parents divorced a year earlier.

Niedenfuer had a splendid 1985 entering that postseason, with a shining 2.71 ERA and a glittering 2.21 fielding-independent pitching rate in 106.1 relief innings. He’d surrendered the Game Six tying run relieving Orel Hershiser in the seventh, but he escaped further damage with a free pass followed by back-to-back swinging strikeouts and then a spotless eighth.

With the Dodgers now leading 5-4 after Mike Marshall’s leadoff bomb in the bottom of the eighth, Niedenfuer opened the ninth by striking Cesar Cedeno out. But McGee singled and stole second, Smith walked, and Tommy Herr’s ground out to first pushed Smith to second and McGee to third. Now came Clark. With first base open.

“I can understand it,” Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt told Sports Illustrated for a 1987 profile of Clark. “Maybe Tommy Lasorda tells Niedenfuer to pitch around Jack, not give him anything good to hit. But pitchers can feel they are better, too, just like hitters can. So he tries to throw it by Jack and . . . ”

Niedenfuer opened by throwing Clark a fastball. The husky righthander’s curtain was dropped immediately, when Jack the Ripper blasted it two-thirds of the way up the left field bleachers. Then, after Niedenfuer ended the inning by getting Andy Van Slyke to fly out, Cardinals reliever Ken Dayley rung up two prompt strikeouts and then a fly out to drop the curtain on the Dodgers’ season.

“Get Jack out and nothing’s ever said about it,” Schmidt told SI, perhaps knowing even then that what proved that pennant-winning blast would define both the hapless Niedenfuer and the bristling Clark for maybe the rest of their lives. “But pitch to him with first base open and get burned, and a manager gets second-guessed to his grave.”

“Lasorda wept in the clubhouse, went to players to apologize, then went on with his life,” wrote Thomas Boswell in 1989. “At the moment he manages the reigning world champions. Maybe Lasorda coped so well because he’d already gone to three Series and won one.”

The only thing Niedenfuer did after Clark blew his fastball to smithereens was stand on the mound looking as though he’d come home one day to see what was left after his house burned to the ground.

Clark’s playing career was pockmarked by too many injuries, and too many battles with front offices and even managers, to match his Hall of Fame talent to a Hall of Fame career. When he slumped, he often couldn’t sleep or eat and blamed himself for losses even if he’d had nothing to do with causing them directly.

He was raised with a kind of brutal indifference by a hard-working but embittered father whose harshness stained him deeper than his mother’s “soft and flowing like whipped cream” opposite. When he connected, it often seemed as though he hoped he’d drive it right down the old man’s throat, if not through his head. As a major leaguer, Clark often preferred the company of “the workaday players” to his fellow team stars. As a parent himself, he gave his own children the time, fun, and love his own father didn’t.

“This is the house that Jack built,” Rick Reilly wrote opening a 1991 SI profile. “This is 6,000 square feet of games and toys and affection that Jack Clark made for his four kids, not at all like the house he grew up in, not at all like the silent one his own father made.”

Jack the Ripper was so bent on giving his children the childhoods denied him that he was accused falsely of refusing to fly with his teams on road trips. It turned out that what he really did was fly home on team off days to spend extra time with his family, then fly back to meet the team at their next road stop.

Clark found childhood sanctuary in two passions, baseball and cars. “Clark’s friends were the low-riders, the gang members, the greasers with their customized rods and tiny front wheels,” Reilly recorded. He was also generous to a fault, whether handing a high school teammate he hadn’t seen in years $500 on the spot, or buying a Cardinals clubhouse attendant a Mercedes-Benz after leaving the Cardinals as a free agent.

As an adult, Clark’s ability to send a baseball cross country made him a fortune. But the cars he loved—including eighteen vehicles several of which were fully-restored vintages, and a drag racing team that never really succeeded—cost him that fortune.

Once in the 1980s Clark had to sue to recover some of the money out of which he and other players were swindled by a shady investor. In 1992, the bankruptcy to which he was driven by all those cars and especially his failing drag racing team exploded into embarrassing headlines. It also exploded into a harsh divorce from his first wife, Tammy.

Reconciled to his father in due course after all those decades, and remarried happily enough, Clark went to bankruptcy court a second time, in 2018, not because he hadn’t learned the first time around—the debt this time wasn’t even close to the 1992 collapse—but because medical expenses for himself and his second wife, Angela, sent them there.

The man whose glandular home runs inspired his Giants teammate Vida Blue to nickname him Jack the Ripper in the first place has been through too much, much inflicted upon him, much self-inflicted.

He needed Thom Brennaman pronouncing him dead, a month before Brennaman committed possible career suicide over pronouncing upon “the great f@g capitals,” about as much as Tommy Lasorda needed to let him swing with first base open and a pennant on the line.

Salami on special at the Slam Diego Deli

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Rookie Jake Cronenworth joined the Padres’ grand slam parade Saturday.

A spectre may be haunting major league baseball—the spectre of San Diego. The Padres, usually renowned for a checkered history, lots of ugly uniforms, a handsome ballpark where hitters usually go to die, and a seeming genius for watching as many as three top-of-the-line players depart for every one or two they could find. Rudely interrupted by a couple of pennants.

That was then and this is now: The Padres now wear uniforms that are passable, if unlikely to put them on the best-dressed men’s lists. They make the right headlines in the press and hash in the National League West and elsewhere. They also make hash out of the National League leader board, where you’ll find them as of this morning at the top for total bases, stolen bases, walks, slugging, OPS, and home runs.

Previous generations of baseball’s big bopping teams have earned colourful nicknames: The Bronx Bombers, the Pittsburgh Lumber Company, Harvey’s Wallbangers. To those add now Slam Diego. These Poundres don’t just hit home runs, they hit conversation pieces. Especially with the bases loaded. The Slam Diego Deli is the Show’s first to grind salami on special in four consecutive games.

When rookie shortstop Jake Cronenworth saw and raised center fielder Trent Grisham’s three homers in a Saturday burial of the Houston Astros by slamming Astros reliever Humberto Castellanos, it was the fifth San Diego slam in six games while they were at it.

The 13-2 win was also the Padres’s sixth straight win overall and raised their record in interleague play to 6-0 so far. These are not your grandfather’s, your father’s, or even your big brother’s Friar Ducks. Sitting, that is.There’s nothing like a not-so-little beatdown laid upon last year’s American League pennant winner to redeem a five-game losing streak that ended when the Poundres flattened the Texas Rangers 14-4 last Monday.

That just so happened to be the same game in which the Slam Diegans’s gigastar-in-the-making, Fernando Tatis, Jr., provoked this year’s first major debate over the Sacred Unwritten Rules—when he faced Juan Nicasio in the top of the eighth, with the bases loaded, one out, a 3-0 count, and a 10-3 Padres lead in Globe Life Hangar, and hit something too meaty to resist over the right field fence.

Baseball’s boring old farts screamed about Tatis’s lack of manners. Rangers manager Chris Woodward, who harrumphed after the game about how offensive Tatis was for daring to swing 3-0 late in the middle of a blowout, lifted Nicasio for Ian Gibaut, who threw right behind Manny Machado’s rump roast immediately to follow.

The problem was that, this time, most of baseball applauded Tatis and decided the SURs a) were patent nonsense and b) don’t cover when a hitter as good as Tatis is fed something Ray Charles could have hit for distance. Apparently, so did Commissioner Nero, suspending Gibaut three games.

The further problem, once Padres manager Jayce Tingler got over his own dismay at Tatis violating the SURs, is that the whole hoo-ha just put rocket fuel into the Padres at the plate. The following night, they could only muster a 6-4 win over the Rangers but Wil Myers joined the deli crew in the top of the first, with the bases loaded and two out, clearing the left center field fence and staking the Pads to an immediate 4-0 lead.

The night after that, back in Petco Park, the Padres and the Rangers wrestled to a tenth inning ted at two. After the Rangers snuck an unearned run home in the top of the tenth, Machado checked in with the bases loaded on the free cookie at second to start their bottom of the tenth, a dubious-enough sacrifice bunt (sorry, I still say you don’t give outs to the other guys, especially with a man in scoring position gifted you), and back-to-back walks.

Machado re-opened the Slam Diego Deli by hitting a full-count meatball over the left center field fence. The night after that, Eric Hosmer checked in with one out, the Padres in the hole 2-1, and the pads padded on two base hits and a walk. Hosmer nailed Rangers starter Kyle Gibson with a drive down the right field line and into the seats. The Padres needed every morsel of that salami even more this time; they had to build and then hold on for the 8-7 win.

When they beat the Astros 4-3 Friday night, there may have been some wags thinking the Padres were on the threshold of disaster. The deli stayed closed. The Padres didn’t even load the bases once against five Astros pitchers. Don’t tell us the magic was gone before we really had a fair shot at it sinking in at maximum depth.

Thank God for Cronenworth. Be so [fornicating] glad the Poundres have Cronenworth. In the bottom of a second inning that began with a 2-1 lead and already added five runs on a leadoff bomb (Myers), a three-run homer (Grisham), and an RBI single (Ty France), Cronenworth tore into a Castellanos fastball on 3-1 and tore it over the right field fence.

“It’s somebody different every single night stepping up,” Cronenworth said after the Saturday night massacre. “Grish has three home runs tonight, Manny hit a home run tonight, Wil [Myers] hit a home run tonight, [starting pitcher] Zach Davies had an incredible outing. It started with him shutting their offense down and getting us back in the dugout as quick as possible.”

Don’t ask about his turn behind the San Diego Deli counter, though. The bad news is that the kid has the boilerplate mastered: “Put a good swing on a good pitch. Just keep my approach up the middle. Just happened to put a good swing on it.” Thank you, Friar Obvious.

Institutionally, the Padres have a few reasons to thank the Astros. It was the Astros who got them into San Diego in the first place, after that lovely city by the harbour and the Pacific hosted the Pacific Coast League Padres for generations. (Including a local kid named Ted Williams playing his minor league ball there, in the era when the PCL was the a major league in everything but name.)

The National League’s second expansion intended for Montreal and Dallas to have new teams. The Astros’s founding owner, Judge Roy Hofheinz, banged a gavel and said, “Not so fast, buster.” Hofheinz would rather have blown the Astrodome to smithereens than sanctioned a rival team playing a hop, skip, and bronco-busting bull’s jump up the road from (as then-Yankee first baseman Joe Pepitone called it) the world’s biggest hair dryer.

So the National League’s lords relented and, with no little help from Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley—who needed a place to dump his general manager Buzzie Bavasi, when O’Malley son and heir Peter was ready to graduate to the Dodgers’ front office—what was meant for Dallas ended up by the southern California seas.

Once upon a time, another Padres owner, Ray Kroc (McDonald’s mastermind and magnate), took to his own public address system to commiserate with fans over “the stupidest baseball playing I’ve ever seen.” Who the hell needs a Big Mac when you’re running the National League’s least-expected delicatessen lately?