With a friend like Trump . . .

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DonaldTrumpNewEnglandPatriots

President Donald Trump, holding a New England Patriots helmet at the White House celebrating the Pats’ Super Bowl LIII victory. He managed to conflate a football beneficiary of the former Alabama coach running for the Senate with the man who coached the Pats’ American Football League ancestors, among others.

When last we had occasion to think of Donald Trump in sports terms having nothing to do with kneeling during the National Anthem, he attended Game Five of the last World Series in Nationals Park. He was booed rather lustily, with intermittent chants of “Lock him up!” punctuating the chorus.

The “lock him up!” chants returned in the seventh inning—not for President Tweety, but for home plate umpire Lance Barksdale, whose evening to that point was full of such dubious calls (including the fourth ball called a third strike on Nationals outfielder Victor Robles during the inning) that both Nationals and Houston Astros fans alike wanted him in the stockade.

Now, though, the president about whom “polarising” often feels high praise arouses the attention of Deadspin, the online sports publication. He arouses it by way of the campaign trail, on a conference call, supporting former longtime Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville’s campaign as Alabama’s newly-crowned Republican nominee to the U.S. Senate.

Trump wanted to praise Tuberville as the reason the University of Alabama hired a particular football coach, after the Auburn Tigers bushwhacked the Crimson Tide in six straight meetings between the two schools. Then, he wanted to praise that coach. Uh, oh. “Beat Alabama, like six in a row, but we won’t even mention that,” President Tweety began, starting with Tuberville. “As he said . . . because of that, maybe we got ‘em Lou Saban . . . And he’s great, Lou Saban, what a great job he’s done.”

Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban must be double-checking his records to be sure he didn’t change his name inadvertently, somewhere. And, to re-assure himself, with apologies to Mark Twain, that the reports of his death have indeed been exaggerated greatly. The National Football League and its long-ago-absorbed upstart competitor the American Football League would love to know how the real Lou Saban coached from beyond.

That real Lou Saban, as Deadspin couldn’t wait to remind anyone caring, coached in both American pro football leagues and in college football for a very long time. But not past 2002, after a decade of working at far lower than Division I programs.

The president who once denounced the late Sen. John McCain for having been captured as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War (“I like people who weren’t captured”) and makes a fetish of “winning” (without stopping to think that one man’s “winning” is another’s self-immolation) chose quite a winner to conflate with Alabama’s incumbent football coach.

Saban, who may or may not be a second or more distant cousin to Nick, was a charter coach of the Boston Patriots, when the AFL was born in 1960. From there he enjoyed a sixteen-season career coaching in the AFL and—when his Denver Broncos moved with the merger—the NFL. He had three first-place finishes (coaching the Buffalo Bills, 1963-65) and two AFL championships. And that’s all, folks.

He had six winning seasons in sixteen coaching the pros. His final record as a pro football coach is 95-99-7. Except for his back-to-back AFL championships, Saban never led his teams past a single playoff win. He did get to return to the Bills in 1972, coaching the teams fabled for O.J. Simpson and the Electric Company offensive line, but they never got past second place or a single playoff loss, either. He resigned after a 2-3 start in 1976 and never coached in the NFL again.

But he did return to the college coaching lines, which he’d visited once in the middle of his pro coaching life (University of Maryland: 4-6 in 1966), and where his coaching career began for a single season in 1956. (Northwestern University: 0-8.) He coached the University of Miami to back-to-back losing seasons (1977-78) and Army (1979) to one losing season. His complete coaching record at the major schools: 15-35-2.

Saban left Miami in the middle of a row over three freshman players attacking a Jewish student in yarmulke while he walked toward a campus religious service. They carried him to Lake Osceola in the middle of the campus and threw him in. Having been off campus when the attack happened, Saban returned to learn of it and say, according to Bruce Feldman’s history of Miami football, “Getting thrown in the lake? Sounds like fun to me.”

After he left Army, Saban took a brief, curious career turn. He became one of George Steinbrenner’s “baseball people,” doing Steinbrenner (a personal friend) a favour and becoming president of the New York Yankees for 1981-82. Even allowing that Steinbrenner did love football, engaging a football lifer as a baseball president seemed along the line of hiring a furniture designer to develop vacuum cleaners.

If Saban had anything to say about some of the turmoil around those Yankees, there seems little enough record of it:

* Steinbrenner fired first-time manager Gene Michael in 1981, after Michael challenged The Boss to knock it off with the constant threats. Steinbrenner’s bid to mollify The Stick became a classic of Yankee panky: Why would you want to stay manager and be second-guessed by me when you can come up into the front office and be one of the second guessers?

* Steinbrenner burned through three managers in 1982: Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Lemon (who’d picked up Billy Martin’s pieces and led the Yankees to a World Series championship in 1978), Michael again, then Clyde King.

* Steinbrenner hired former Olympic hurdler Harrison Dilliard to help turn the Yankees into a speed team, an idea so hilarious as it was accompanied by continuous running drills in spring training that wags began calling the Yankees “the Bronx Burners.” (The experiment lived only slightly longer than some Yankee managers kept their jobs.)

The man who thought it sounded like fun for three of his Miami players to dunk a Jewish student in Lake Osceloa isn’t on record anywhere that I know of suggesting what fun Steinbrenner’s King of Hearts act in the south Bronx must have been for those on the wrong end of His Majesty’s scepter.

Lou Saban died at 87 in 2009, two years after Alabama hired Nick. He might not have had a real reputation as a long-term winner but he did have one as a teacher. He was also in no position to be the direct beneficiary of  Tuberville’s constant seawalling of the Crimson Tide. Alabama isn’t exactly renowned for hiring octogenarian head coaches. Nick Saban, on the other hand, has a long-term winning reputation in college football: a 248-65 record; three Bowl Championship Series wins; and, ten bowl game wins otherwise.

Deadspin offers the charitable suggestion that Trump might have conflated Saban with Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame coaching legend. Careful with that axe, Eugene: In some portions of the South, confusing or conflating a Crimson Tide coach with some Hoosier coach can provoke the same kind of tavern debate (if not brawl) as could be provoked in the northeast, formerly,  if you inadvertently confused or conflated Mookie Betts with Mookie Wilson.

Trump’s sports record is dubious at best, shall we say. When he hasn’t beaten his gums about kneeling National Anthem protesters (a subject for another time, for now), he’s been a football owner (in the failed United States Football League some say he destroyed in the first place), a less-than-knowledgeable advocate (speaking politely) of Pete Rose’s reinstatement to baseball and election to the Hall of Fame, and a public critic, equally less than knowledgeable, of Maximum Security’s rightful disqualification in the 2019 Kentucky Derby.

With an expert like that on his side, I’m not entirely sure that Tuberville—whose own college football coaching career was impressive enough (159-99 record; seven bowl wins)—needs adversaries.

Not right, Nats

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2020-07-14 DaveMartinezMikeRizzo

Dave Martinez (left) and Mike Rizzo. The Nats’ GM hasn’t heard a peep about a contract extension or wholly new deal yet despite being in the final year of his current deal. The skipper hasn’t, either, despite having one more year on his current deal.

You built a World Series champion through trials, errors, and very occasional calls for your head on a plate while you stayed your course and kept your eye on the Promised Land. It wasn’t just any World Series champion but Washington’s first Show champion* since the Coolidge Administration.

But your contract expires after the season to follow, however truncated the coronavirus world tour makes it. Wouldn’t you think your bosses would want you to stick around so you can give it your best shot at sustaining that success?

Or, you managed that club from hell to the highest waters possible, despite the not-so-great bullpen you were handed to work with when last year began, keeping them from losing their marble (singular) despite a 19-31 season beginning. They bought your go-1-0-every-day philosophy. You gave them room to go 74-38 the rest of the season and perform feats of derring-do without nets and, sometimes, logic.

You also did it while earning barely more than the minimum major league player’s salary. Wouldn’t you think, too, that the same bosses would want you to stick around so you can give it your best shot at convincing your team their next theme song—Gerardo Parra, after all, has moved onward, taking the “Baby Shark” mojo with him—should be, “I Want to Take You Higher?”

Sure you would. Both of you would. But nobody in the Washington Nationals’ executive suite seems to have moved so much as a fingernail on it. Meaning, as USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale reminds us, that general manager Mike Rizzo is a lame duck in a truncated season and manager Dave Martinez is a year from the same quack.

And, if Rizzo’s a lame duck this year he may not be the one able to move on keeping Martinez above and beyond 2021, presuming the Nats’ success sustains. Which it should, whenever the game returns to something resembling normal, with the extending of Stephen Strasburg, Max Scherzer not exactly showing age just yet, a new young core and several reliable veterans.

This is the GM who took a big hit in 2018 when—in the middle of an already injury-compromised season that also included Bryce Harper’s walk year—he dumped two relief pitchers in circumstances described as dubious at best and disingenuous at worst.

When Shawn Kelley was brought in to pitch near the end of a blowout, looked toward Martinez for guidance about an umpire’s positioning, then spiked his glove after surrendering a home run, Rizzo took it as showing up the skipper even though Martinez didn’t see it that way. He didn’t give Kelley a chance, getting in the reliever’s face then releasing him to be snapped up by the Oakland Athletics.

When Rizzo suspected concurrently that Kelley’s fellow reliever Brandon Kintzler was the source of a Yahoo! Sports story calling the Nats clubhouse a big mess, he didn’t even bother to verify it—he sent Kintzler off to the Chicago Cubs. Both Kelley and Kintzler found themselves back in the races at their new addresses. Kintzler denied emphatically, with then-Yahoo! Sports writer Jeff Passan’s affirmation, that he was the source of the clubhouse mess story.

“If you’re not in,” Rizzo said emphatically, “you’re in the way.” In those moments it looked as though the GM himself could be charged under that statute.

Rizzo stood his ground for better or worse. So did Martinez, whose bullpen management was considered suspect but who was, in fairness, suffering a malady his predecessors had to suffer, too. For the longest time Rizzo was seen as the GM who could and did build solid starting rotations, solid position cores, and reasonable benches, but just couldn’t build bullpens with the same surety.

Martinez never lost his players when all was said and done, either. “They held onto Martinez,” writes Washington Post sportswriter Jesse Dougherty in Buzz Saw: The Improbable Story of How the Washington Nationals Won the World Series, “despite faint calls for his job, and he didn’t spend October [2018] watching the postseason. That would have been one kind of torture. He chose even worse.”

He went everywhere with an iPad that had each of the Nationals’ 162 games loaded onto it. He hunted in Wisconsin, fished outside Salt Lake City, lay in the hammock at his farm outside Nashville, and still carved out time, every day, to relive all the mistakes. There were his mistakes, mostly with the bullpen, such as leaving relievers in too long, or not striking the right balance between analytics and his gut. Then there were his players’ mistakes, such as taking the wrong plate approach, the wrong baserunning approach, or lapsing on defense . . .

He got to West Palm Beach [for spring training 2019] in early February and called for a staff meeting. That’s when he told the coaches about correcting the little things. Mistakes were met with yelling “Do it again!” into quiet mornings . . .

The calls for both Rizzo’s and Martinez’s heads ramped up at that 19-31 start last year. By the time they shoved the Milwaukee Brewers out of the wild card game, upended the Los Angeles Dodgers in the division series (something about a guy named Howie Kendrick detonating a grand slam at the expense of a manager who misread his bullpen even worse), and buried the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series, executions were no longer an option.

When Rizzo’s midyear trade acquisition Daniel Hudson struck Michael Brantley out swinging to finish what a gutsy Scherzer started (pitching five innings on fumes and probably lucky to have only two runs pried out of him) and Kendrick overturned (that pole-ringing two-run homer turning a deficit into a lead the Nats never lost) in Game Seven of the World Series, the calls weren’t for executions but canonisations.

Lately Rizzo has been more than just the deft rebuilder. The Show’s contradictory COVID-19 issues of late got a verbal beatdown from Rizzo after Nats’ tests were still delayed 72 hours after July 3.

“We cannot have our players and staff work at risk,” Rizzo said. “Therefore, we have cancelled our team workout scheduled for this morning. We will not sacrifice the health and safety of our players, staff and their families. Without accurate and timely testing it is simply not safe for us to continue with Summer Camp. Major League Baseball needs to work quickly to resolve issues with their process and their lab. Otherwise, Summer Camp and the 2020 Season are at risk.”

He wasn’t alone. The A’s, the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Angels, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and other teams found themselves canceling workouts or intra-squad games over testing delays. This is no bowl of Raisin Bran they’re dealing with.

Letting Rizzo be the face of the Nats when it comes to coronavirus safety protocols is one thing, Nightengale writes. Letting him sit as a lame duck otherwise isn’t acceptable. “It’s insane,” he continues, “but again this is the same ownership that fired manager Dusty Baker after winning back-to-back division titles. It’s the same owners that told Bud Black he was their new manager, only to offer him a one-year deal. The same owners who have perhaps the smallest and lowest-paid front office staffs in baseball.”

The same owners whose manager earns barely more than infield comer Carter Kieboom would have earned in a full 2020 season.

Nightengale notices something else, too. He notices that, during Rizzo’s tenure, not one Nat—other than longtime clubhouse leader Jayson Werth hit with a reckless driving charge (going 105 on the Beltway)—has made room for even the mildest scandal: “No PED suspensions. No domestic violence suspensions. No discrimination lawsuits.”

No extracurricular, off-field-based high-tech cheating, either. So far. The Astros and the Boston Red Sox may or may not be right that they weren’t the only ones operating illegal intelligence agencies during their World Series-winning seasons. The New York Yankees still have some splainin’ to do about that illicit dugout phone and possible other extracurricular Yankee panky. But nobody’s pointed any such finger toward the Nats just yet. They might be the only part of Washington you can still call scandal free. So far.

When ancient questionable tweets by shortstop star Trea Turner surfaced, Turner simply manned up, said he was young and stupid and not necessarily in that order, and that was that. No muss, no fuss, no attempt to duck, nothing more than a quick apology.

Loyalty is one thing, and Rizzo has that in abundance to his bosses and his players alike, so long as he doesn’t think those players are in the way. But what does it tell you that only two other teams won more games than the 2010s Nats while the Nats finished the decade with the keys to the Promised Land but you can find almost ten teams with better-paid front office people?

Rizzo and Martinez have earned new deals. For Martinez, it might make up for his not being named Manager of the Year over the Cardinals’s Mike Schildt as he should have been for 2019. Schildt lifting a slightly leaky boat isn’t even close to Martinez raising the Titanic.

“[T]his is a proud baseball franchise,” Nightengale writes, “and shouldn’t be run like a construction site, sitting back and making bids to get the cheapest cost.” Maybe some Nats players—who are as loyal to Rizzo and Martinez as those two bosses are to them—could drive the point home further by having their batting helmets re-shaped into construction site hard hats?

——————————————-

*  Let us not forget: The Homestead Grays, playing their home games in Washington’s ancient Griffith Stadium, beat the Birmingham Black Barons in the final Negro Leagues World Series in 1948.

Freese’s pieces, revisited

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2020-07-12 DavidFreeseSeriesMVP

David Freese hoists the 2011 World Series MVP trophy. He’d also won that National League Championship Series MVP.

Notoriously enough at the time, Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson pre-Yankee mused aloud, “If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.” When fellow Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson was given a day at Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, on the threshold of his retirement, the host of the event told the cheering crowd, “Around here they don’t name candy bars after Brooks—they name their children after him.”

When David Freese made the St. Louis Cardinals’ difference in the 2011 National League Championship Series, I noted—after recalling he first thought his trade from the San Diego Padres to the team for whom he grew up rooting madly, the Cardinals, was a joke—“(E)veryone except citizens of Milwaukee might be laughing with the National League Championship Series’ most valuable player.”

In St. Louis, of course, they may be ready to name a candy bar after him. Freese’s Pieces, anyone? It isn’t everyone who comes up from oblivion to out-slug Albert Pujols when Pujols is having the best postseason set of his career, or drives home a ferocious exclamation point on it Sunday night with a first-inning blast that merely starts the Cardinals en route a secured trip to the World Series.

Who knew after Game Six of that NLCS that Freese’s series would prove a mere dress rehearsal for the big event to come? Not even Freese himself, about whom Joe Posnanski—amidst a series in The Athletic remembering sixty transcendent baseball moments—writes with loving eloquence that he was one kid who got to live every baseball kid’s backyard or schoolyard dream, suiting up for the home team he grew up loving, and hitting the blasts that either send the team to the Promised Land or yank them back to the threshold.

Most such kids would sell their souls to get a chance to do it for the home team even once. Freese did it twice, also in Game Six, but this time during the 2011 World Series. He tied it with a two-run triple in the bottom of the ninth and won it with a leadoff home run in the bottom of the eleventh. Telling the Texas Rangers, “Not so fast,” he sent the set to the seventh game his first-inning, game-tying two-run double would help the Cardinals win.

Think about the roll of Cardinals World Series heroes and from whence they came in the first place. Grover Cleveland Alexander (pitching and winning Game Six to send the 1926 Series to a seventh game his team would also win)—Elba, Nebraska. Pepper Martin (hitting .500 in a seven-game 1931 Series)—Temple, Oklahoma. The Dean brothers (Dizzy: two wins; Paul, two wins, including Dizzy’s Game Seven shutout, 1934 Series)—Lucas, Arkansas. Enos Slaughter (the Mad Dash, Game Seven, 1946 Series)—Roxboro, North Carolina. Bob Gibson (MVP of the 1964 and 1967 Series)—Omaha, Nebraska. Darrell Porter (MVP of both the 1982 National League Championship Series and World Series)—Joplin, Missouri. David Eckstein (resident pest and MVP, 2006 World Series)—Sanford, Florida.

Did somebody mention Sandy Koufax? He got to be a World Series hero twice for his hometown Dodgers, the MVP of the 1963 and 1965 Series—but that came after the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles, and after a serious hitch in Koufax’s delivery was caught at last and fixed in spring training 1961, turning him from an untamed talent into an off-the-charts Hall of Famer.

Think a little bit, too, of how many players were Hall of Famers who came up too short in postseasons if they got there at all. Of how many—like Freese—who weren’t Hall of Famers on the best days of their regular season lives, but played like Hall of Famers when they did get to the big postseason dance. Of how the Freeses of the game live the truth of Gene Hackman’s valedictory in (of all things) the football film, The Replacements: “Greatness, no matter how brief, stays with a man.”

(Eckstein? Al Gionfriddo? Dusty Rhodes? Sandy Amoros? Don Larsen? Moe Drabowsky? Al Weis? Donn Clendenon? Gene Tenace? Brian Doyle? B.F. Dent? Dave Henderson? Mickey Hatcher? Sid Bream? Tony Womack? Edgar Renteria? Luis Sojo? Scott Spiezio? Scott Podsednik? Carlos Ruiz? Pablo Sandoval? Steve Pearce? Call your offices.)

Porter came the closest to being a homegrown Series hero, Joplin being a measly four-hour, 284-mile drive to St. Louis. Freese was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, but raised in St. Louis’s Wildwood suburb. He’d set Wildwood’s Lafayette High School’s single-season record of 23 home runs and a .533 batting average in his senior year, but felt burned out enough by baseball to spurn a baseball scholarship at the University of Missouri to try studying computer science instead.

So much for that idea. After visiting Lafayette during a summer while working in his school district’s maintenance department, Freese gave baseball another shot at two other schools and—the year Eckstein made himself the cockroach the Detroit Tigers couldn’t exterminate in the 2006 Series—made himself the Sun Belt Conference’s player of the year. The Padres drafted him in 2006’s ninth round.

2020-07-12 DavidFreese

Freese about to hit the plate in a swarm of teammates, Game Six, 2011 World Series. “I just got beat up by thirty guys,” he laughed to reporters afterward. It was nothing compared to how depression was beating him up inside.

The Cardinals sent a spent Jim Edmonds to San Diego to get Freese in 2008 because they needed a solid minor league third baseman. Then, with former Angels World Series MVP Troy Glaus injured, the Cardinals needed Freese—until they didn’t. He didn’t turn up in the Cardinals’ fatigues again until 2010, where a hot start turned unfortunately into a season-ending ankle injury that June.

His 2011 threatened to be injury compromised, too, a hand fracture when hit by a pitch costing him 51 games. After his return, he finished the regular season with a flourish of eight hits in the final nine games. Then came the NLCS. Then came the World Series. Then came first and second with two outs for Freese in the Game Six bottom of the ninth, against Rangers closer Neftali Feliz. Then came Freese on 1-2 down to his and the Cardinals’ final strike—of game, set, and season.

Then came Freese swinging at a fastball on the outer half of the plate. “The beauty of it,” Posnanski wrote at the time, “was that in the instant after the ball was hit, it had a chance to be anything.”

He had obviously hit it well — the ball cracked off the bat — but there was no telling how well. It had a chance to be a home run. It had a chance to be an out. I have written before that there is nothing in sports like the successful Hail Mary pass in football, and the main reason is that no two Hail Mary passes are alike. Sometimes they deflect from one receiver to another. Sometimes they bounce off the defenders’ hands and back to a waiting receiver. Sometimes the pass just drops into a pile and sticks in a receiver’s hands. Really, there are countless geometrical possibilities. Baseball doesn’t usually have that kind of geometry. Home runs are home runs. Singles are singles. Pop-outs are pop-outs . . . But Freese’s fly was something like a Hail Mary. There was just no telling how it would turn out while the ball was in the air.

Rangers right fielder Nelson Cruz misjudged where the wall was, playing in the Rangers’ no-doubles defensive alignment, and the ball sailed over his head and into the wall. It sent the game to extra innings, where Josh Hamilton restored the Rangers’ two-run lead with a home run in the top of the tenth but a pair of singles, a run-scoring ground out, and Lance Berkman’s two-out RBI single—with the Cardinals again down to their final strike—tied things up again, this time at nine each.

Then Jake Westbrook kept the Rangers to a mere base hit in the top of the eleventh and Freese led off the bottom against Mark Lowe. Remember, now, that this was also the Series in which Pujols channeled his inner Reggie Jackson in Game Three, hitting three home runs—from the sixth inning forward, nourishing a 16-7 blowout. Who could possibly top that?

For that matter, who could possibly top Freese’s Game Six-tyer? The one that turned eight innings of somewhat sloppy baseball into three innings to come of surrealistic baseball? The answer turned out to be Freese himself. On a full count. On what looked like a changeup hanging into the middle of the plate. Over the center field fence, onto the green lawn beneath the Busch Stadium batter’s eye. With Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, then the Rangers’ president, watching from the field level seats in abject disbelief.

Trotting around the bases as the Rangers left the field, Freese slammed his batting emphatically onto the third base line, down between his briefly leaping legs, a few feet before he hit the plate to be buried by a swarm of celebrating teammates. “I’m just about out of breath,” Freese told reporters in an on-field post-game interview. “I just got beat up by thirty guys.”

His Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa—whose Game Five bullpen communication breakdown got close to vaporising his image as a tactical master and big-picture strategist, and who should have blown his team to world-tour vacations for pulling his kishkes back out of the incinerator—could only say, “You had to see it to believe it.”

This was a player who battled clinical depression his entire life, fell into alcoholism while battling it and suffered a small number of accidents and incidents before he became a Cardinal, then took the battle public eight months after he married and while in the Busch Stadium visitors’ clubhouse as a Pirate. “I’ve had moments like that since high school, to be honest,’’ he told USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale in 2017.

It’s been 15-plus years of, “I can’t believe I’m still here.” You win the World Series in your hometown, and you become this guy in a city that loves Cardinal baseball, and sometimes it’s the last guy you want to be. So you start building this façade, trying to be something I was not. And the whole time, I was scared to death what was going to happen to me after baseball.

. . . Who knows where I was headed, but as long as I was here, I had so many friends here, I wasn’t good at just saying no. I wanted to please people, make everyone happy, and that became impossible.

What happened was the Cardinals trading Freese to the Los Angeles Angels in November 2013, the Cardinals knowing Freese needed to leave in the worst way possible to blow the pressures away. That was part two of what began resolving his inner turmoil. He met part one at his friend’s media studio a week before the deal, an intern named Mairin O’Leary—who became Mairin Freese in the simplest ceremony possible, in a Pittsburgh coffee shop in September 2016. Over a crepes breakfast.

Freese had one more chance at postseason glory as a 2018 Dodger. He did his part, hitting leadoff home runs in Game Six of the NLCS and Game Five of the World Series, but the Dodgers fell to the Boston Rogue Sox who may or may not have deployed their now-infamous replay room reconnaissance ring sign-stealing plot during that postseason.

When he retired after last season, Freese no longer saw his stupefying 2011 postseason as a cross to bear from behind the wall of depression. He looked forward to taking his almost three-year-old son to a live Cardinals game in due course. Not to mention showing the little boy what Daddy delivered in Game Six. And all that postseason, including a still-record fifty total bases and 21 runs batted in.

“It’s going to be cool when Kai understands and I show it to him,” Daddy told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as he retired, “and he says, ‘Is that really you on the TV?’ He understands it’s me now if he’s watching and there’s a closeup of me hitting or something. It is going to be cool (showing him the World Series ring). Look at that damn squirrel. He might not care, which might even be cooler.”

Kai Freese will have to wait, unfortunately, until the coronavirus world tour dissipates enough to let the games bring the fans back to the stands. His father has probably told him, “Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.”

“There are 270 players in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is only one player who grew up in St. Louis and got to live the dream again and again for the team he grew up loving,” Posnanski writes, observing the contrast between Hall of Famers who lacked for truly signature moments and ordinary men who have one that transcends the game itself. “I suspect David Freese is pretty happy with how it turned out.”

The guy who made St. Louis baseball the happiest place on earth in 2011 fought hard enough to get to happiness with how his baseball legacy turned out in the first place.

Rank desertion? Don’t even go there.

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2020-07-11 BusterPosey

San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey has opted out of playing this year for the sake of his children—an incumbent pair of twins and a pair of twin newborns freshly adopted. Some dare call it desertion—erroneously.

Whatever else you think about those major league players who have opted out of playing in 2020, or who think about doing so, here’s something that shouldn’t come into play: someone snarking about such players committing “rank desertion.” (So help me, that’s how someone phrased it in one online baseball forum.) Ignore them. Let them rant their heads off, but you’re under no obligation to listen.

That’s one of the beauties of free speech, what’s left of it. You can rant your head off any old time and place it strikes you to rant. You also bear no known mandatory obligation to listen to any particular ranter for any particular reason.

Militarily, of course, “rank desertion” equals one soldier, sailor, marine, or airman, or a group of them, walking away from their units or posts without call, usually but not exclusively in wartime. In civilian terms, “rank desertion” implies someone or a group of someones walking off the job where there’s no known option aside from a labour strike or formal resignation to do it.

The players were given the opt-out option after all those weeks of haggling between the owners trying to game them out of agreed-upon-in-March pay protocols before they finally agreed to give what remained of a 2020 season a try. Handed that option, those players exercising it cannot be accused credibly of rank desertion.

There’s a coronavirus still on world tour, to various extents, and baseball players play and sojourn in places that still present exposure risks they’re not entirely anxious to bring home. Especially when they have loved ones considered in the high-risk category.

San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey may be the highest-profile player to opt out of the season to date. There but for the curse of injuries might he be in the Hall of Fame conversation; maybe two or even three more injury-free seasons on his jacket might keep him there. He could still get those seasons beginning next year.

As was his right under the current protocols, Posey thought more than twice about the twin babies he and his wife, Kristin, are adopting. They were born prematurely last week and at this writing remain in neonatal intensive care. The San Francisco Chronicle says the little girls are doing well enough in the circumstance.

Already the father of incumbent twin children, Posey weighed the risk and pondered the opt-out option that has yet to be rescinded. Then, he made his decision for the sake of his children’s health. The same decision Los Angeles Angels demigod Mike Trout continues weighing as the birth of his first child with his wife, Jessica, looms next month.

Trout isn’t exactly on poverty row so far as major league baseball players are concerned. Neither is Posey, even if Trout is above and beyond his and any other player’s pay grade. Atlanta Braves outfielder Nick Markakis has a family to consider as well, and he’s not exactly going to be among the poor by opting out of 2020, either, as he did during the week now past.

Two factors moved Markakis to opt out, the risk to his family and the very real COVID-19 infection incurred by his franchise co-face face teammate Freddie Freeman. (Braves fans have a case to make that Freeman now shares the distinction with Markakis’s fellow outfielder Ronald Acuna, Jr. Markakis also admits playing with no audience at first doesn’t exactly pose a thrill.)

Markakis spoke to Freeman by phone and learned fast enough. “Just hearing him, the way he sounded on the phone, it was tough,” he told reporters last Monday. “It was kind of eye-opening. With everything that’s going on, not just with baseball but all over the world, it makes you open your eyes.”

Felix Hernandez, the longtime Seattle pitching bellwether now trying to resuscitate his career with the Braves, has also opted out of 2020. So has Michael Kopech, the Chicago White Sox pitcher who’d otherwise hoped to begin his return from his 2018 Tommy John surgery. So has Colorado Rockies outfielder Ian Desmond, whose teammate Charlie Blackmon was hit with COVID-19 and who has alarms about equal to health alarms for doing so.

On health terms, Desmond and his wife, Chelsey, are already parents of four young children and Mrs. Desmond is pregnant with their fifth. That’s the immediate reason Desmond exercised his opt-out option. But it provided him a chance to speak publicly enough on social and even spiritual terms.

Desmond—who is bi-racial—laments what the George Floyd murder at police hands in Minneapolis re-exposes of society in general and, from his perspective, the game he loves otherwise. “Think about it: right now in baseball we’ve got a labor war,” Desmond began in a round of jolting but thought-provoking Instagram posts.

We’ve got rampant individualism on the field. In clubhouses we’ve got racist, sexist, homophobic jokes or flat-out problems. We’ve got cheating. We’ve got a minority issue from the top down. One African American GM. Two African American managers. Less than 8% Black players. No Black majority team owners.

Perhaps most disheartening of all is a puzzling lack of focus on understanding how to change those numbers. A lack of focus on making baseball accessible and possible for all kids, not just those who are privileged enough to afford it.

If baseball is America’s pastime, maybe it’s never been a more fitting one than now . . .

Other opt-outs, also for familial health concerns, include Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher David Price (who has yet to throw a pitch in regular-season competition for them), and three Washington Nationals: first baseman and elder statesman Ryan Zimmerman, relief pitcher Joe Ross, and catcher Welington Castillo.

Baseball’s coronavirus testings have not exactly proven the epitome of consistency or coordination. Teams like the Giants, the Nationals, the Houston Astros, the St. Louis Cardinals have postponed several “summer camp” workouts over them. Astros third baseman Alex Bregman skipped a subsequent Astros workout when his test didn’t arrive back on time. That had a few of his teammates more than a little shaky.

“We want to know how these test results are going to work out for us,” said outfielder Michael Brantley. “Not having Alex here today was just another day he didn’t get to prepare. As I read around the league, a lot of players are voicing their opinions that we need our test results back faster.”

You can say anything you wish about those players opting out and others yet to come who opt out of 2020 for their health’s sake first. If baseball’s testings continue being that inconsistently performed and handled, would you really be shocked to see more players deciding their health and their families’ health just can’t be entrusted to that? Regardless of their salaries?

You can also say as you wish about Desmond’s not-to-be-dismissed-out-of-hand thoughts regarding the first American team sport to end segregation officially while still having issues 73 years later accepting and assimilating non-white personnel on and off the playing field. You don’t need to demand a quota system to say baseball can, should, and must do a better job of it.

Much as we’ve missed a major league season thus far, we seem to need reminders more often than comfortable that certain things cut both ways. Things like the “human element,” for example. The traditionalists screamed blue murder over technological advances they thought (erroneously) would erode the “human element.” But it isn’t just traditionalists dismissing the opting-out as rank deserters.

That dismissal is a plain, no-further-discussion-necessary false dismissal of, what do you know, the human element. The element that says baseball players are not invincible androids who can’t be felled by or transmit disease but mere human men, prone to all manner of incurring and transmitting affliction, particularly during a pandemic that’s become as much a political football as a challenge to medicine.

The rank desertion accusers should be asked how swiftly they’d step in and take the risk for the sake of playing a game much beloved but not without risk. When they answer, “five minutes ago,” they should be asked just as promptly whether they’d like to bring an infection back to their loved ones.

The crickets should be heard playing the entirety of a classic jazz album—In a Silent Way.

Landis sided with the angels, once

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When Earl Averill demanded a piece of his sale price from the PCL to the Indians, Landis—wrong without integrity about much—actually sided rightfully with the Hall of Fame outfielder.

The current discussions about whether to replace Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s name from the Show’s Most Valuable Player awards aren’t out of place. (My view is: yes, replace it.) History deems baseball’s first commissioner a tyrannical autocrat who behaved purely for the owners’ good and enforced baseball segregation.

But Landis stood squarely on the side of the angels at least twice during his reign, and those should not be forgotten, either.

Everyone knows he administered justice, sometimes more rough than just, when it came to baseball’s criminal gambling elements. What everyone doesn’t remember or know is that Landis once displayed remarkable insight and foresight when it came to selling players. Insight and foresight which, if heeded, might have made baseball’s future economics very, very different.

A kid from Snohomish, Washington named Earl Averill made the Pacific Coast League a personal playpen from 1926-28. The San Francisco Seals outfielder hit for a .342 traditional batting average and a .538 slugging percentage, with 79 home runs including 36 in 1928.

That caught the eyes of the Cleveland Indians, and the Tribe opened the checkbook and bought Averill from the Seals for $50,000, agreeing that Averill didn’t have to report to them until after the PCL pennant race ended. Averill was normally a quiet type whose passions included flowers and animals. But the future Hall of Famer was savvy enough to flinch when he read about the sale in a newspaper.

Until I read The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract I had no knowledge that Averill actually asked how much of that sale price he could expect to receive. James didn’t say whether or not either the Seals or the Indians laughed their fool heads off over that question.

What he did say was Averill’s answer: translating loosely, wanna bet? The outfielder decided he wasn’t going anywhere no matter how ardently the Seals and the Tribe determined to convince him otherwise. The debate reached Landis’s eyes and ears, and Landis must have surprised anyone privy to his thinking with his response.

The commissioner agreed with Averill. He actually believed Averill wasn’t out of line demanding a piece of that $50,000 sale price. Landis suggested, as James paraphrased, “that baseball should adopt some sort of legislation by which, whenever a player was sold, the player himself would get a cut of the proceeds.” Say what?

Perhaps needless to say, the suggestion went the way of the cylinder phonograph. You could only imagine the major league owners of the time demanding Landis reveal what was in his tea in that moment because they wanted to get swacked, too.

The impasse between Averill and the Indians ended when the Tribe paid him a $5,000 bonus and signed him to a salary somewhat higher than the standard major league rookie salary of the time. He went to Cleveland and launched the Hall of Fame career compromised when a back injury in a 1937 game wrecked his formidable swing.

Bad enough, perhaps, that Landis’s suggestion went nowhere fast enough, but worse was that it never entered the mind of his successor four times removed. Bowie Kuhn so despised Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley that he let it get in the way of sound judgment and put a needless virus into baseball’s economic system.

Quaking over the Messersmith-McNally ruling that ended reserve clause abuse and ushered in free agency, Finley fumed when three of his top players—pitchers Vida Blue and Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers, plus outfield star Joe Rudi—refused to sign 1976 contracts lacking no-trade/no-cut clauses, the issue that prompted Andy Messersmith to pitch 1975 without a signed Los Angeles Dodgers contract in the first place.

When Finley brought those three plus third baseman Sal Bando to his sale floor in June 1976, it provoked a bristling crowd of buyers. When the word reached Kuhn at Comiskey Park, where he was watching the Chicago White Sox host the Baltimore Orioles, Kuhn said, wanna bet? He voided the sales, claiming they’d be “devastating” to baseball’s “reputation for integrity.”*

Players too well accustomed to front-office duplicity probably laughed themselves into headaches. Especially when Kuhn continued, “If such transactions now and in the future were permitted, the door would be opened wide to the buying success of the more affluent clubs, public suspicion would be aroused, traditional and sound methods of player development and acquisition would be undermined, and our efforts to preserve the competitive balance would be gravely impaired.”

To James, Kuhn closing Finley’s version of Toys ‘R’ Us “was an ignorant, bone-headed, destructive policy which had no foundation in anything except that Kuhn hated Charlie Finley and saw that he could drive Finley out of the game by denying him the right to sell his [star] players.”

What Kuhn should have done, if he had been thinking about the best interests of the game, is adopt the Landis policy: rule that players could be sold for whatever they would bring, but 30% of the money had to go to the players. Had he done that, the effect would have been to allow the rich teams to acquire more of the best players, as they do now. But this policy would have allowed the rich teams to strengthen themselves without inflating the salary structure, and would have allowed the weaker teams, the Montreal-type teams, to remain financially competitive by profiting from developing young players.

If Kuhn adopted the Landis idea, it would have put $300,000 into Rudi’s, Fingers’s, and Blue’s pockets immediately. Finley would have screamed blue murder over getting a measly $2.1 million for only as long as it took him to put it in the bank. His three toys would have earned more before playing a single 1976 inning than either of the three did in 1975.

Now we’ll never know how much less the salary structure might have inflated in due course, if Kuhn hadn’t voided the Rudi-Fingers-Blue sales while imposing a concurrent cap of $400,000 on straight cash deals, meaning teams in need couldn’t sell their stars for big money while keeping their bargains on the sales floor for comparative pocket change.

When Averill was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1975, the Earl of Snohomish looked foolish for criticising the Hall in his acceptance speech because of how long it took him to get there. He still looked less foolish than Kuhn did because sticking it to Finley overrode the good of the game.

Somewhere, wherever he was in the great beyond, Landis—who was absolutely on the right side, for once in his baseball life—must have shaken his head in dismay while calling for as stiff a drink as possible.

 

Some portions of this essay have been published previously.—JK.

* Among other things, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley pressed Kuhn against the Rudi-Fingers-Blue sales. This makes a travesty of the integrity of baseball. Pennants are not to be bought! read notes historian John Helyar ascribed to O’Malley in the moment.

So said the owner who bought longtime Dodger nemesis Sal Maglie from the Indians in May 1956—a deal that helped make the final Brooklyn pennant possible. Apparently, buying pennants in June was dangerous, but buying one in May was something else entirely.

By the way, the law firm that represented the National League at the time of the Maglie purchase included a young lawyer named (wait for it!) Bowie Kuhn.