Anatomy of an execution

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2019-09-09 DaveDombrowskiDavidOrtiz

Just shy of eleven months ago, Dave Dombrowski wore a Red Sox helmet and let former Red Sox superstar David Ortiz interview him right after the Red Sox nailed a World Series. After midnight last night, Dombrowski went to the Red Sox guillotine.

Watch and ponder a 10-5, home run heavy Red Sox loss to the Yankees on national television Sunday night. Awaken Monday morning to discover the Red Sox threw out the first president of the season just after midnight. Down the stretch. With the Red Sox down to little if any hope of really defending their 2018 World Series championship.

Every once in awhile not even a World Series appearance or conquest is enough to save someone’s baseball job. It wasn’t for Dave Dombrowski. The GM-made-president of baseball operations, who finished what his predecessor Ben Cherington started and steered the Red Sox back to the Promised Land for the fourth time since the 21st Century began, is finished.

And the questions include the price the Olde Towne Team will pay for last year’s conquest. Dombrowski spent big with dollars and with prospects to make last year’s triumph happen. Now the Red Sox farm system is parched, and a lot of the dollars that finished constructing last year’s conquerors could prove a prison as much as a parade.

Forgotten at times during last year’s triumph was that Cherington built the core of the team. Dombrowski took the bows with everyone else after the Red Sox finished stunning the Dodgers last fall but all he did was finish what Cherington started. And everyone who remembered Dombrowski’s years of trying but failing to get the Tigers to the Promised Land and mortgaging the farm several times couldn’t resist asking how long before Dombrowski’s accomplishment with the Red Sox would endure before he’d be nudged out of Boston, too.

It’s unfair to Dombrowski in a few ways, of course. But running a team whose in-house culture is win/win-now/keep-us-winning isn’t simple business. And men who mortgage the farm on its behalf often have lower survival rates than men who know how to remake/remodel without tanking or without letting the farm become a dust bowl.

Cherington got four years. Dombrowski didn’t survive a fourth. Both were hired seemingly out of nowhere. Except that for one of them, “nowhere” was right under the Red Sox’s noses. Cherington was part of the Red Sox baseball operations offices since 1999 and built himself a solid player development background when he was hired to succeed Theo Epstein in 2011.

Cherington’s first order of serious business, alas, was to take it like a manperson when the powers above made him look like a fool after the infamous 2011 Red Sox collapse. He’d promised numerous players that whomever would take the bridge, after Terry Francona quit before he could be fired, it wouldn’t be the rumoured Bobby Valentine. The powers above hired Valentine (specifically, it may have been Larry Lucchino’s call); Cherington’s choice was almost anyone but. (Actually, at the time, it was Dale Sveum.)

Poor Cherington. He found himself having to keep his back door open to help one after another Red Sox player keep his marble (singular) during the Valentine nightmare. Then, he executed the daring August 2012 trade that sent the Dodgers Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez, and Carl Crawford and concurrently blew open a small tonnage of financial headroom while giving himself the space to hatch and execute a post-Valentine plan.

Cherington spent the 2012-13 offseason buying or dealing for a group of more than useful availables and spare parts—Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino, David Ross, Stephen Drew, Brock Holt, and (especially) sleeper reliever Koji Uehara—and bringing home former Sox pitching coach John Farrell to take the bridge and dissipate the Valentine toxins.

That effort, plus the returns to health of such key men as John Lackey, often-injured (and oft-unfairly alienated) Jacoby Ellsbury, and especially future Hall of Famer David Ortiz, got the Red Sox 2013 World Series rings for Cherington’s efforts. It also got Cherington named as the third Red Sox executive ever named by The Sporting News as Executive of the Year.

Concurrently, he devised and executed a longer-range plan that rebuilt the Red Sox farm without even thinking about tanking, which is never an option for a team whose owner John Henry learned what not to do and how not to do it watching the similarly win-now-or-be-gone thinking of the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner.

Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Andrew Benintendi, Eduardo Rodriguez, and apparently defense-first Jackie Bradley, Jr.—all of whom factored large enough in last year’s conquest—were Cherington’s handiwork, either by in-house development or trade such as the deal that brought Rodriguez to the Red Sox in late 2014.

Where the earnest Cherington mis-stepped was with some of his subsequent free agency signings, including Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez, A.J. Pierzynski, and Grady Sizemore. When the Red Sox executed him in favour of Dombrowski, Cherington still left them a solid nucleus that didn’t go unnoticed by the incoming Dombrowski.

It didn’t take Dombrowski long to sign such nuggets as David Price and Craig Kimbrel, and watch as the Red Sox went from last to first in the 2016 American League East, though they were shoved out of the postseason by the eventual pennant-winning Indians. Dombrowski traded for Chris Sale, signed Mitch Moreland, and basked in the 2017 AL East title despite another postseason exit short of the Promised Land.

Then he answered Farrell’s apparently losing his clubhouse at last by canning Farrell and hiring Astros bench coach Alex Cora—while the Astros were still advancing toward their 2017 World Series conquest. And Cora let his new players know immediately how they fell short enough: “You guys were easy to game plan against. Too many bad takes [at the plate].”

Dombrowski also landed J.D. Martinez at almost the eleventh hour of last year’s spring training, then watched Benintendi, Bogaerts, Devers, and Betts especially come into their own, Betts almost running away with last year’s American League Most Valuable Player award. Marry that to Price and Sale shaking away whatever problems they might have had otherwise, and the Red Sox turned the 2018 postseason into a thrill that climaxed when Sale struck out the side to end the World Series hoisting the trophy in Dodger Stadium.

Except that there were a few serious cracks in the structure Dombrowski finished atop Cherington’s foundation:

* Almost typical of a Dombrowski administration, the Red Sox didn’t just empty the farm, they took a torch to it. Assorted observers say the farm’s being rebuilt little by little, though.

* Dombrowski ignored the Red Sox bullpen almost entirely both last offseason and approaching this year’s new single mid-season trade deadline. Some say it’s outperformed its expectations this year; others say it became taxed too heavily as one after another Red Sox starter faltered for assorted reasons—especially after they were barely worked in spring training and looked like spring-training pitchers in April.

* Betts has one more season coming under Red Sox control and, unless something happens between now and October 2020 to constitute an offer he can’t refuse, it looks as though he’s going to play the market for the first time then. The Red Sox may have ideas about trading him this winter, but if they go there they won’t get that solid a return for a one-year rental.

* Martinez is posting another magnificent season at the plate, but he has an opt-out clause he can exercise at season’s end and enough observing the Red Sox fear he’s liable to try playing hardball. For more money? For a longer commitment? Nobody knows just yet, but the Red Sox have to brace themselves for either.

* With Nathan Eovaldi, a postseason hero out of the bullpen last fall, missing too much time to injury this year and then having to shake away rust in a return to the rotation, it leaves the Red Sox with him, Sale, and Price as underperformers among the walking wounded and on long-term contracts while they’re at it.

In fact, Sale—who’s now done for the season thanks to pitching elbow inflammation—won’t even see his contract extension begin until 2020, but some argue Dombrowski signing him to that extension might have seeded Dombrowski’s end. Sale swore when signing that his shoulder troubles were behind him. Everyone wanted to believe it. Then his inconsistent 2019—brilliance here, battery there—ended prematurely when his elbow immolated. Uh-oh.

But there’ve been enough bright lights in Red Sox fatigues to make you confident they can win next year. Betts, Bogaerts, and Devers still make for a powerful threesome at the plate, though the Red Sox may want to think hard and start thinking now about keeping Betts in the family. Even if Henry wants to trim payroll up the street, he can’t afford to let his franchise player leave the family.

Benintendi shook away his first half inconsistencies and is having a magnificent second half, and he should be ready for a full season’s high-level production in 2020. Rodriguez is having a breakout season. Matt Barnes and Brandon Workman have become late-inning godsends out of the bullpen.

And rookie reliever Darwinzon Hernandez’s bullpen performance in his first 25 gigs (2.83 ERA; 2.17 fielding-independent pitching [FIP]; 17.0 K/9) in addition to his widely enough reported early maturity may mean the Red Sox’s late-game/ending-game wipeout option of the future is preparing for that future already, even if Cora isn’t anxious to smother the kid with hype.

But Jhoulys Chacin, whom the Red Sox signed after the Brewers parted ways with him late last month, has no such fear. In a perfect position to know, Chacin isn’t afraid to compare Hernandez to Josh Hader, the Brewers’ bullpen assassin. “He reminds me of Hader,” Chacin tells MassLive.com’s Christopher Smith. “He throws that raised fastball that some guys just can’t catch up.

“I’ve talked to him a lot since I’ve been here,” Chacin continued. “I want him to stay healthy and keep doing what he’s been doing. I played with Hader and to see his fastball just raise up, (Hernandez’s) fastball does pretty much the same, too. Like I said, he just needs to stay healthy and take his approach every day to the field and I think he can be a pretty good pitcher.”

It isn’t just Hernandez’s fastball. He’s developed a solid slider and has a curve ball with wipeout potential. Any way you look at him, Hernandez at 22 may hold the Red Sox bullpen’s future in his left hand.

The Red Sox won’t talk publicly about Dombrowski’s execution just yet. Give them credit, sort of, for doing it almost stealthily. The NFL’s New England Patriots hogged the weekend headlines, first signing controversial wide receiver Antoine Brown, after he wriggled his way out of Oakland, then blowing the Pittsburgh Steelers out 33-3 Sunday night to open their season. The Red Sox dropped the guillotine on Dombrowski almost noiselessly.

They left Cora to be the public face of the putsch. It’s not exactly Cora’s most comfortable position, as he made clear after Sunday night’s loss when he was told the blade sliced  through Dombrowski’s neck. “I’m surprised and shocked, obviously,” the manager said. “Right now, I don’t have too much to say. This is the guy that gave me a chance to come here and be a big-league manager. They just told me so I’m not ready to talk about it.”

Martinez and Rick Porcello have said they were all but blindsided over executing Dombrowski, to whom both players were close going back to their Detroit days. Porcello had enough on his plate apologising publicly to Red Sox fans for his, shall we say, modest performance this season, without losing a man he considered a friend.

“At the end of the day” the righthanded former Cy Young Award winner said, “we’re the players who are on the field and we’re the ones who can make or break a lot of things. Ultimately, the onus comes on us. I’m still processing everything. Processing myself, too. It’s really hard to reflect on it, too. I’ll have potentially a better answer for you in a couple days. You never like to see anybody lose their job over what we’re doing on the field.”

As peculiar as it might sound to read in print, the Yankees have had little but front office stability with Brian Cashman as their general manager since 1998—and only one World Series title to show since the turn of the century. The Red Sox have had five full-time general managers since 1998 (Dan Duquette, Mike Port, Epstein, Cherington, and Dombrowski)—and four World Series titles to show since the turn of the century.

A lot of teams would kill for the Red Sox’s 21st Century track record—four World Series rings in fifteen years—even with the extremes of maximum success and (thanks to three dead-last division finishes) maximum recess. And a lot of GMs or baseball ops presidents would kill for Dombrowski’s overall resume: two World Series rings (his other ring: the 1997 Marlins), two American League pennants (the Tigers), in a little over two decades.

But a lot of them wouldn’t turn the farm into the dust bowl to get there, either.

The Red Sox for now will be run by a trio of assistant GMs, Brian O’Halloran, Eddie Romero (the son of 1986 pennant-winning Red Sox spare part Ed Romero), and Zack Scott. Several reports say Romero among the three is most considered to be a full GM/baseball ops president in waiting. Maybe the Red Sox won’t wait too long to make it happen.

A real Saturday night special

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2019-09-08 AaronBarrett

Eyes red after weeping for joy, Nationals reliever Aaron Barrett tips his cap from the dugout Saturday night.

Even down the stretch of the stretch, some things transcend ratings and standings. Aaron Barrett became one of them Saturday night.

When the Nationals righthander was sent out to pitch the bottom of the fifth, it may have been enough that he could be up for the assignment at all, never mind working a scoreless inning in a game that eventually became a ninth-straight Braves win.

And it wasn’t low leverage, either, despite the end of the Braves’s batting order looming. This wasn’t a mop-up assignment on either end of a ferocious blowout or to hold fort in a lost cause. Barrett relieved Nats starter Austin Voth with the Nats down a mere 2-1 and Ronald Acuna, Jr. looming as the third man scheduled to hit.

Maybe Barrett’s kind of comeback was the kind that moves a manager to trust his heart equal to trusting his stuff. It isn’t every major league pitcher who survives Tommy John surgery and a followup broken humerus bone to throw even one pitch, never mind a scoreless inning.

Barrett didn’t exactly start the gig the right way, walking Adeiny Hechevarria on four straight to open the inning. But he made sure Hechevarria was the only Braves runner of the frame. He got Braves starting pitcher Julio Teheran to foul out to first on 1-2. And then came Acuna, who was perfectly capable of spreading the Braves’ lead and the Nats’ concurrent miseries with a single swing.

The husky righthander with the doll-like face under his beard went right back to work. He caught Acuna looking at a strike one two-seam fastball on the upper inside corner. He got Acuna to swing right over a second two-seam fastball that hit the floor of the strike zone. He caught Acuna looking at a sweetly diving slider that landed smack dab on the low outside corner.

It was Barrett’s first major league punchout in 1,499 days, but the way he did it would leave a neurosurgeon envious of that kind of precision.

And when he got Ozzie Albies—who homered in the first—to loft a changeup to moderately short center field for the side, Barrett wiped tears from his eyes with the front of his Nats jersey as he stepped down from the mound toward the dugout. Where manager Dave Martinez and his grinning teammates high-fived and embraced him. Then Barrett took a seat, clutching the towel Martinez handed him, and wept unashamedly into that towel.

A three-run Atlanta sixth, including back-to-back homers by Brian McCann and Matt Joyce, still lurked ahead. So did a Nationals run scoring on a seventh-inning double play, and so did Juan Soto sending a two-run double to the back of center field in the eighth.

So, unfortunately, did the Nats falling ten games behind the Braves in the National League East with the 5-4 loss, while keeping a two-game grip on the league’s first wild card, while the Braves added to a 20-4 string since 11 August and a thirteenth straight home win, the Show’s most since the Indians did it in their pennant-winning 2016.

None of which really overthrew Barrett’s first major league inning in four years. “After the outing was over,” he managed to say after the game, “I’m just walking off and all the emotions just hit me. Just, ‘You did it, man. You did it’.”

He’d been one solid element of the 2014 Nats bullpen with a 2.66 ERA, a 2.59 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP), a 10.8 strikeouts-per-nine rate, and 49 punchouts in 40 2/3 innings. But he had a rough seventh-inning appearance in Game Four of that year’s division series sweep at the Giants’ hands, walking the bases loaded, then wild-pitching tying run Joe Panik home with Pablo Sandoval at the plate.

He pitched in terrible luck in 2015: a 2.21 FIP against a 4.60 ERA in forty appearances before going down to Tommy John surgery. Then, in his first return, his humerus bone snapped hard enough that those who were there could hear it resemble a gunshot, according to MLB.com’s Nats beat writer Jamal Collier. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post described it as “look[ing] like his elbow had ‘exploded’.”

Barrett subsequently began the long trek back up from the lowest minor leagues until his 2.75 ERA and 62 strikeouts in 52 1/3 innings at Harrisburg (AA) this year earned him the callup to the Nats. His wife, parents, in-laws, brothers, and physical therapist were at SunTrust Park Saturday. (Barrett lives just outside Atlanta itself.)

They plus thousands of Nats fans hope this is a comeback that sticks, that Barrett even at 31 continues his pitching career at all, never mind in the Show. They surely know others haven’t been that fortunate. Including one whose pitching arm humerus bone betrayed him likewise in 1988.

Dave Dravecky survived cancer in that bone to make a gutsy return to the Giants the following season, beating the Reds with an eight-inning performance. His very next start, against the Expos: the humerus broke while he delivered a pitch to Hall of Famer Tim Raines, sending Dravecky down in a tumbling heap. Season over.

During the subsequent on-field celebration when the Giants beat the Cubs in the 1989 National League Championship Series: arm broken again. X-rays showed the cancer came back as profoundly as Dravecky himself. Career over. Two years later: arm and shoulder amputated. He found a second career as a Christian motivational speaker and writer, often collaborating with his wife, Jan.

Things like that remind you to live in the moment and make it count for as long as you have the moment. Aaron Barrett plans to do just that. Even if he might have a Comeback Player of the Year award in his 2020 to come. With his spirit, don’t rule it out. “You dream about the moment,” Barrett told Collier. “You picture the moment, you try to visualize what it’s going to be like, and you know whatever moment or whatever happens, it’s unlike anything you envisioned.”

He may or may not have envisioned catching Ronald Acuna, Jr. with his pants down for strike three. But doing it only sweetened the rare soils from which Barrett hopes to continue emerging to stay.

How a Verlander Cy would make history

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Houston Astros v Toronto Blue Jays

Justin Verlander during his no-hitter against the Blue Jays; if he wins this year’s AL Cy Young Award, he’ll make league history in another way . . .

Even I didn’t catch on and I was watching the game. But Justin Verlander’s no-hitter last Sunday could put him into the history books for reasons other than the no-hitter himself.

That’s because, according to Jayson Stark, five pitchers have thrown no-hitters in the same seasons in which they won Cy Young Awards and Verlander, in theory anyway, could become the sixth. But he’d still make history if he wins this year’s American League Cy—because no American League pitcher has yet won the Cy the same year they went no-no.

The previous five: Jake Arrieta (Cubs), Clayton Kershaw (Dodgers), Hall of Famer Roy Halladay (Phillies), Mike Scott (Astros), and Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax (Dodgers). National Leaguers all. And Koufax did it twice: in 1963, when he pitched the second of his four career no-hitters; and, in 1965, when his fourth proved that practise really makes perfect.

That’s not Verlander’s only shot at the history book this year. (If he does win, it would be his second Cy Young Award.) Suppose he and his rotation mate Gerrit Cole finish one and two in the American League Cy Young Award voting. (It could happen, folks.) According to Stark, it’d be the first time rotation mates ever finished 1-2 in the AL Cy Young vote.

And only one pair of starting rotation mates ever finished 1-2 in a Cy Young Award vote before. No, it wasn’t Koufax and Hall of Famer Don Drysdale. Good guess, though. Koufax won three Cys when it was still a major league award, not one in each league, and he won all three unanimously. Drysdale won it in 1962 even though it’s arguable that Cincinnati’s Bob Purkey probably should have won the award; Dean Chance (Angels) won the 1964 Cy but Koufax was posting a Cy-worth season when it ended after the baserunning injury that exposed his elbow arthritis at last.

It took until 2001 for rotation mates to finish 1-2 in a Cy Young Award vote: Hall of Famer Randy Johnson won the National League award, and should-be Hall of Famer Curt Schilling finished second. The Big Unit, of course, can’t complain since he won five Cy Young Awards including four straight; Schilling’s major Cy Young Award problem is having Cy-worth seasons when someone else was a) just a shade better or b) having a career year.

IF NO KOUFAX—Suppose Sandy Koufax wasn’t in the Show when he copped those three major league-awarded Cy Young Awards? Who would have won them in 1963, 1965, and 1966?

If you go by wins above a replacement-level player, and if Cy Young voters went by it in 1963 (yes, we’re theorising, since nobody thought about WAR back then), the winner would have been . . . Dick Ellsworth, the 23-year-old Cubs lefthander who just so happened to have his career year.

Ellsworth was credited with 22 wins, but he posted career-best full-season 2.11 earned run average (second in the National League to Koufax) and 2.68 fielding-independent pitching. Hall of Famer Juan Marichal won 25 games and had a sub-3.00 ERA for the first time in his career (2.42) and a solid 2.62 FIP.

So how did Ellsworth end up with more WAR than Marichal? Easy: Ellsworth pitched in maybe the National League’s most notorious hitters’ park for a notoriously lousy team still mired in its looney-tooney College of Coaches rotating managers experiment, and he really had to work for those 22 wins. (His ’63 ERA+ was a Show-leading 167.) Marichal’s team was better even though his Giants finished third in the league behind the pennant (and World Series) winning Dodgers and the second-place Cardinals.

Considering that Marichal was credited with 25 wins for a bona-fide pennant contender, it’s entirely possible that if Koufax hadn’t been in the league Marichal would have won the 1963 Cy Young Award. But Koufax was in the league and his ability to miss bats and avoid walks while leading a team to a pennant was just too overwhelming.

Koufax actually didn’t lead major league pitchers in WAR for 1965—Marichal did. So why did Koufax win his second Cy Young Award. Too easy: 26 wins and a fourth no-hitter in as many seasons, which was a perfect game in the bargain. Not to mention pitching the pennant clincher on two days’ rest at the end of a hammer-and-tongs pennant race between the Dodgers and the Giants. And breaking Hall of Famer Bob Feller’s single-season major league strikeout record (with 382) didn’t hurt, either.

But if you went by 1965 WAR Marichal had an MLB-leading 10.3 to Koufax’s fourth-in-Show 8.1. There were two guys in between Marichal and Koufax among the 1965 major league WAR-leading pitchers, both of whom were having their career years: Sam McDowell (Indians) and Jim Maloney (Reds), both of whom finished with 8.2 WAR. And McDowell was arguably better than Maloney that year: McDowell led the American League with a 2.18 ERA and a 2.08 FIP; Maloney’s were a few points higher than Sudden Sam’s.

In 1966, the Dodgers and the Giants went at it for a final time among those 1960s pennant races and this time Koufax led the Show with his 10.3 WAR. He also led with a) his fifth-straight league-leading ERA (1.73, which also led the Show for the third time), his sixth-straight Show-leading FIP (2.07), his fourth Show strikeout title (317), and a Show-leading 27 wins.

Marichal finished right behind Koufax with 9.1 WAR, and Hall of Famer Jim Bunning (Phillies) finished with 9.0. As a matter of fact, only one American League pitcher finished in the top ten Show WAR among the hurlers in ’66: Gary Peters (White Sox), with 5.3.

It’s really to mourn that Juan Marichal, the arguable best righthanded pitcher of the 1960s, never won a Cy Young Award, either the MLB version or the league version, but it wasn’t his fault that a) Sandy Koufax was his contemporary through 1966, and b) someone else not named Koufax had either a career year (Dean Chance, 1964; Mike McCormick, 1967), an extraterrestrial year (Hall of Famer Bob Gibson, 1968), or came into his own completely and to stay (Hall of Famer Tom Seaver, 1969) during several of Marichal’s best seasons.

WHITHER WHITEY?—You may have noticed Hall of Famer Whitey Ford missing from the above discourse. In 1963, the Yankee bellwether got credit for 24 wins while helping lead his Yankees to (what a surprise) the pennant. So why didn’t Ford get much of a Cy Young Award nod that year?

For one thing, Ford wasn’t quite as good as Koufax and Marichal at missing bats; he lived on the ground ball as well as generally avoiding walks. For another thing, Ford got slightly better run support per start than Koufax, Marichal, and Ellsworth did in 1963.

On the other hand, his 24 wins were the second and final time Ford was a 20+ game-winner. And both those seasons came following the Casey Stengel era. The legend about Stengel and Ford is generally true; the Ol’ Perfesser really did tend to save Ford for the Yankees’ best opponents if he could help it.

According to Jay Jaffe’s The Cooperstown Casebook, a researcher named Jason Brannon discovered that Ford made forty percent more starts against the Yankees’ top two rivals than its bottom two in the Stengel era. When Ralph Houk succeeded Stengel starting in 1961, Ford made seven more starts (39) than in the only season Stengel allowed him to make more than thirty. And what do you know: Whitey won the Cy Young Award that year.

Except that he won 25 games but shows only 3.7 WAR. Even if you think Edwin Starr was right (War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!), you should know the reason: the 1961 Yankees simply bludgeoned the competition with all those home runs, and they could make any pitcher look like a Hall of Famer, never mind a Whitey Ford who is a bona-fide Hall of Famer.

(The ’61 Yankees are also slightly overrated as a team because of all those home runs and the Mantle-Maris home run chase. If you take the word of Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups, and it’s a good word to take, five Yankee teams were actually far enough better; from first to fifth—the 1998, 1927, 1939, 1923, and 1937 editions. Me, I’d have thrown in the 1954 edition, if only because there’s something a little sad about a team winning 103 games and not winning the pennant . . . because the Indians chose ’54 to have their career year.)

POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC—Dick Ellsworth, alas, had a 1966 he’d have just as soon forgotten. At age 26 had a respectable 3.46 FIP but his ERA barely missed reaching 4.00 . . . and he was hung with a major league-leading 22 losses. And the 1966 Cubs finished in tenth place.

The lefthander probably should have suspected it was going to be that kind of year when Topps released his baseball card in the spring. Bad enough: the player shown on the face was righthanded. Worse: The the photograph on the front was actually Ken Hubbs, the Cubs’ second baseman (and 1962 NL Rookie of the Year)—who’d been killed in a February 1964 small plane crash.

The good news is that the 1966 Ellsworth/Hubbs card may not be all that valuable among collectible baseball cards. ComC, the Redmond, Washington-based card and comic trading Website, lists a mint condition Ellsworth/Hubbs at no higher than $55.74. The most valuable Ellsworth card? The 1964 card he shares with Sandy Koufax and Bob Friend (Pirates) showing the National League’s 1963 ERA leaders, at $142.48.

Losing Ken Hubbs was devastating to the Cubs and to baseball, of course, especially given the irony that he took up flying to conquer his fear of it. But Dick Ellsworth didn’t deserve to be embarrassed the way he was on his 1966 baseball card, either.

The more things change . . .

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2019-09-05 JimmieFoxxFrankieFrisch

Generational debates on player “toughness” and baseball conditions didn’t end with Jimmie Foxx (left), Frankie Frisch, and a group of fellow Hall of Famers in 1954. They won’t end ever, really.

“Today they don’t have the great number of tough players and hitters. That is because life is different. As a kid I used to shovel manure with a pitchfork. Today everything is done by machines.”

If I gave you that quote without attribution, you’d think it came from one of today’s old-school fans or analysts who think, erroneously, that baseball today lacks “toughness.” But it doesn’t come from one of today’s grumps. It comes from Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx. And he said it to Sports Illustrated in 1954.

A present-day SI writer, Jon Tayler, exhumes it for a kind of state-of-the-game address. And it might be fun to look at what the other Hall of Famers still alive in 1954 said about the state of the game then. The title of that piece: “Are Today’s Baseball Players Sissies Compared to The Old Timers?” You may or may not be surprised at who said what.

“Baseball is a more aggressive game today,” said outfielder Paul (Big Poison) Waner, answering clearly in the negative. “The players can’t let up a bit. In my day we could. Today the pitcher has to throw hard to every man in the line-up. That’s the reason for so many substitutions. There are many more home-run hitters playing today. And there are cracker-jack fielders.”

Waner should only have been able to see the kind of hard throwing that was yet to come. In 1954, Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson were playing basketball on college scholarships (Koufax at the University of Cincinnati, Gibson at Creighton University), Sudden Sam McDowell was in middle or junior high school, minor league legend Steve Dalkowski was still in high school, and Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan were still in grade school.

Rogers Hornsby (second baseman), who wasn’t exactly baseball’s Mr. Congeniality (when he was canned as the St. Louis Browns’s manager in 1952, Browns players led by pitcher Ned Garver presented owner Bill Veeck with an engraved trophy), answered the headline in the affirmative. Feel like a little wager that without knowing it was Hornsby this could have been said by Goose Gossage?

“[I]t’s the fault of the managers, not the players,” Hornsby said. “They change men too often. A pitcher will be removed for one bad pitch. A left-handed batter will be removed for a right-hander, for the percentage. Would they ever have taken out Cobb, Speaker, Wagner or Frisch?”

You wonder if Hornsby wasn’t taking a jab at Casey Stengel, a product of the John McGraw school when all was said and done, but who made a dark and successful art out of changing men, playing percentages, manipulating relief pitching—and kicking the American League’s ass for most of a decade plus while he was at it—during the era Hornsby lamented.

Al Simmons (outfielder) demurred from Hornsby’s assessment. “It was soft for us,” said Bucketfoot Al. “We had no Sunday games. Besides double-headers, today’s players have to play day, night and Sunday baseball.” The doubleheader today is the exception, not the rule, but players in 2019 also have to play night, Sunday, and day baseball. Often while traveling from one coast to the other or north to south.

I bet you think the following remark could be said by any reporter, columnist, or analyst today: “Many of the players today are fully as good as most of the old-timers. But comparisons are difficult to make. One of Ty Cobb’s great assets was base-stealing; in the 1915 season he stole 96 bases . . . With the rabbit ball today, why risk an out? It’s better to wait for the long hit.”

And I bet you’re wrong. That was actually Carl Hubbell, he who wore the silks of the New York Giants while striking out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Bucketfoot Al, and Joe Cronin in succession in the 1934 All-Star Game. And Hubbell had a point if you consider it to be that there were (and still are) those who considered 1950s baseball, which some of today’s old schoolers still think was the game’s Golden Age, to be too little more than a big power game. (In 1954, Little Looie Aparicio was just about to start the real return of the stolen base.)

To the question in the 1954 headline Cy Young (there’s a pitching award named in his honour, I think, wink wink) said, “Yes. They can’t take it. I’ve seen some of them threaten the pitcher when a ball brushed them back. Most rugged old-timers took this as a part of the game. It’s the rule today to use several pitchers in one game. Iron Man McGinnity pitched 55 games for the Giants in 1903. He won three double-headers in one month.”

I don’t suppose it crossed Young’s mind that in the dead ball era pitchers such as himself weren’t oriented or taught all that much to try throwing the proverbial lamb chops past the proverbial wolves, or that dead-ball pitching’s number one orientation was inducing contact, the more the better, and that the lack of power pitchers in the dead ball era normally meant that getting hit by a pitch wasn’t liable to leave a welt or a splitting headache.

Would it be fair to have asked Young if he would have flinched pitching against, say, Bob Feller, and had to face retaliation from Feller if Young had knocked down or drilled one of Feller’s Indians? Would it have been fair to question Walter Johnson’s “toughness” because the legend has it that whenever the gentlemanly Big Train did hit a batter he’d be almost apologetic about it and genuinely hopeful that he didn’t injure the poor guy?

“Players today like Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Duke Snider, Eddie Mathews, Mickey Mantle, Bob Feller, Phil Rizzuto and [sic] Pee Wee Reese are as rugged as any of the old-timers,” said third baseman Pie Traynor. “The trouble is that they are handicapped by having to play day and night baseball. This shortens their careers.”

Brushing aside that Rizzuto proved to have the shortest career of the players Traynor named, and that with the exception of Mantle and Mathews all those players had playing careers interrupted by World War II service, Traynor was probably right about their toughness but not quite right about the day/night conundrum. Night ball shortened a lot of Hall of Famers’ and others’ statistics more than their careers; injuries tended to shorten their careers more.

Williams (nineteen seasons) and Musial (22 seasons) would finish very long careers the majority of which seasons were played in the night ball era. So would Feller (eighteen), Mathews (seventeen), Mantle (eighteen), Snider (eighteen), and Reese (sixteen).

In due course you would see such protracted, predominantly night ball careers, from such Hall of Famers as Mantle (eighteen years) Henry Aaron (23 years), Ernie Banks (nineteen), Johnny Bench (seventeen), George Brett (21), Lou Brock (nineteen), Chipper Jones (nineteen), Willie Mays (22), Willie McCovey (22), Joe Morgan (22), Mike Schmidt (eighteen), and Jim Thome (22) among others among the position players.

Among the mostly- or exclusively night ball-era Hall of Fame pitchers? Hello, Warren Spahn (21; “He’ll never get into the Hall of Fame, he won’t stop pitching,” Stan Musial once cracked about him), Robin Roberts (nineteen), Whitey Ford (sixteen), Bob Gibson (seventeen), Juan Marichal (sixteen), Tom Seaver (twenty), Steve Carlton (24), Ferguson Jenkins (nineteen), Dennis Eckersley (24), Greg Maddux (23), Tom Glavine (22), Randy Johnson (22), Mike Mussina (eighteen), and Mariano Rivera (nineteen), among others.

But baseball’s rolls also include too many players whose careers were compromised or shortened by injuries, especially by being foolish enough to try playing through them regardless. That kind of “toughness” gets you some immediate admiration but costs your team a useful-or-better asset and you a career.

They still talk about Mickey Mantle’s what-ifs (forgetting that what was was impossibly great regardless) despite almost his entire career being an orthopedic experiment. And, to this day, baseball fans of long standing lament the what-ifs regarding a lot of players whom injuries compromised or finished: Pistol Pete Reiser, Carl Erskine, Karl Spooner, Herb Score, Wally Bunker, Tony Conigliaro, Mark (The Bird) Fidrych (who came back too soon from one injury too many), Butch Hobson, and Kirby Puckett (who made it to the Hall of Fame anyway), among others. They’re liable to do it regarding David Wright, Joe Mauer, and Buster Posey, too.

Funny that Hornsby should have mentioned his fellow second baseman Frankie Frisch. Frisch had something to say about whether players in 1954 were sissies comparied to players in his day or earlier. Which might surprise those today who remember how Frisch (and his running mate/successor Bill Terry) were so convinced nobody was as good as the good old days’ players that they corrupted the Hall of Fame by ramming as many of their Cardinals’ and Giants’ cronies into the Hall of Fame as they could get away with.

“It’s tough to say who are the tougher,” said the Fordham Flash. “Night games and the rabbit ball have changed everything. The managers seldom play for one run. And the players swing from the end of the bat. But baseball is a nicer game today. They meet you at the train and drive you to the park. TV has them hamming”

If only Frisch hadn’t concluded by adding, “But we got more fun out of the game.” Fun is obviously in the eye of the beholder. But Frisch and company in 1954 should remind us that a Hall of Fame manager named Sparky Anderson would prove right when, continuing his mastery of the double (or more) negative, he’d say in due course, “We try every way we can think to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it.”

And the more things in baseball change, the more most of them stay the same.

Discouraged even when the Mets win?

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2019-09-04 AmedRosarioJoePanik

Amed Rosario and Joe Panik (2) celebrate the Mets’ Wednesday win over the Nats. So why does it still feel discouraging?

Four months ago, Dave Martinez couldn’t live five minutes without yet another pundit or sports talking head measuring him for the electric chair. Four minutes after the Mets blew one to the Nats in the bottom of the ninth that they led by six in the top, on Tuesday night, Martinez can live like a skipper who has about a 99 percent chance of seeing the postseason even by way of the National League’s first wild card.

Even if he and his Nats lose the afternoon after.

And a few moments before the Nationals started their off-the-charts Tuesday overthrow, Martinez had only one message for his players: “If you let this game go like this, it’s not going to be good,” as he put it in his post-game press conference. Kurt Suzuki in the bottom of the ninth finished making damn sure the game didn’t go like that. He also made sure that what was left of the Nationals Park crowd went from chaos to bedlam while he was at it.

After Suzuki’s three-run homer landed halfway up the left field seats Tuesday night, the Mets looked like they wouldn’t live another five minutes without someone, anyone, preparing to stage an intervention on behalf of the Crisis Addiction Anonymous organisation for which this year’s Mets ought to be the founding fathers.

“It kind of just seemed like a bad dream,” said Mets outfielder Brandon Nimmo, who accounted for two of the Mets’ ten Tuesday runs with a fourth-inning sacrifice fly and a ninth-inning homer.  “I don’t know. That’s hard to do even in a Little League game I feel like, come back from [six] runs down in the bottom of the ninth against guys throwing 99 mph. I don’t really have words for it.”

Mets fans thought it was bad enough watching the Mets blow a seven-run lead in what looked like a blowout in the making against the Braves in Atlanta while almost letting the Braves win it at the eleventh hour? That was just a hard day’s night of a 10-8 win. Tuesday night’s 11-10 loss after the Mets had the damn game locked in the vault was they should have known better. And didn’t.

“We had a six-run lead,” lamented Mets manager Mickey Callaway, whose own neck looked as though it were being measured for a guillotine in May. “Major league pitchers got to be able to hold that.”

How could Martinez and his Dancing Nats, the guys who’ve been baseball’s best since 23 May and think nothing of turning the dugout and the clubhouse into Soul Train after epic home runs or hard-earned wins, know that their still-testy, still-implosive bullpen was going to be taken off the Tuesday night hook by a Mets bullpen that would have fought the Chicago Fire with incendiaries instead of water and other retardants?

A Wednesday matinee between the two, their final meeting of the regular season, promised to be an anticlimax if the Nats won. Or, if the Mets’ self-immolating bullpen incinerated themselves and the Mets yet again. Well, some promises are made to be broken, after all. Some.

Come Wednesday, Luis Avilan struck out Juan Soto swinging after Jeurys Familia surrendered an RBI single (to ex-Met Asdrubal Cabrera) and a two-run double (to Anthony Rendon); Seth Lugo—who wasn’t allowed to work a second inning Tuesday night, with results that will still live in Mets infamy—got his usual two-inning gig and shook off a pair of hits with no runs; and, Justin Wilson pitched a spotless bottom of the ninth.

And the Mets held on to win 8-4. Which cynics, meaning practically any Met fan on the planet, might suggest means it just isn’t safe anymore to trust these Mets with any lead more than four runs. They even had another six-run lead in the middle of the sixth—and let the Nats get a little frisky in the bottom of the inning.

They tied the Nats at a run in the top of the third when spaghetti-bat outfielder Juan Lagares, of all people, led off and hit Nats starter Anibal Sanchez’s hanging cutter over the center field fence. They doubled their pleasure in the top of the fourth when aging second baseman Robinson Cano, returning fresh from the injured list, blasted a first-pitch splitter the other way, into the Mets’ bullpen in left center, with right fielder Michael Conforto (leadoff double) aboard.

And they kicked the train into overdrive when Pete Alonso sent his National League-leading 45th bomb inside the left field foul pole with one out in the top of the fifth.

But with Mets starter Zack Wheeler labouring through five innings and 101 pitches despite surrendering nothing more than Nats shortstop Trea Turner’s two-out RBI single in the bottom of the second, Callaway decided he had no choice but to open the bullpen, and Familia came forth to open the Washington sixth.

Once the Mets’ effective closer, Familia hasn’t been the same since the Mets’ defense blew three World Series saves for him in 2015, or since Conor Gillaspie homered off him to help the Mets lose the 2016 wild card game, not to mention a domestic violence suspension and a blood clot putting paid to his 2017 before the Mets traded him away during 2018.

This season Familia’s been somewhere between lost and implosive, though he had a recent stretch of serviceability before he turned a two-all tie into an eventual 5-2 loss to the Phillies with a little help from a walk to Rhys Hoskins and, in due course, a three-run double by Scott Kingery on Sunday.

Now he took the mound in Nationals Park, walked Gerardo Parra and pinch hitter Andrew Stevenson back-to-back, and struck Turner out swinging. But he threw Cabrera—still bent on making the Mets pay for failing to re-sign him last winter—a creamy pitch that got turned into an RBI single. And he threw Rendon more fodder for the Nats third baseman to solidify a Most Valuable Player case in a walk year, Rendon driving one to the back of right center for a two-run double.

After Avilan dispatched Soto for the side, it took until the top of the eighth for the Mets to thicken the cushion, when Jeff McNeil squirted an RBI single through the right side for the seventh Mets run. The Mets made a push against returning Nats reliever Sean Doolittle in the top of the ninth but Doolittle managed to strand first and third with no scoring damage.

Then Wilson got a ground out, a line out, and shook off a walk to Suzuki—after spinning him around and into the dirt on the first pitch, perhaps just a little reminder against getting too comfy following Tuesday night’s discomfort—to end the game by getting Victor Robles to force Suzuki at second.

You’re encouraged to see a team recover that swiftly from a disaster like Tuesday night. Whether or not it means said team has one more run of derring-do in them before the regular season’s over. But maybe the Mets picked up a piece of Tuesday night news out of Pennsylvania that helped remind them it could always be worse.

Because as bad as it was for the Mets Tuesday night, it was absolutely worse for their Syracuse Mets AAA affiliate. The Mets blew a six-run lead in the ninth? The S-Mets blew a seven-run lead in the eighth, with the International League’s North Division title at stake in a tiebreaking game. But the S-Mets bullpen let the Scranton-Wilkes Barre RailRiders overthrow them, 14-13.

The Mets have been playing for a mere second National League wild card that looks more and more distant the deeper the stretch drive runs. Playing with dynamite, or matches at least, isn’t the way to reach it.

By and large the big boys have reminded the Mets how invincible they aren’t when they look like champions in the making but do it mostly at the expense of the bottom crawlers. Taking two of three from the first NL wild card-leading Nats, just like sweeping the American League second wild card-tied Indians last month, may yet prove aberrational.

Hi! We’re the Mets! And we’re crisis junkies. So who’s going to be the first Met to stand up, make the confession, and begin the recovery process?

The Mets have now won twelve of their last sixteen series, and have won the season series against the Nats, 12-7, but they don’t make you feel too encouraged anymore when they win. And the Nats don’t make you feel discouraged even when they lose two of three. (Even when you think they might think about joining CAA themselves.) Not until they open against the Braves Friday night, anyway.