Aw, jeez, not this [spit] again . . .

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Tell me why Tatis swinging on 3-0 late innings in a blowout at all—never mind for salami—is wrong, but throwing him something hittable on 3-0 late in a blowout isn’t.

You’d think a major league baseball team might have more important things to worry about these days. But no. The Texas Rangers didn’t like San Diego Padres superstar-in-the-making Fernando Tatis, Jr. hitting a grand slam in the top of the eighth Monday. On 3-0. With the Padres already leading 10-3.

Just to be certain there could be no doubt whatsoever how little to their taste was Tatis’s blast the other way, Rangers reliever Ian Gibaut threw one right past Manny Machado’s rump roast. The good news, if you can call it that, is that at least Gibaut didn’t aim for Machado’s dome.

That may have been the only good news of that entire little comedy that was about as funny as a beach club in Antarctica. Yes, children, thanks to Tatis and the Rangers we’re back to the Sacred Unwritten Rules yet again. Just when you thought the pandemic and baseball’s extraterrestrial ups and downs playing through it might have given us more grave thoughts to think.

“I think there’s a lot of unwritten rules that are constantly being challenged in today’s game,” said Rangers manager Chris Woodward to reporters, after the Padres finished what they started, a 14-4 blowout in which the Rangers mustered only four runs on four hits against four San Diego pitchers.

Apparently, four isn’t the Rangers’ lucky number this year. So far.

“Yeah, I didn’t like it, personally,” Woodward continued. “You’re up by seven in the eighth inning — it’s typically not a good time to swing 3-0. It’s kind of the way we were all raised in the game. But, like I said, the norms are being challenged on a daily basis, so just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not right. I don’t think we liked it as a group.”

The skinny after the game had it that Tatis may have missed a take sign. Tatis himself said he wasn’t liable to make that mistake again, having grown up with the game and learned the SURs good and well.

It almost doesn’t matter. Because if the Rangers are so P.O.ed that Tatis saw a fastball from Juan Nicasio just meaty enough to swing on and just so happened to send it into the fan cutouts in the right field seats, hitting one right in the chops, it beggars the question of how and why Nicasio threw the pitch and how and why the Rangers let the Padres bang ten runs home on ten hits in the first place.

It also beggars the question of whether the Rangers are current on baseball history. Teams have been known to make comebacks from seven runs or more in the deficit column. The Padres have been on both sides. Four years ago they lost a game they once led by ten. Last year, they won a game in which they were down seven at one point.

Andujar’s Law (Joaquin, that is): In baseball, there’s just one word—you never know. Somebody’s law (I know I’ve seen it before, but I can’t summon the source): In baseball, anything can happen—and usually does.

You let a hitter get into a 3-0 count with or without the bases loaded? That’s on you. You throw him something he can meet with the bat at all? That’s on you. You want to scream bloody murder because he didn’t thank you nice fellows by taking strike one and his medicine after you were already so generous as to let him and his take a seven-run lead on you going in? That’s on you, too.

Oh, yes. Tatis already embarrassed you an inning earlier, with two on and nobody out, when Jesse Chavez threw him a meatball down the pipe on 1-0 and he hit it over the left center field fence to make it 10-3 in the first place. There isn’t a jury on earth who’d say you were unjustified being humiliated like that.

But humiliation doesn’t justify letting a kid with a bat that live into a 3-0 count with one out and the bases loaded courtesy of a leadoff infield hit and a pair of walks. The Rangers should count themselves fortunate that the maximum home run anyone can hit is a grand salami.

I bet they wouldn’t have been half as furious if Tatis swung and missed, grounded into an inning-ending double play, or at worst whacked something into the shallow outfield for maybe one measly run, maybe two. That’d be merely embarrassing, not humiliating.

And I’d bet concurrently that maybe the sole reason the Rangers might have felt compelled to remind Tatis and the Padres about what to do and not to do on 3-0 in a blowout was because Nicasio, understandably, didn’t much like being taken for salami when he was already in with the task of keeping the Padres from adding insult to injury.

Tatis and the Padres might care to know they have a Hall of Fame ally. “So you take a pitch…now you’re 3-1,” tweeted Johnny Bench, eleven of whose lifetime 389 home runs were salamis. “Then the pitcher comes back with a great setup pitch…3-2. Now you’re ready to groundout into a double play. Everyone should hit 3-0. Grand Slams are a huge stat.”

A Cincinnati Reds pitcher of today, Trevor Bauer, whose tendency to shoot from the lip is often six parts wisdom and half a dozen parts wisenheimer, tweeted four words of advice to Tatis: “1) Keep swinging 3-0 if you want to, no matter what the game situation is 2) Keep hitting homers, no matter what the situation is 3) Keep bringing energy and flash to baseball and making it fun 4) The only thing you did wrong was apologize. Stop that.”

The apology to which Bauer referred, apparently, was Tatis telling reporters after the game, “I know a lot of unwritten rules. I was kind of lost on this. Those experiences, you have to learn. Probably next time, I’ll take a pitch.”

Don’t let that happen, kiddo. If they’re fool enough to throw you something to hit on 3-0 while you and yours have a fat lead, the SURs be damned. Don’t be so generous with their ignorance.

A terrible anniversary

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Carl Mays, demonstrating his submarine-style delivery. This was once the most famous photograph of him. (National Baseball Library.)

Tomorrow we ought to win pretty easily. I can’t hit this man Mays, but the rest of the team sure can.
—Ray Chapman, Cleveland Indians shortstop, 15 August 1920.

On 20 September 1920, New York Yankee pitcher Carl Mays was scheduled to appear in traffic court on a speeding charge levied three weeks earlier. Mays didn’t appear, but a Yankee secretary named Charles McManus did on his behalf, entering his guilty plea and paying his $25 fine.

Events three days earlier, and a hundred years ago today, compelled Mays to stay out of sight for what proved a full week: the death of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman, 29 years old, fifteen hours after a Mays pitch caught him in the head with a sickening crash leading off the top of the fifth in an overcast New York.

On the same day Mays was due in traffic court, a priest named the Rev. Dr. William A. Scullen presided over the Chapman funeral that crammed St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland and backed up traffic and crowds outside the church. After commemorating Chapman’s skill, character, and faith, all of which made him beloved in Cleveland and liked around baseball, Scullen turned his attention to the pitcher whose service felled him.

May there be no hostility in any heart to the man who was the unfortunate occasion of his accident. He feels it more deeply than you, and no one regrets it as much as he. This great game we play, that is our national pastime, could not produce anybody who would willingly do a thing like that. Remember those would be the words of him who lies here. Do not hold any animosity.

The priest may have been too late for his words to have any impact on Mays’s behalf. Mays wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity even before the tragedy. Even Chapman’s opponents testified to his sterling self. Even Mays’s teammates and managers often testified to his less-than-agreeable self.

The Indians weren’t the only team demanding a boycott of subsequent games in which Mays was scheduled to pitch. Yet their Hall of Fame player-manager Tris Speaker was the only member of the team not to sign a letter calling for such a boycott. Nothing could bring Chapman back, and Speaker wasn’t about join the chorus calling an accident murder.

A Kentucky-born, Missouri-raised son of a Methodist minister himself, Mays was known for a submarine-style delivery, an oft-remarked reputation for head-hunting on the mound, and a then-legal spitball at least as effective as the other pitches through which he lived mostly on ground balls.

A few years after the Chapman tragedy, Mays had so alienated Yankee manager Miller Huggins that Huggins used him sparingly until finally starting him against the Indians, of all people. On a day Mays didn’t have his best, the Indians jumped him for twenty hits, thirteen runs, and a 13-0 final. Asked why he wouldn’t change pitchers, Huggins didn’t flinch.

“He told me he needed lots of work,” the manager said, perhaps with a tiny sneer, “so I gave it to him.”

As likeable and respected as Chapman was, the shortstop was known concurrently for crowding the plate, which would have made him prone to a plunk even if a pitcher wasn’t trying to hit him. That didn’t stop only too many from stopping just short of calling for criminal charges against the suddenly hapless Mays.

One week after Chapman’s funeral, The Sporting News published an editorial that barely stopped short of calling Mays a murderer, while Mays continued to stay out of sight in the tragedy’s immediate aftermath:

Mays knows what all the world is saying. He can not dodge the finger of accusation by keeping himself from public view. Nor is it “hysteria,” as his defenders would charge, when critics everywhere remind us of frequent previous complaints against his style of pitching and recount the disputes it has caused on the ball field.

No one accuses Mays of a direct intent to injure any batter, living or dead, but there are few who do not feel that Mays took the chance and made the batter take the chance, and there are many who wag the head and say such a thing as has happened was bound to happen some day.

Mays stayed in seclusion for a week after the tragedy, while talk of boycotting games Mays was due to pitch crawled all around the Show. He talked only to a Manhattan prosecutor the day after Chapman died, according to both the Society for American Baseball Research and Mike Sowell’s The Pitch That Killed: The Story of Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920.

He thought at first that the pitch ricocheted off Chapman’s bat, fielding it properly and throwing to first for what he thought was an inning-opening out. Not quite. Chapman was down in a heap. The next day, a Yankee employee knocked on Mays’s apartment door. Sowell:

Ray Chapman. (National Baseball Library.)

Mark Roth, one of the ballclub’s secretaries, did not bother to identify himself.

“Carl, I’ve got some bad news for you. Ray Chapman died at five o’clock this morning.”

The words hit Mays like a sledgehammer. He stood there stunned, then slowly shut the door in Roth’s face.

The next few hours were a blur to Mays. He did not know how long he sat in his apartment in a daze. Finally, he was jarred back to reality by the ringing of the telephone. It was a police inspector, offering his sympathy and a police guard if Mays felt one was needed to ensure his privacy. Mays accepted.

Later that day, a Yankee attorney, Frederick Grant, escorted Mays to a police station where he met an assistant Manhattan district attorney identified only by the surname Joyce.

“It was a little too close, and I saw Chapman duck his head in an effort to get out of the path of the ball,” Mays told the A.D.A. “He was too late, however, and a second later he fell to the grounds. It was the most regrettable incident of my career, and I would give anything if I could undo what has happened.”

When Mays returned home, Sowell learned, his wife told him she received two threatening telephone calls, one of which threatened that her husband would be shot when next he drove his car across a viaduct on 155th Street in the Bronx. When he returned to action and beat the Detroit Tigers, the fury continued apace.

Set the Chapman tragedy to one side for a few moments. Mays’s pitching record includes that he led the American League with fourteen hit batsmen in 1917, when he pitched for the Boston Red Sox. He hit eleven and ten in each of the next two seasons. You’d be hard pressed to suggest that Mays hadn’t earned a head-hunting reputation on that record alone. Even in a time when baseball players weren’t exactly renowned for couth.

But Mays never again hit batters in double figures in any season, hitting as many as nine in a season only once, and that was the year after the Chapman tragedy, when he also led the Show with 27 wins. His final career total of hit batsmen was 89 in a fifteen-season major league career, and an average of seven per 162 games.

He isn’t even in the top 100 all-time drillers. (He’s tied at number 128.) Mays having committed the notorious hit batsman in Show history singles him out. (Two minor league players, Tom Burke and Johnny Dodge, died in 1906 and 1916, respectively, after being hit in the head by pitches. Those pitchers, Joe Yeager and Tom [Shotgun] Rogers, didn’t earn a fragment of Mays’s infamy.)

Mays wasn’t exactly an outlier among pitchers when he once said, “Any pitcher who permits a hitter to dig in on him is asking for trouble. I never deliberately tried to hit anyone in my life. I throw close just to keep the hitters loose up there.”

Chapman’s death shattered the Indians to a man—until it didn’t. Speaker swore the team would grind it out and win the pennant in his memory, the way they believed he wanted.

Abetted in no small part by the end collapse of the Chicago White Sox, when the Black Sox scandal graduated from rumour to explosive fact and eight White Sox were suspended by the team post haste, the Indians won the pennant and beat the Brooklyn Dodgers (then known as the Robins) in the World Series.

Absent Chapman’s death, Mays might have been remembered best as a tough pitcher who was lost for explaining why his personality rubbed enough people in baseball the wrong way. “When I first broke into baseball, I discovered that there seemed to be a feeling against me, even from the players on my own team,” he once said. “I always have wondered why I have encountered this antipathy from so many people wherever I have been. And I have never been able to explain it, even to myself.”

He didn’t always seem to think that questioning his managers’ intelligence or his teammates’ play behind him on rough days might have had a hand in it.

If you believe in karma’s bitchcraft, you should know that life after baseball wasn’t always kind to Mays. Sowell exhumed that he lost his life’s savings ($175,000) in the 1929 stock market crash and his wife to complications from an infection in 1934. That left him to raise his two children alone, until he met and married the former schoolteacher who came to him at first as his housekeeper.

But Mays also became a longtime baseball scout and teacher who mellowed as the years went by and who made a particular point of teaching his charges to play the game as safely as possible within reason.

The Chapman tragedy caused two major rules changes. Change one: the Show outlawed the spitball officially, while allowing pitchers already throwing the pitch (including Mays and, more famously, Hall of Famer Burleigh Grimes) to continue until their careers ended.

Change two: fresh, clean baseballs in play at all times. (Mays showed an umpire a scuff on the ball that hit Chapman as well as how wet the ball still might have been from light rain earlier that day, indicators that Chapman may not have picked up the flight of the ball until it was too late.)

Harry Lunte pinch-ran for Chapman played shortstop the rest of the game, which the Indians held on to win, 4-3. Then, a rookie named Joe Sewell, swearing to anyone who’d listen that he’d become the next Chapman, became the Indians’ regular shortstop—all the way to the Hall of Fame, after playing his final three seasons with the Yankees, of all people.

Mays had the credentials for the Hall of Fame when it was born in 1936, but he never made it. Not because of the Chapman tragedy, but—according to Sowell and numerous other researchers—because of suspicions never really proven that he’d tanked in the late innings of two 1921 World Series games didn’t dissipate easily. (Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis actually investigated, hiring detectives as part of it, and found the suspicions to be just that.)

It didn’t stop Mays from going to his grave believing in his heart of hearts that Ray Chapman was the number one reason he was kept out of Cooperstown. Mays was elected to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2009; that Hall notes among other things that not only did Mays stay close to his roots but often brought grosses of used major league baseballs home to give to local children.

Mays picked himself up, dusted himself off, started all over again, and finished his pitching career with a kind of stubborn courage that might have been lacking in another pitcher who might also have caused such a tragedy without malice aforethought.

Yet when he told San Diego sportswriting legend Jack Murphy the Chapman tragedy wasn’t “on my conscience, it wasn’t my fault,” the sense was that Mays said it not because he believed it in the depth of his heart of hearts but because, from the same depth, he still couldn’t bear that a sickening accident caused a death that marked him for life.

Chapman actually planned to retire after the 1920 season, having married before the season started, and having planned to enter his father-in-law’s business. He was buried in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery—four miles north of Calvary Cemetery, where his wife and daughter were buried eventually. A plaque in his memory now hangs on a wall in Progressive Field’s Heritage Park.

Mays finished raising his children before living an uncontroversial life to follow with his second wife, stubbornly continuing to hunt and fish despite age forcing him to walk with a cane due to arthritis and depriving him of some of his hearing.

Much as he loved his Missouri roots, Mays was buried next to his first wife in Portland, Oregon’s River View Cemetery. His headstone mentions not his baseball career but his military service in World War I. He once ran an Oregon baseball school whose students included a young Oregonian who became a Red Sox legend, shortstop/manager/coach Johnny Pesky.

Living well enough is usually the best revenge. But it’s also the next best thing to an absolution that’s only God’s to give when men and women can’t or won’t. That as well as the dozens of used Show baseballs and other kindnesses Mays gave children back home may help to brighten his memory. Even a little.

Ray Chapman didn’t deserve to die playing the game he loved. Carl Mays, who loved the game likewise, didn’t deserve to be stricken with the next worst thing to the mark of Cain for a terrible accident.

The upstarts of West Camden Street?

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Whichever era’s gear you like, it looks safe to be an Oriole fan again. So far. All things considered.

I’m not seeing things, really, I keep telling myself. So do most of you who aren’t part of the fan base. So, probably, do most of those whose allegiance—in cardboard cutouts this pandemic season, unfortunately—anchors at 333 West Camden Street in Baltimore.

Where the Orioles have suddenly re-graduated themselves from birds of prey, as in prey for the other guys, to the American League East’s second-best record behind the beasts of the south Bronx and fourth-best record in the entire league.

Entering Sunday the Orioles had the fourth-most runs per game (5.35), the sixth-best team on-base percentage (.334), the second-best team slugging percentage (.466), the second-best team OPS (.800), the second-highest total bases (320), and the sixth-lowest team number of hitters banging into double plays (10) . . . in the entire Show.

So far.

They didn’t do it against their fellow presumed cream puffs, either. They’ve beaten the world champion Washington Nationals four out of five times, and the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays both three out of three.

They’re also one of the Show’s most prolific road shows, too, even in this coronavirus-nourished Quiet, Please! Alfred Hitchcock Presents Dimension X Minus One Fella’s Family of a season—nine road games, eight wins.

They’ve even had a six-game winning streak and they’ve won seven out of eight, including those four wins dropped on the Nats pending today’s skirmish in Camden Yards.

All that despite their pitching being near the bottom third of the league’s team ERA pack and near it in team pitching strikeouts while being just about dead center for surrendering the big flies.

It’s enough to make even generic baseball collectors reach for their Oriole hats of any era, plop them atop their heads almost daily, and wonder what strange new feats of derring-do await from a team who’d turned too profoundly into the AL East’s feats of derring-don’t even think about it.

Maybe the only more surprising ensembles in the Show right now are the Miami Marlins, who didn’t let a little thing such as practically the entire team waylaid by COVID-19 positives stop them from remaking/remodeling on the fly and entering Sunday afternoon with the number five winning percentage.

Most fish get the ick and croak. These Fish either got or laid dormant the coronavirus, lost what seemed like half their first-third of the season . . . and went from the guppies of the National League East to its barracudas. Just pray that they don’t begin behaving like real barracuda and start eating their young. Oops. Maybe the Marlins already did that—their average age is 29.4.

Come to think of it, the Marlins won nine games so far entering Sunday, and four of them came against . . . the Orioles. With this season’s cockamamie-looking playoff plan, it may not be thinking two thousand light years from home to imagine these Birds of Prey against those Flying Fish. It might be jarring, it might seem to threaten the natural order of things, but it may not be all that surreal.

So what went on in Camden Yards on Sunday afternoon? A little comic relief from Nats manager Dave Martinez, for openers, objecting to a pitch call with an extremely emphatic Horse[spit]! Horse [fornicating] [spit]! Didya hear me? in the bottom of the second. (O Vin Scully, where is thy sting?)

Let’s see . . . an RBI single, a sacrifice fly, and another RBI single put the Nats up 3-0 in the top of the first. Oriole right fielder Anthony Satlander got one back in the bottom, off Max Scherzer, with a one-out blast into the right field bleachers. A sacrifice fly and another RBI single made it 5-1, Nats in the top of the fifth.

Orioles catcher Pedro Severino said, “That’s what you think,” with two aboard in the bottom of the sixth, catching hold of a Scherzer fastball practically down the chute and sending it over the left field fence. An inning later, Satlander found the screws on Scherzer’s two-out, 2-1 repeat changeup and repeated what he did in the first, to practically the same section of unoccupied real estate.

Tied at five. If the Orioles are really playing over their own heads, they weren’t going to let even Mad Max take them without a fight.

Oops. With two out and Juan Soto on second in the top of the eighth, Oriole third baseman Rio Ruiz threw Kurt Suzuki’s should-have-been inning-ending grounder wild enough to let Soto score and Suzuki have first and then second on the house.

That was no time for surprise generosity, Orioles. Unless it wasn’t that much of a surprise. The Orioles entered Sunday fifth in the American League with fourteen errors. Well, nobody’s perfect, and the Orioles are still trying to get used to winning again, however surrealistic the truncated season.

Heavy sighs of relief, mostly from the Oriole dugout, unless someone figured out a way to send the canned crowd sounds through any cutouts in the park. Oriole reliever Paul Fry got Nats pinch-hitter Eric Thames to pop out to shortstop Jose Iglesias for the side. Staying within one run was child’s play.

Wsn’t it?

It wasn’t. Not when Nats reliever Tanner Rainey struck out the side after opening the Oriole eighth by plunking designated hitter Renato Nunez and World Series finisher Daniel Hudson struck out two after opening the Oriole ninth with a ground ball out. Even upstarts like these Orioles can’t have everything yet, can they?

Horse [spit] Horse [fornicating] [spit]! Didya hear me?

Plesac: The press made the media do it.

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Zach Plesac, future politician.

Once upon a time, the late William Safire—New York Times columnist and language maven (his even more famous “On Language” essays)—drew the line. “When you like us, we’re the press. When you hate us, we’re the media.”

Well, the press reported Cleveland Indians pitchers Zach Plesac and Mike Clevinger violated the team’s and the Show’s coronavirus health and safety protocols, so Plesac at least hates the media.

He must be bucking for a future in politics. He already has down pat the politician’s go-to excuse when caught with his or her hands in the proverbial cookie jar: The devil press made the devil media do it.

Name the scandal. Teapot Dome? The Profumo affair? Vietnam? The sad Thomas Eagleton affair? Watergate? The botched Iran hostage rescue mission? Abscam? Iran-Contra? Monkey Business? Whitewater? Crimes covering up extracurricular White House nookie? The Iraq war? Abu-Ghraib? Hurricane Katrina? The IRS singling out and targeting conservative groups? Benghazi? Continuing (four administrations and counting) executive order abuse? Two presidential impeachments in three decades?

It wasn’t the perps’ fault. The presidents who abetted, helped cover up, tried to help cover up, or at least approved such malfeasances? (Or, in George McGovern’s case, throwing the hapless Eagleton under the proverbial bus instead of standing by his man.) It wasn’t their fault, either. The presidents who faced impeachment but ducked removal when two Senates refused to try them seriously? Not their fault, either. It was the press’s fault, because the media exposed, investigated, and embarrassed the political (lack of) class.

You didn’t get the memo? Did you get the one reminding you that “fake news” (the catch phrase is Donald Trump’s, but the concept is almost as old as journalism itself) is the news the newsmaker doesn’t want you to know and you don’t really want to hear?

The Indians finally sent Plesac and Clevinger to their alternate site in Eastlake, Ohio, after a team meeting Friday morning at the Birmingham, Michigan site where they stay when playing the Detroit Tigers in the Tigers’ house. The two pitchers were in the cauldron for a night out in Chicago last weekend, involving a restaurant dinner and a card game at a friend’s home.

On the surface, a night out to dinner and playing cards with friends isn’t exactly the scandal to end all scandals. But the Indians, like most major league teams, take the coronavirus seriously enough to impose rules including that nobody can leave the team hotel without the team clearance Plesac and Clevinger failed to get.

The Indians sent Plesac back to Cleveland in a privately-hired car. They had no clue Clevinger was involved until after the pitcher flew back from Chicago with the team. The unamused Tribe compelled each man to issue a team-authored statement. It might have stayed calm and collected otherwise if Plesac hadn’t gone to his Instagram account and schpritzed.

Plesac got the aforementioned memo. He created a video message filmed in his own moving car. Oh, sure, he owned up to violating the protocols, but by God it wasn’t so much his fault for violating them but the media’s fault for having discovered and reported them.

“The media is really terrible, man. The media is terrible,” he fumed. “They do some evil things to create stories and make things sound better, make things sound worse. Truthfully, I’m disgusted the way the media has handled the whole situation surrounding our team.”

Tell us more, Mr. Plesac. If you’ll pardon the expression, inquiring minds—including this long-enough-time member of the working press in the media—want to know. (Yes, Virginia, I’ve been a small city/regional daily newspaper reporter, a regional daily news radio reporter and anchor, and a trade/Internet journalist since almost the birth of the online journalism era. I’m not just another blogger-come-lately.)

We’d like to know if several 1919 Chicago White Sox tanked a World Series because the press made them do it or the media was going to blow the lid off the whole thing in due course.

We’d like to know if The Giants stole the pennant! The Giants stole the pennant! because the press handed Leo Durocher reserve infielder Hank Schenz’s Wollensak spy glass or the media sent it with coach Herman Franks to the Polo Grounds clubhouse above center field to steal opposition signs for the stretch drive comeback that forced the famed pennant playoff.

We’d like to know whether the rest of the press other than the Cincinnati Enquirer aided and abetted the 1957 All-Star ballot-box stuffing scandal on behalf of the Reds, or whether the media compelled commissioner Ford Frick to yank the All-Star starting lineup voting out of the fans hands, where it didn’t return for almost a decade and a half.

We’d like to know whether the press sent Pete Rose’s gambling habit across the line to betting on baseball, or whether the media sent him across that line to bet on his own teams and bet himself right out of the game and out of Hall of Fame consideration.

(We’d like to know what you think about the press covering up the first whiffs of Rose’s gambling or the media unable and maybe unwilling to nudge then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn into the investigation he wouldn’t sanction but which came almost a decade after his exit.)

We’d like to know whether the press poured actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances into baseball or the media handed those players the pipelines to the stuff.

(Well, ok. You have us there. Sort of. Thomas Boswell was prepared to expose Jose Canseco as a juicer decades before Canseco wrote his inconsistent tell-alls, but the press didn’t really want to know until the late Ken Caminiti took it to the media, specifically to Sports Illustrated.)

We’d like to know whether the press compelled Aroldis Chapman, Jose Reyes, Hector Olivera, Jeurys Familia, Derek Norris, and Steven Wright to domestic violence scandal and suspension, or whether the media compelled Jose Torres, Roberto Osuna, Addison Russell, Odubel Herrera, Julio Urias, and Domingo German to likewise.

We’d like to know whether the press cooked up the Astro Intelligence Agency and the Rogue Sox Replay Room Reconnaissance Ring or whether the media encouraged them to graduate from theory to real cheating.

We’d like to know whether the COVID-19 outbreaks that waylaid the Miami Marlins and the St. Louis Cardinals came from a couple of players being not so smart going for nights on the town or from the press insisting that the media raise enough of a hoopla that it damn near ended this coronavirus-truncated season described in best shorthand as Alfred Hitchcock Presents the Outer Limits of the Twilight Zone.

We’d like to know whether fellow Indians pitcher Adam Plutko spoke of his own free mind when he fumed, over whether Plesac and Clevinger could re-earn their teammates’ trust, “They lied to us. They sat here and publicly said things that they didn’t follow through on. Those grown-ass men can sit here and tell you guys what happened and tell you guys what they’re gonna do to fix it. I don’t need to do that for them.”

And, whether the Indians’ all-but-franchise-face, Francisco Lindor, said of his own free mind, “We have to sit and look ourselves in the mirror. And it’s not about the person we see in the mirror. It’s who’s behind you. It’s not about that one person. It’s about everybody around you.”

Or did the devil press make the devil media make them say it?

“They [screwed] it up twice”

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Former Houston Astros manager A.J. Hinch and bench coach Alex Cora. Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher Joe Kelly fumes that Astro players tainted Hinch’s and Cora’s names to save their own.

With everything else buffeting major league baseball before delayed “summer camp” and the truncated season, it was easy enough to miss. But Alex Cora—considered an Astro Intelligence Agency co-mastermind and unproven shepherd of the Red Sox Replay Room Reconnaissance Ring—spoke out in June.

And Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly, one of Cora’s Red Sox charges during their run to the World Series title in 2018, spoke up likewise in a podcast by Dodger teammate Ross Stripling days before his suspension—for throwing at Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa, the latter drawing Astros and Dodgers alike out of dugouts in social-distance violation—was cut from eight to five games.

Between them comes an alteration of the former Astrogate narrative, and it’s not likely to mitigate the AIA stain on the 2017 world champions. If anything, it’s liable to make the stain deeper. Upon the 2017-18 Astros’ players and upon commissioner Rob Manfred, who handed those players blanket immunity in return for spilling about the AIA’s off-field-based, electronic pitch sign espionage.

“The people who took the fall for what happened is nonsense. Yes, everyone is involved,” said Kelly aboard Stripling’s podcast.

But the way [the AIA] was run over there was not from coaching staff . . . They’re not the head boss in charge of that thing. It’s the players. So now the players get the immunity, and all they do is go snitch like a little bitch, and they don’t have to get fined, they don’t have to lose games.

Kelly’s remarks hark among others to Cora telling ESPN writer Marly Rivera in early June that he didn’t object to shouldering his own responsibility for the 2017 Astros’ chicaneries, having been their bench coach before becoming the Red Sox’s manager, but also wanting one and all to know that neither himself nor 2017 Astros designated hitter Carlos Beltran were the sole drivers.

When Manfred dropped his Astrogate hammer earlier this year, he fined owner Jim Crane the maximum-allowable $5 million, virtual tip money. He suspended general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for all 2020. Crane fired the pair almost at once.

Then the Red Sox more or less forced Cora out as their manager before the Rogue Sox sign-stealing report emerged. And the New York Mets more or less forced Beltran out as their newly-hired manager—before Beltran got to manage even a single exhibition game for the team he once starred for as an outfielder.

“When you take someone’s livelihood . . . to save your own ass, that’s what I don’t like,” Kelly continued.

Cheating? They cheated. Everyone knows they’re cheaters. They know they’re cheaters. It’s over. That’s done with. But now they mess it up by ruining other people’s lives, so they [screwed] it up twice . . . When you taint someone’s name to save your own name, this is one of the worst things that you could probably do . . . That really friggin’ bugs me. I think I’ll be irritated forever.

In other words, the Astros players accepting Manfred’s immunity to throw Cora, Beltran, and even Hinch and Luhnow under the proverbial bus isn’t even close to being Mike Fiers—frustrated that attempts by himself and others in the know to get reporters to push for exposing the AIA previously—finally blowing the Astrogate whistle to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich last November.

Kelly may have missed Cora telling Rivera it wasn’t only players who might have made himself and/or Beltran sacrificial lambs. “There has been a narrative out there of what happened,” Cora said.

Ever since mid-November until the commissioner announced the results of the Red Sox investigation, I have read many things that are true and many others that are not.Out of this whole process, if there is one thing that I completely reject and disagree with is people within the Astros organization singling me out, particularly Jeff Luhnow, as if I were the sole mastermind. The commissioner’s report sort of explained, in its own way, what happened. But the [Astros players] have spoken up and refuted any allegations that I was solely responsible.

If there is one thing I am absolutely sure of, it is that it was not a two-man show. We all did it. And let me be very clear that I am not denying my responsibility, because we were all responsible.

Manfred’s subsequent report on the Rogue Sox determined—after the commissioner handed 2018-19 players the same immunity to spill as he handed the Astros—that their replay-room sign-stealing scheme was actually executed without Cora’s direct knowledge of the operation.

Remember: The AIA involved either installing an illegal real-time camera or altering an existing camera off mandated eight-second transmission delays to send opposition pitch signs to a clubhouse monitor, where someone deciphered them and signaled them to hitters by way of banging a can slowly next to that monitor.

The Rogue Sox didn’t go that far. They married old-fashioned on-field sign-stealing gamesmanship to new-fashioned technology all but gift-wrapped for them. MLB itself handed them and anyone else so inclined the keys to the kingdom when it installed multiple-monitor replay rooms in both clubhouses in all ballparks.

Someone deciphered opposition signs on one of those monitors and transmitted them to a Red Sox baserunner who’d send it on to a batter. The key is that the Red Sox needed a man on base to execute the reconnaissance operation in the first place. They couldn’t and didn’t have stolen signs for every man in the lineup.

The AIA didn’t need baserunners to do its dirty work, though it could only operate in Minute Maid Park. Which made the scheme even more bizarre, never mind unnecessary, since the 2017-18 Astros actually won sixteen more games total on the road than at home.

Cora, remember, once made himself a Dodgers folk hero thanks to an epic eighteen-pitch plate appearance against Chicago Cubs pitcher Matt Clement that ended in a two-run homer into Dodger Stadium’s right field bullpen. Now he’s a pariah for being the bench coach of the ’17 Astros and the manager of the ’18 Red Sox, both of whom beat the Dodgers in back-to-back World Series.

Unlike those Astros who met the press as spring training opened (pre-coronavirus shutdown) and sounded as unapologetic as men offering apologies can sound, outraging about seven-eighths of MLB players, Cora did apologise for both the AIA and the Rogue Sox. “I understand why people think that our championship is not valid, and it’s our fault that they think that,” he told Rivera.

I am being honest and I apologize for what happened and for the mistakes we made as a group. I understand why people are disappointed. I am disappointed in myself. At the time, one doesn’t think about the consequences. It was something that kept growing and growing, and in the end, it was wrong. We made a mistake and I must pay for the consequences of my actions.

Kelly pondered aloud whether those Astros who spilled to Manfred called Beltran, Cora, Hinch, and even Luhnow—whose administration was controversial enough before Astrogate’s exposure, and whose departure may have been mourned the least—“and said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry’ . . . If they had said, ‘Hey, I’m super scared, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to lose money, I had to rat’ . . . Grow a pair of balls and say that.”

Would that make any difference to Beltran, Cora, and Hinch now?

Beltran lost a job he’d barely begun to do but one for which he seemed qualified enough. Cora lost a job in which he’d become only the fifth rookie manager ever to win a World Series, after Bucky Harris (the 1924 Washington Senators), Eddie Dyer (the 1946 St. Louis Cardinals), Ralph Houk (the 1961 New York Yankees), and Bob Brenly (the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks).

The hapless Hinch, who’d shown himself mostly as an ideal managerial marriage between smarts and sensitivity, was exposed as powerless to stop his charges from plunging deeper into baseball crime or to stop his superiors from fostering such an atmosphere in the first place.

Before you return to the false narrative of Kelly’s “hypocrisy” for scoring the Astros while being a member of the Rogue Sox, remind yourself: Red Sox pitchers catching on to baserunning teammates sending stolen enemy signs to hitters probably thought the runners got the signs the old fashioned way, catching on to and exploiting an enemy catcher’s inadvertent tells.

The Red Sox fell to the ’17 Astros in a division series but beat the Astros in five—abetted especially by Andrew Benintendi’s Game Four-ending, three-run-saving, series tie-thwarting catch in left field—in the ’18 American League Championship Series.

Six Astros regulars on the 2017-18 team remain with them today. How long before the AIA stain dissipates is anyone’s guess, never mind that there were those from the scandal’s birth who suggested the stain wouldn’t leave the Astros until all the 2017-18 players had either moved on or ended their career.

There’s little enough comfort for Astro and Red Sox fans still coming to terms with having rooted for two great teams who, obviously enough, lost enough faith in their own greatness. There’s also the distinct possibility that the bad blood between the Astros and the Dodgers won’t dissipate too soon, either. They meet again in Dodger Stadium in September.

“Just to say, ‘Oh, it’s done, it’s over with, move on,’ I don’t think is a reality for anyone,” Dodger third baseman Justin Turner told a Fox Sports pre-game show. “I think around the league, there are a lot of guys upset, who kind of feel like the punishment didn’t really fit the crime. I don’t know if that’ll ever go away for me.”

Millions of fans and an awful lot of players don’t know, either.

Throneberry Fields Forever

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