Pumpsie Green, RIP: The modest pioneer

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2017-07-19 PumpsieGreen

Pumpsie Green poses with three Red Sox who helped make his integrating the team that much more bearable. From left: third baseman Frank Malzone, shortstop Don Buddin, and first baseman Pete Runnels.

For those whose hobbies include forging off the wall trivia questions, here’s a beauty.  What does Pumpsie Green have in common with Jackie Robinson and Lou Brock? The answer is two parts: 1) Green, too, was the first black man to play on a particular major league baseball team. 2) He was also a teammate of the now-late Ernie Broglio, traded most notoriously for Hall of Famer Brock in 1964.

Part two is the far less problematic, of course: Green and Broglio were teammates for El Cerrito High School in California. Part one, alas, is the more so: Green was the first black man admitted to the ranks of the Red Sox, who were, alas, the final team in major league baseball to admit a black player and one of the first, alas far further, to reject Robinson, Willie Mays, and others over a decade earlier.

A catcher/first baseman in high school, Elijah Jerry Green, Jr., who died at 85 Wednesday morning, two years older and the morning after cancer claimed Broglio, became a middle infielder who wasn’t as well endowed with baseball gifts as Robinson and wasn’t built to blow the walls down. Pioneers—reluctant (a word so often used to describe Green) and otherwise—are quiet as often as they are vibrant. And Green, a handsome young man with a smile that said “Hello, my friend,” was as quiet as the season was long.

He was the son of an Oklahoma transplant who’d farmed in the Sooner State before moving his family to California. The old man became a sanitation worker and mother worked on the Oakland docks as a welder during World War II before becoming a convalescent nurse. It was Mom who gave Green his nickname, calling him Pumpsie from when he was a toddler. He had no idea what inspired it.

But loving baseball as he did, he had a fine idea what inspired him to set his sights on a possible major league life. The tough old Pacific Coast League integrated in 1948, and when the Oakland Oaks hosted a barnstorming team of all-stars led by Jackie Robinson himself, the teenage Green—who attended as many Oaks games as he could—wasn’t going to miss the game.

“I scraped up every nickel and dime together I could find,” Green told Herb Crehan for Red Sox Heroes of Yesteryear. “And I was there. I had to see that game . . . I still remember how exciting it was.” Green’s ambition then was to play for the Oaks, whose shortstop Artie Wilson was their first black player, and Green modeled his own playing style on Wilson, who once led the PCL in batting average and stolen bases.

The Oaks did sign Green but assigned him to an A-level affiliate in Washington state. By 1955, he was Red Sox property, but when they wanted to send him to their affiliate in Montgomery, Alabama, Green was only too understandably reluctant. Young black men were about as anxious to go to Alabama then as a cobra might be to go on a dinner date with a mongoose.

By spring 1957 Green impressed the Red Sox’s farm system administrators, including then-system director Johnny Murphy, the former Yankee relief pitcher and future Mets general manager. He was assigned to the Oklahoma City Indians in the AA-level Texas League, where he discovered he was good for a break whenever the Indians had to play the Shreveport (Louisiana) Sports.

“When the team went to Shreveport,” Green recalled, “I didn’t go, because they didn’t allow blacks to play in Louisiana. So I had a three- or four-day vacation.” Some vacation. But he played well enough with the Indians to earn a promotion to the Minneapolis Millers, whom the Red Sox made their AAA affiliate after the New York Giants moved to San Francisco and surrendered their rights to Minneapolis, where they first planned to move.

Every major league team except the Red Sox had integrated by the time Green became a Miller in 1958. Green didn’t play particularly well on the regular season but, in the American Association postseason, he went 5-for-12 with four runs scored and three batted into help the Millers win it.

The good news is that Green was finally invited to spring training with the Red Sox themselves in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1959. The bad news is that spring training was the only place the Red Sox broke the colour line at first. They refused to do as some of the other integrated teams did, forcing Green to stay at a hotel seventeen miles from camp because the team’s regular spring hotel near camp refused to admit black guests.

Green finally found spring training lodging at the hotel where the Giants trained in Phoenix, the Giants having been integrated since 1949 and compelled the hotel to accept the entire team long since. And despite being considered the best rookie in camp, the Red Sox officially seemed ambivalent about him. Their manager at the time was Pinky Higgins, a former infielder known as a close buddy of owner Tom Yawkey but also known to be rather a bigot.

Even in Howard Bryant’s magnificent study of the Red Sox’s and Boston’s racial growing pains, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, it’s not entirely clear whether it was Yawkey or Higgins who declared, a decade earlier, “There’ll be no niggers on this ballclub as long as I have anything to say about it.”

Most notoriously in the mid-1940s, the Red Sox worked out Robinson, Mays, and other black players in sessions long since shown to have been shams for show after enough in the Boston press (particularly Boston Record columnist and Ted Williams nemesis Dave Egan) and the increasingly influential black press (such as the Pittsburgh Courier) pressured the team to do it.

While the rest of the Show caught on, little by little, to the good the black talent pool could do their teams, the Red Sox remained clueless. And, futile. The black talent pool didn’t suddenly make winners of all the teams, of course (we mean you, Cubs, for one example), but choosing to remain in the paleozoic era did the Red Sox no favours, either.

Higgins left room for further ambivalence when he sent Green back to Minneapolis to begin the 1959 season. “The Red Sox won no prizes this spring for the way they treated Pumpsie Green,” fumed Boston Globe baseball columnist Harold Kaese. “From a strict baseball point of view they may have been doing the wise thing when they optioned their first Negro player to the Minneapolis farm club yesterday. From every other point of view, they undoubtedly have pulled a colossal boner.”

All this blew around the head of a soft-spoken 25-year-old middle infielder who had no intention of fomenting revolution and who could never grok—even four decades after the fact—why such men as Higgins and other Boston racists had to be as they were. “Sometimes,” he told Bryant for Shut Out, “when I think of the things people like me had to go through, it just sounds so unnecessary. When you think about it, it is almost silly, how much time and energy was wasted hating.”

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Pumpsie Green finished his major league career with the early Mets, though he missed the insanity of the original edition of the team.

“His,” Bryant wrote, “is the outsider’s story of life in a very insular city.” Today it seems somewhat difficult to remind yourself that the Jim Crow South wasn’t the only part of the country that couldn’t decide whether, as Malcolm X once phrased it, it should be, “Let’s keep the niggers in their place” or “Let’s keep the Knee-grows in their place.”

“I want to be judged like any other ballplayer,” Green said after his return to Minneapolis. “I don’t want to be a crusader. I just want to play ball.” He finally got his chance with the Red Sox after Higgins—whose alcoholism was almost as notorious around baseball as his racism—was canned in favour of Billy Jurges.

Jurges welcomed Green with open arms, as did such teammates as Hall of Famer Ted Williams plus Pete Runnels and Frank Malzone, the splendid third baseman who had Hall of Fame talent but had been buried in the minors a little too long before he finally made the Red Sox in 1955.

“I used to love to talk to Ted Williams, once of the nicest guys I ever met,” Green once told the Globe. Williams took enough of a liking to Green personally, too, that the Splinter made Green his regular for playing catch to exercise both their throwing arms during spring training and later.

As things turned out, Williams proved far more. His 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech jolted the Hall:

The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty second home run. He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the nature of the game. I hope that some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Pumpsie Green was the reluctant Red Sox pioneer, but his pal Williams instigated the moves that finally brought the best of the Negro Leaguers, including Paige and Gibson, into the Hall of Fame.

Green had other allies among his Red Sox teammates, including pitcher Bill Monbouquette. When coach Del Baker and then Higgins both dropped the N bomb, according to the Society for American Baseball Research, Monbouquette told coach and skipper alike he didn’t want to hear that. “[T]hen [Baker] started to give me a bunch of crap, and I said, ‘I’m going to tell you something. I’ll knock you right on your ass. I don’t care if you’re the coach or not.’ I said, ‘You don’t do things like that!’”

It would be wonderful to say that, when Green was finally brought to the Red Sox, he knocked the team’s and the leagues’ record books for the proverbial loop. He wasn’t that talented, unfortunately. He was good enough for the Show but it wasn’t going to make him a baseball star, never mind a Hall of Famer, on purely baseball grounds.

He has a respectable .357 lifetime on-base percentage and walked a little more often than he struck out, but he was used preponderantly as a pinch swinger and defensive replacement. And by his own admission he probably pressured himself far more than need be to produce in his unique circumstances.

In 1962, Green hit the headlines in one of the most peculiar ways imaginable, when he joined pitcher Gene Conley and walked off the team bus on a hot New York day, after a tough set with the Yankees, looking for refreshment. And, while moseying in and out of assorted watering holes, Conley invited Green to join in heading for Bethlehem in Israel “to be nearer to God.”

The astonished Green elected instead to return to the Red Sox immediately. Conley made his way as far as Idlewild Airport in Queens (not yet renamed for the assassinated President John F. Kennedy) before rejoining the team two days later. “We were just crying in our beer,” Green once remembered.

After that season Green was traded to the embryonic Mets, along with Tracy Stallard, the pitcher known best as the one who served Roger Maris his 61st home run at the end of the 1961 season. The Mets sent the Red Sox third baseman Felix Mantilla, once a comer with the Braves, who’d devolved into a player whose most amazing gift was for going the wrong way when batted balls came his way.

Green needed to knock himself back into shape in spring 1963. The Mets sent him to AAA Buffalo and recalled him in September. He had only 66 plate appearances as a Met but showed a very respectable .278/.409/.426 slash line, even hitting the last of his thirteen lifetime major league home runs off Philadelphia’s Ray Culp on 17 September. He began suffering hip issues, played two more seasons in Buffalo, was released in July 1965, then gave it one more try with the Syracuse Chiefs and retired.

The quiet man called Pumpsie had a fine life after his playing days. He went to college and earned a degree in physical education from San Francisco State, then ran baseball programs in the Berkeley Unified School District and coached the game for a quarter century. Some of his charges eventually made the major leagues, including Glenn Burke, Ruppert Jones, and Claudell Washington.

2019-07-18 PumpsieGreen

Pumpsie Green, serene and happy, throwing out a ceremonial first pitch in Fenway Park.

Green also taught mathematics and helped oversee school security while he was there. When not doing all that, he and his wife, Marie, raised two children, one of whom became a high school teacher and principal herself. And despite his quiet struggle for acceptance with the Red Sox, the years passing by made Green appreciative of just what he achieved there.

“There’s really nothing that interesting about me,” he once told Danny Peary. “I am just an everyday person happy with what I did. I take a lot of pride in having played for the Red Sox. I would like to be remembered in Red Sox history as just another ballplayer.”

One then remembers reading often enough that the Robinsons and Mayses and Larry Dobys and Frank Robinsons were one thing, but the real test would be whether and when black men could be accepted when they were as ordinary as the most ordinary white player, too. Green, however, was ordinary only as a baseball player. As a man, he wasn’t as ordinary as he liked to describe himself. Not even close.

“He laughs bitterly that the Red Sox humiliated Jackie Robinson, that it slept when it could have acquired Willie Mays, and that these twists of fate left it to unassuming Pumpsie Green to integrate the Red Sox,” Bryant wrote.

It is a fact that he is proud of, even if during those days he wanted little to do with the attention that came with being at the epicenter of a moral drama within a franchise and a city. He harbours no bitterness toward the Red Sox or the city of Boston for any reason. He wanted an opportunity to play baseball and they gave him that chance. If he does not rage at being set apart from the Red Sox in those early Scottsdale days, it is this personality that allows him not to be devoured by the past, and that makes him healthier today. It is, he says evenly, what healing is all about.

Green followed the Red Sox for the rest of his life. You may rest very assured that he was among those pumping his fists and cheering at home when the Red Sox—long past their 1950s shame, long enough removed from the Yawkey era, in which the real curse on the team was boneheaded administration, and as well integrated as the day was long—returned at last to the Promised Land, for the first of four such returns after the turn of this century.

“In 1997, they asked me to come back for opening day and throw out the first pitch,” Green told Bryant. “[Then-general manager] Lou Gorman was very friendly. They brought a limousine for me and my wife. We had a hell of a time.” A very different hell of a time than the one he had to make the Red Sox in the first place.

Ernie Broglio, RIP: Talk of the trade

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2019-07-17 ErnieBroglioStanMusial

Ernie Broglio (right) enjoys some dugout levity with Hall of Famer Stan Musial. (Pitcher Larry Jackson is in the background.)

I wish I hadn’t waited. Now I can only say goodbye.

I’d found an address and contact information for Ernie Broglio, the one-time Cardinals pitcher who’d been dealt to the Cubs in the 1964 deal that made a Cardinal out of a talented kid named Lou Brock, with whom the Cubs didn’t seem to know what to do and learned the hard way that the Cardinals knew only too well.

My thought was to interview him not just about the trade that made it seem as though his real surname was BrockforBroglio. Even though I knew from much previous reading that Broglio rather enjoyed talking about it, laughing about it, and mixing in other stories from his baseball life and beyond. A genial man who didn’t take himself too seriously or curse God for any malfortune, he seemed.

“I congratulate all the Hall of Famers,” he once said, “Some I played with, and some I helped put there.” A greater self-valedictory for a pitching career that went from promise to breakdown you’d be hard pressed to find.

I wanted to ask Broglio other questions, too, including and especially about cortisone, shots of which he’d taken two years before the Brock deal. And, about the friendship he struck up with Hall of Famer Brock in the years that followed their very different careers. “I lost a ballgame but I gained a friend,” Ralph Branca once said about Bobby Thomson. Broglio could say plausibly, “I lost a team but I gained a friend.”

As my own cherished new Mets friend Bill Denehy can tell you, too many cortisone shots can portend disaster, as they did for Denehy, who’s now legally blind as a likely result. The smart medical thinking today is that any more than ten cortisone shots can create visual and other issues, but baseball and other sports still seem to rely a little too excessively on them for helping their athletes recover.

After a few delays thanks to other matters of work and life, I finally told myself I would reach out to Ernie Broglio this month. Now I won’t get the chance. He died Tuesday night of cancer at 83; his daughter announced it on social media.

“You live with it,” Broglio told a writer in 2016 about Brock-for-Broglio. “You go along with it. I mean, here you are fifty-some years later after the trade and we’re talking. And I’m thinking, ‘What trade is going to be remembered for 50-something years? I told Lou Brock, ‘I better go before you, because you’re in the Hall of Fame and well-remembered.’ I’m only remembered for the trade.”

Damn it, Broglio’s probably-half-kidding wish came true.

He was an El Cerrito, California product who was so well regarded as a promising pitcher that, in 1953, he went right from high school graduation to signing with the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. The Reds signed him in 1954; the New York Giants bought him out of their system in 1956.

The Giants traded Broglio to the Cardinals with pitcher Marv Grissom (the winning pitcher in Game One, 1954 World Series—the game of Willie Mays’s legendary catch) for three spare parts in 1958. Broglio’s rookie 1959 wasn’t much to brag about, but in 1960 he knocked the National League over.

Armed with a curve ball Lou Brock himself once described as the best in the game at one time, perhaps until Sandy Koufax’s matured, Broglio in 1960 was credited with 21 wins to lead the entire Show; his 148 ERA+ and his 6.8 hits per nine rate were the best in Show as well.

He finished third in the Cy Young Award voting (the award was then given to one pitcher across the board) behind winner Vernon Law (Pirates) and runner-up Warren Spahn (Braves), but his ERA+ and his 7.1 wins above replacement-level (fourth of any player and tops among major league pitchers) make a case that Broglio should have won the Cy Young Award if not for Law’s team winning the pennant.

In 2016, Broglio was told of his position on 1960’s major league WAR list. Ahead of him were only Mays, Henry Aaron, and Ernie Banks. (Behind him, in descending order, were Roger Maris, Hall of Famers Eddie Mathews and Don Drysdale, his Cardinals teammate Ken Boyer, and Hall of Famers Jim Bunning and Mickey Mantle.)

“What? I’m in there? Holy cow,” he exclaimed to the San Jose Mercury News. “With all those great hitters! The Hall of Famers!”

Out of spring training in 1961 Broglio came down with shoulder tendinitis and was given eighteen cortisone shots (about one every other starting assignment) during the season. Several years later, Broglio told that to a doctor who told him, astonished, “That’s five years’ worth!”

He had a modestly successful 1962, but Broglio again came up shining again somewhat in 1963, with eighteen wins and a 2.99 ERA, but not all was well. His pitching elbow joined his shoulder in giving him trouble, perhaps from all those curve balls, which may explain the drops in his hits-per-nine rate (7.3) and his career-high 24 home runs surrendered.

The Cubs didn’t bother looking past his surfaces when they cast their lonely eyes upon him in 1964. They saw an eighteen-game winner who’d been a 21-game winner three years before that and, with an acute need for pitching, didn’t pay close attention to Broglio’s actual health.

“The Cubs didn’t know,” Broglio said a few years ago. “Nowadays, that trade never would have happened.” He was wrong. It wasn’t that the Cubs didn’t know, it was that they chose to ignore.

2019-07-17 ErnieBroglioCubs

Broglio relaxing in Wrigley Field after becoming a Cub . . .

Because about a month or so before Brock-for-Broglio, the Cubs acquired another pitcher from the Cardinals, Lew Burdette, the former longtime second banana (as a pitcher) to Spahn on the Braves. (As pranksters, Burdette and Spahn were equals.) And Burdette heard the whispers soon enough that the Cubs were itching to bring Broglio aboard and that they might have in mind sending Brock to get him.

Burdette told Bob Kennedy—then the top banana among the Cubs’ insane College of Coaches experiment—and anyone else who’d listen that Broglio had elbow trouble and was taking shots. Kennedy himself apparently tried to tell the Cubs front office to look before they leaped because the pool might prove empty.

Apparently, the Cubs thought of Brock as expendable because they simply didn’t know how to work with a center fielder who wasn’t really a power hitter but had speed to burn. (Brock’s signature power moment, unlikely as it was, was in 1962, when he became only the second major leaguer to hit a home run into the Polo Grounds bleachers 460something feet from home, against the Mets—the night before Aaron hit one to about the same spot.)

If the Cubs were willing to part with Brock, the Cardinals were only too happy to send them Broglio without saying a word about Broglio’s medical issues. They also sent the Cubs outfielder Doug Clemens and veteran pitcher Bobby Shantz and got Brock plus pitchers Jack Spring and Paul Toth.

Broglio believed the Cardinals knew exactly what they were doing in both coveting the expendable Brock and in deciding to move Broglio onward. He believed to the day he died, never mind in 2011 when he spoke to ESPN’s William Weinbaum, that the Cardinals knew they were sending the Cubs damaged goods.

“If I remember right, at one time I threw about four or five wild pitches in one ballgame,” Broglio told Weinbaum, “and Bob Uecker was catching and I kind of jokingly said, ‘How come you didn’t protect me?’ He couldn’t. He couldn’t have caught the ball or stopped the ball. They were so far in front of home plate that there was an indication that I had problems with my elbow.”

Broglio laughed while he recalled it, but the Cardinals ended up having the last laugh. They turned up the last men standing after the Phillies collapsed into a potential three-way pennant tie in 1964, and went on to win the World Series. They’ve won ten pennants and five World Series since Brock-for-Broglio. Brock went on to a Hall of Fame career breaking Ty Cobb’s lifetime stolen base record. The Cubs, with egg on their face over the deal, needed a mere five decades plus two years to return to, never mind win a World Series.

Hall of Famer Billy Williams learned of Broglio’s insistence that the Cardinals knew they were sending the Cubs a patient and not a pitcher. “That’s how the game was played then,” he told Weinbaum. “Any time a general manager felt he could put stuff on another organization, that’s what they did.”

Broglio pitched eighteen games for the 1964 Cubs looking nothing like the fellow whose ERA in 1960 was 2.74 or whose 1963 ERA was 2.98. After the season, he underwent ulnar nerve surgery and had bone chips removed from his pitching elbow. It didn’t help.

“I was back for spring training in February, which gave me a total of three months rest,” Broglio remembered. “Nowadays, for the same operation, they give you a year or more. That made my career shorter than I wanted it to be.” Indeed. His ERA for 1965 and 1966: 6.64.

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Broglio at home, in more ways than one.

He took his wife, Barbara, and their four children home to San Jose, to the same home they’d bought in 1959, and went to work full-time and permanently in the liquor warehouse where he’d been working in the off-seasons. He also coached voluntarily at various area high schools, trying to teach young pitchers about avoiding arm trouble such as put paid to his career.

And he rooted with just about two thirds if not more of the country when the Cubs finally returned to the Promised Land in 2016.

Except for his son, Stephen’s, death at 52 in 2007, Broglio remained cheerful and friendly throughout, with a smile bright enough to walk half a city home when stricken with a power failure. He withstood the onset of type 2 diabetes. (Brock, who has enjoyed post-baseball success as a florist and the creator of a unique umbrella-shaped rain hat, has lost a leg to diabetes and survived (so far) multiple myeloma.)

And his friendship with Brock became one of the sweeter spots in his life. “Ernie is top of the charts,” the Hall of Famer told Weinbaum. “He is a good man, a man with integrity. We have a good relationship because we laugh, we talk, and people, for whatever reason, are still interested.”

Broglio cherished a 1990s Old-Timer’s Day appearance he made with Brock at Wrigley Field. “They introduced me next-to-last, and Lou was last. The Cub fans sure didn’t forget Brock-for-Broglio,” he said. “As I came out, everybody stood up and gave me a great ovation of boos. I started laughing, removed my cap, and took a bow. Then they introduced Lou, and my God, I thought Wrigley Field was going to collapse the way they cheered him.”

Broglio needed only his own good cheer to overcome and even appreciate the trade that made him infamous. That’s just one reason why I wish I hadn’t hesitated to call him. I might have made another new friend, who leaves a legacy of laughter, love, and acceptance, now gone to the Elysian Fields where I can only pray the Lord welcomed him home just as cheerfully.

The Mets leave the Twins a mess for now

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2019-07-17 PeteAlonso

Pete Alonso hits . . . not just a two-run homer but a conversation piece Wednesday in the eighth.

Until the All-Star break the Twins, of all people, looked like the shock of the season with reasonable ownership of the American League Central. And the Mets looked like the National League’s clown show without the benefit of drawing laughs other than those mixing disgust and dejection.

Twins fans have taken the ride savouring every day so far. Mets fans have laughed like Figaro—that they might not weep.

Except when Pete Alonso catches hold of one, with or without men on, in the eighth inning or otherwise. Then, Mets fans weep for sheer joy. Unless their jaws hit the floor as on Wednesday afternoon, when Alonso didn’t just hit a two-run homer, he hit something liable to be picked up on satellite-orbiting radar.

This was one day after the Mets kind of snuck a 3-2 win past the Twins. A former Minnesotan of my acquaintance habitually believes anything good from the Twins is an illusion and anything bad a matter of established fact, phrasing it as politely as longtime Twins fans are reputed for being. Then came Wednesday’s top of the eighth and it was too much for even the most cynical Twins fan.

Who did the Twins think they were all of a sudden—the Mets?

It began with a walk. It climaxed with a monstrous home run. In between came the sort of thing for which the Mets are only too well disregarded and the Twins aren’t exactly among baseball’s most notorious practitioners.

Twins reliever Matt Magill opened by walking Robinson Cano, the designated hitter on the day, who’s come to that point in his career where he’ll take his base any way he can get there, unfortunately for the Mets. Then, Magill struck out Todd Frazier and Michael Conforto swinging in succession. Followed by Amed Rosario shooting a base hit up the pipe for first and second. And then it happened.

Mets second baseman Adeiny Hechevarria sent a fly toward the left field track. Eddie Rosario, sunglasses wrapped snugly around his eyes, drifted back with a perfect bead on the ball until, so it looked, even the sunglasses couldn’t keep his eyes focused as the sun hit the lenses with a nova-like blast. The ball descended to his glove, then rebounded right out of it.

Cano and Rosario hit the jets and scored handily. Then Jeff McNeil doubled off the right field wall to send Hechevarria home. Dominic Smith—who’d smashed a pinch-hit three-run homer to give the Mets a 5-3 lead in the first place an inning earlier—sent McNeil home with a single.

Up stepped Alonso. He looked at two sliders sailing up to the plate under the strike zone floor. He looked at another slider hitting the inside wall of the zone, barely. Then he saw a slider hanging up in roughly the same spot, maybe an inch further on the inside of the plate. And he sent it halfway up the third deck past the left field fence, bouncing off an empty seat and past a female fan who’d bent over futilely trying to grab the ball.

It was only Alonso’s first bomb since he won the Home Run Derby in Cleveland over a week earlier. But the 474-foot flog couldn’t have been any deadlier if he’d hit it with a sledgehammer and not a bat.

Magill got Mets catcher Wilson Ramos to ground out to end the carnage—temporarily. The Twins kindly sent reserve shortstop Ehire Adrianza out to take one for the team in the top of the ninth. The poor guy ended up taking three for the team thanks to a two-run triple (Amed Rosario) and an RBI double (Hechavarria).

Alonso himself looked as though he took pity on the Twins when he ended that inning with a hard ground out to third. Then Mets reliever Chris Mazza shook off a run-scoring ground out in the bottom of the eighth to work two solid relief innings and finish the 14-4 flogging.

These Twins opened the day with a cozy five-and-a-half-game lead over the Indians in the AL Central. But the Indians spent Monday and Tuesday dropping sixteen runs on the toothless Tigers for 8-6 and 8-0 final scores. And the Tribe didn’t seem likely to just roll over and play dead for the Detroit pussycats Wednesday night.

All of a sudden, the Twins thumping and bumping their way into being one of baseball’s 2019 feel-great stories looked very vulnerable after the Mets got through with them in a two-game set.

It didn’t start that way for the Mets. Already in certain disarray because of assorted issues and controversies on the field, in the clubhouse, and in the front office, they were forced to change plans when Zack Wheeler—scheduled to start Tuesday, in a certain trade-deadline-period showcase—hit the injured list with shoulder fatigue instead.

Forcing the Mets to turn to a bullpen game by using Steven Matz, a starter recently moved to the bullpen to fix himself, as an opener. Maybe it was an omen, because a lot of the kind of peculiar fortune that went against the Mets so far on the season went their way for a change.

Like in the top of the first, when McNeil and Conforto moved to third and second on a passed ball, Cano sent McNeil home with a sacrifice fly, and an error by Jonathan Schoop at second allowed Conforto home. Like when Rosario got to score while Conforto beat out a grounder to shortstop in the top of the fifth. And when six Mets relievers kept the Twins scoreless—despite loading the bases on closer Edwin Diaz—after the fourth.

A little more of that and a lot less of the kind of thing that turned them into a hybrid between nursery school and a slapstick academy and the Mets might not have made the wrong kind of truth out of rookie general manager Brodie Van Wagenen’s preseason challenge, “Come get us.”

Don’t look now, but the Mets are 5-1 including now a four-game winning streak since the All-Star break. And they’ve just taken a pair from the reputed threshing machine of the AL Central, including Wednesday’s human rights violations. It may or may not mean a turn of their sad seasonal tide, but this was one time the Mets didn’t need to ponder calling their therapists after a game.

Nor does being sliced, diced, pureed, and nuked Wednesday afternoon mean the Twins face a turn of their otherwise joyous seasonal tide in the wrong direction, either, just yet. But you might forgive them if they pondered calling Dial-A-Shrink for a few minutes.

Joe Grzenda, RIP: Holding a riot ball

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2019-07-17 GeorgeWBushJoeGrzenda

Joe Grzenda (right) with President George W. Bush, handing Bush the baseball Grzenda saved since the final, ill-fated Washington Senators game in 1971.

It took almost 34 years for a certain baseball to be pitched to home plate in RFK Stadium, Washington. And when it finally was thrown to the plate, it didn’t sail out of the hand of the pitcher who’d kept the ball all those years, despite having been invited to throw it.

The ball would have been thrown on 30 September 1971, by Washington Senators lefthanded pitcher Joe Grzenda, with two out in the top of the ninth and the Senators about to bank a season and Washington life-ending 7-5 win, assuming Grzenda could erase Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke.

Despite the invitation to throw it up to the plate when Washington re-entered the majors by way of the Montreal Expos moving to become the Nationals, Grzenda handed the honour instead to President George W. Bush, clad in a Nats jacket, who threw an admirable breaking ball to Nats catcher Brian Schneider.

Grzenda, who died 12 July at 82, two days after his 60th wedding anniversary, never got the chance to throw the ball on that surreal September 1971 afternoon. He ended up keeping the ball in a drawer in his Pennsylvania home, in an envelope marked, “Last baseball ever thrown as a Washington Senator, baseball club. Sept. 30, 1971. Murcer grounded out to me.”

That would be Bobby Murcer, Yankee outfielder, who grounded out to Grzenda for the second out of a save attempt that never got consummated thanks to a fan riot that kept Grzenda from pitching to Clarke. All those years later, Schneider—a self-confessed memorabilia collector—returned the ball to Grzenda after the Bush pitch.

Nicknamed Shaky Joe because of a few nervous habits he had on the mound, Grzenda became a Senator in 1970 after a trade from the Minnesota Twins, who’d been the original Senators until moving for 1961, which prompted the expansion birth of the second Senators in the first place.

Shaky Joe finished 1971 with a magnificent 1.92 earned run average, a 2.00 fielding-independent pitching rate, and a 1.01 walks/hits per inning pitched rate. He was a sharp middle-to-late relief pitcher finishing 46 games in 1971 and credited with five saves every one of which was two innings or more. In his next-to-last major league season, he averaged two innings per gig and was, arguably, the Senators’ most reliable relief pitcher.

Several hours before he erased Felipe Alou and Murcer on back-to-back ground outs, Grzenda sat in the RFK Stadium stands well before game time and reflected. “I don’t want to leave this place,” he said. “This year has been the best I’ve had. It’s been like a beginning for me.”

Major league baseball was leaving the capital again because Senators owner Bob Short decided he couldn’t make it work in D.C. any longer—after he’d done just about everything within his power to guarantee it wouldn’t work.

Short wouldn’t sell the team to local interests or at least to buyers willing to camp in Washington, either—unless they were willing to pony up a minimum of $12 million, that is. The Washington Post‘s almost mythological sportswriter, Shirley Povich, compared that to the guy who buys a $9000 car, abuses it, spends $3,000 to repair it, then claims he has a car worth $12,000. Is that so Washington, or what?

“His fellow club owners let go unrecognised Short’s continual mistakes that got him into the mess that, he says, threatened to bankrupt him,” Povich wrote 23 September 1971.

They paid scant heed to the fact that Short foolishly overborrowed to buy the team and then pleaded poverty, and to the stubborn refusal of this novice club owner to hire a general manager, and his record of wrecking the club with absurd deals . . . [T]he impoverished Senators were the only team in the league billed for the owner’s private jet, with co-pilots. The owners had ears only for his complaint that he couldn’t operate profitably in Washington.

Publicly and to his fellow American League owners, Short promised he hadn’t bought the Senators on shaky financial standing in order to move them. According to Tom Deveaux’s The Washington Senators, 1901-1971, Short indulged the nation’s other national pastime: litigation, threatening just that against his fellow owners unless they let him leave.

After authorising then president Joe Cronin to find a solution, the American League owners were stunned at Short’s admission he’d been talking to Texas and other areas. Short was also in hot water with the Armory Board, which owned RFK Stadium and to which the Senators owed six figures worth of back rent. That’s rather Washington, too.

When the Armory Board threatened to turn off the stadium lights, Short relished the feud. At first the board seemed to cave a bit, offering Short free rent for the first million admissions per season and the revenues from stadium billboard advertising. What the board wouldn’t do, however, was forgive the $178,000 back rent. Along came Washington’s city council to sue the Senators and the Armory Board, for failing to pay and collect rent.

That swung into action commissioner Bowie Kuhn, whose boyhood included working as a scoreboard operator at old Griffith Stadium. Kuhn ordered Short “to keep his yap shut,” Deveaux wrote, while hitting the road soliciting potential buyers for the Senators. It proved to be only slightly less futile a road trip than many taken by the Senators themselves.

The American League owners took a 21 September 1971 vote on whether to allow the Senators to move. They now feared the National League might move to town if the Senators moved out, giving the nearby Orioles heavier competition than the usually hapless Nats. Short needed 75 percent of the votes to get his wish.

At first, three clubs abstained while the Orioles and the White Sox voted no. World Airways magnate Ed Daly told Kuhn and Athletics owner Charlie Finley—one of the abstentions—he was willing to buy the Senators. The problem was Finley telling Daly the eleventh hour was upon them, and Daly telling Finley he couldn’t decide that fast. That’s so Washington, too.

Thus did Finley and Angels owner Gene Autry (originally a “no” vote, and acting through a representative since he was undergoing eye surgery) change to “yes” votes. Thus would the Senators begin 1972 as the Texas Rangers. And thus would the Senators meet the Yankees at RFK Stadium on 30 September 1971,  an almost 20,000 strong crowd filling the joint, hoisting placards and banners zapping Short up one side and down the other—particularly those displaying his initials.

Grzenda wasn’t the only Senator who wasn’t anxious to leave Washington. The idea didn’t exactly thrill Frank Howard, their power hitting behemoth and star, either. Which didn’t stop the 6’8″ giant known as Capital Punishment for his glandular home runs from giving those heartsick fans one final thrill, when he checked in at the plate to lead off the bottom of the sixth.

With the Senators down 5-1 and Howard being 0-for-1 with a walk thus far, he caught hold of a Mike Kekich fastball and drove it to the rear end of the left field bullpen, and the crowd went nuclear in its momentary joy. Nudged out of the dugout for a curtain call, Howard tipped his helmet to the crowd for the first time in his baseball life, blew them a couple of kisses, then wept, as much for sorrow as joy.

The blast started a four-run inning to tie the game at five, a tie broken in the bottom of the eight thanks to an RBI single (Tom McCraw) and a sacrifice fly. (Elliott Maddox.) Then Grzenda went out to try saving it for Paul Lindblad, whose two spotless relief innings put him in line to get credit for a win.

After Grzenda erased Alou and Murcer in the top of the ninth, fans began jumping on and off the field down the foul lines. It looked menacing enough for Senators manager Ted Williams (yes, children, that Ted Williams) to order his bullpen pitchers to beat it post haste. Except that the Splinter forgot to urge them to take the safe path to the clubhouse, under the RFK Stadium stands.

As Grzenda got ready to pitch to Clarke, the relievers left the bullpen and headed down the field toward the dugout. Oops. “That’s when all hell broke loose,” Deveaux wrote. “The fans stormed back onto the field en masse, yanking up clumps of dirt and grass which might be kept as souvenirs of Washington Senators baseball.”

Howard playing first base had three fans climbing his back, which must have been something like three mice climbing a tree. Grzenda saw a rather large man heading his way appearing at first to have ideas about tackling the pitcher, which Grzenda eventually admitted gave him ideas about throwing his glove—which still had the ball in it—at the guy. But all Grzenda got for that was a pat on his shoulder.

Finally, as fans continued pillaging what they could, including bases, plus letters and numbers from the scoreboard, umpire Jim Honochick ruled the forfeit to the Yankees. By the time the fans got through with the place, RFK Stadium looked as though it was  tattered and torched in a terrorist attack.

Grzenda drove home from the park with his wife, Ruth, and their two children, including his then-ten year old son Joe, Jr., who wept all the way home. The Grzendas met in 1956, when the lefthander was a Tigers prospect and the Birmingham Barons’s (AA) best pitcher, and she was sitting in the stands at Birmingham.

He had a look at the comely brunette and handed the bat boy a note to give her. “I had come to the game with a girlfriend of mine who I worked with at the First National Bank, and her dad,” Mrs. Grzenda revealed after her husband was inducted into the Barons’ Hall of Fame five years ago. “The bat boy brought a note over to me that said, ‘How would you like to meet Joe Grzenda?’ My girlfriend kept hitting me on my leg, saying you’ve got to meet him and her dad said that Joe was the star of the team,” she continued. “I didn’t know anything about baseball.”

They first met in Birmingham, he taking her out for hamburgers and shakes after the Barons bat boy handed her his note. They married a year later and stayed that way happily for sixty years and two days. For two thirds of their marriage, they lived and loved with the husband part of capital lore. Maybe it wasn’t quite the way Grzenda would have preferred becoming such lore. But that, too, is so Washington.

Can Bob Gibson knock this opponent down?

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MLB: Cincinnati Reds at St. Louis Cardinals

Bob Gibson (with glasses) enjoying a laugh with fellow Hall of Famers (l to r) Red Schoendienst, Whitey Herzog, and Lou Brock, while celebrating an anniversary of the Cardinals’ 1968 pennant winner.

Bob Gibson wanted the edge every time he took the mound. And in his absolute prime he got it, never mind that his reputation as an intimidating headhunter is more than slightly exaggerated, about which more to come. But what Henry Aaron, Dick Allen, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Carl Yastrzemski among others couldn’t do, one particularly pernicious opponent now just might.

Gibson sent his fellow living Hall of Famers a letter informing them that he’s battling pancreatic cancer. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says Gibson visited Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital and been hospitalised in his native Omaha for two weeks, anticipating a chemotherapy program to begin Monday. Hall of Famer Jack Morris revealed Gibson’s struggle while announcing a Twins game Saturday.

It’ll keep Gibson from attending the annual Hall of Fame induction a week from today. And it has more than just the Cardinals’ considerable fan base praying for the 83-year-old former pitcher with the whip-like delivery, the sprawling follow-through, the glare from the mound before beginning his windup that made him resemble a quiet storm about to release its full fury.

Those who remember Gibson’s follow-through and finish, in which he resembled a leaning tree with his glove resembling a hanging grapefruit at one branch’s end, may wonder how on earth he could field his position. Much as they do when remembering the late Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, whose yanking sidearm delivery yanked him almost all the way to the grass on the first base side of the mound as if he’d been knocked over by an oncoming car.

Yet Gibson won Gold Gloves for his position consecutively from 1965-73. Bunning, God rest his soul, would probably have won the Concrete Glove if they’d given one.

There was an aggressive elegance to Gibson’s attack on the mound captured best by Roger Angell, in The New Yorker, in an essay called “Distance,” republished in Late Innings: A Baseball Companion in 1982:

Everything about him looked mean and loose—arms, elbows, shoulders, even his legs—as, with a quick little shrug, he launched into his delivery. When there was no one on base, he had an old fashioned full crank-up, with the right foot turning in mid-motion to slip into its slot in fromt of the mound and his long arms coming together over his head before his backward lean, which was deep enough to require him to peer over his left shoulder at his catcher while his upraised left leg crooked and kicked. The ensuing sustained forward drive was made up of a medium-sized strike of that leg and a blurrily fast, slinglike motion of the right arm, which came over at about three-quarters height and then snapped down and (with the fastball and the slider) across his left knee. It was not a long drop-down delivery like Tom Seaver’s . . . or a tight, brisk, body-opening motion like Whitey Ford’s . . . He always looked much closer to the plate at the end than any other pitcher; he made pitching seem unfair.

Angell may have been the only baseball writer to whom Gibson’s coming election to the Hall of Fame had its disturbing side: “He seemed too impatient, too large, and too restless a figure to be stilled and put away in this particular fashion; somehow, he would shrug off the speeches and honorifics when they came, just as he had busied himself unhappily on the mound when the crowd stopped the rush of the game to cheer him at Busch Stadium that afternoon in 1968. For me, at least, Bob Gibson was still burning to pitch to the next batter.”

The writer so wrongly referred to as baseball’s Homer, when in fact Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell, referred to Game One of the 1968 World Series, the day Gibson broke Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s record for strikeouts in a World Series game. He tied Koufax when he struck out Hall of Famer Al Kaline in the top of the ninth, and his catcher Tim McCarver held onto the ball while pointing toward the center field scoreboard announcing the feat.

“Throw the goddam ball back, will you! C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” hollered the righthander who once ordered McCarver, who’d become one of his closest friends, back to his position by barking, “Get back there behind the plate where you belong. The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it!” When Gibson finally acknowledged the roaring crowd and his achievement with an uncomfortable tip of his cap, he struck out Norm Cash and Willie Horton to end the game with a Cardinals win and seventeen punchouts.

2019-07-13 BobGibsonAlKaline

Bob Gibson striking out fellow Hall of Famer Al Kaline to tie the World Series record for single-game strikeouts that he’d break shortly after, in Game One, 1968. In that Year of the Pitcher Gibson’s regular season 1.12 ERA shone even more than Tiger pitcher Denny McLain’s 31 wins.

Watching Gibson pitch myself was like watching an assassin with the mind of Montaigne, the reflexes of a gymnast, and an arm that found the way to marry a bullwhip to a Gatling gun. The intimidating appearance and delivery sometimes masked a pitcher who applied a Warren Spahn-like intellect to his art. “Hitting is timing,” Spahn, the Hall of Fame lefthander/prankster, liked to say. “Pitching is destroying timing.” Gibson’s mind saw and raised by studying his challengers’ minds as well as their timings.

The late Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, whose plate stance Angell described memorably as “that of an impatient subway traveler leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train,” impressed Gibson as deceptive with his once-famous plate crowding, because pitchers were fooled into thinking Robinson wanted inside pitches.

Besides, they’d be afraid of hitting him and putting him on base. So they’d work him outside, and he’d hit the shit out of the ball. I always tried him inside and I got him out there—sometimes. He was like Willie Mays—if you got the ball outside to Willie at all, he’d just kill you. The same with [Hall of Famer Roberto] Clemente. I could throw him a fastball knee high on the outside corner seventeen times in a row, but if I ever got it two inches up, he’d hit it out of sight. That’s the mark of a good hitter—the tiniest mistake and he’ll punish you.

Yet this proud man, who played a major role in easing the Cardinals’ way toward complete integration earlier in his career, using his often-unheralded wit to guide white teammates out of behaviours bred into them without their even realising it, who took his own unshakeable pride in being in control on the mound and taking control of a game, could admit that he, too, had his moments when his “brains small up,” as he told Angell:

I got beat by Tommy Davis twice the same way. In one game, I’d struck him out three times on sliders away. But I saw that he’d been inching up and inching up toward that part of the plate, so I decided to fool him and come inside, and he hit a homer and beat me, one-oh. And then, in another game, I did exactly the same thing. I tried to out-think him, and he hit the inside pitch for a homer, and it was one-oh all over again. So I could get dumb, too.

Gibson’s intelligence played large in his off-field and post-baseball life. He built and opened a successful Omaha restaurant, Gibby’s, in which Angell recorded he had a direct hand in the design and construction, and for which he encouraged integrated clientele. (“A neat crowd,” Gibson once described the mixture.) He suffered no fool gladly and rejected the idea of professional sportsmen as role models. (“Why do I have to be an example for your kid?” this father of three once asked another father, gently but firmly. “You be an example for your own kid.”)

He also wittily discouraged patrons from trying to chat him about baseball when he knew they didn’t truly know the game:

You hear them say, “Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury . . . ‘ Some cab driver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cab driver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.

During his pitching career Gibson was uneasy with the press because he couldn’t grok their wanting “to put every athlete in the same category as every other athlete.” After his pitching days, stories began to come forth that Gibson’s sometimes forbidding public image masked a man who developed intense friendships, especially with those, black, white, otherwise, who accepted and respected that he wouldn’t say what he didn’t believe.

It was one reason why Gibson’s brief and mostly forgotten attempt at broadcasting (on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball) became as brief as it was. He’d interview a player who’d just achieved an unusual feat and question and banter with him as a fellow professional sharing professional truths about the game and its influences outside the park alike, and not a talking head.

Gibson also served actively on the board of an Omaha bank, invested in an Omaha radio station, served as a pitching coach for his friend Joe Torre in Torre’s three brief pre-Yankees managing turns, and once took the motor home the Cardinals presented him as a retirement gift to travel across the western United States.

When I was in the Air Force in the 1980s, I did my entire post-basic training/post-technical school hitch at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, next to Omaha. (I worked as a member of the old Strategic Air Command as an intelligence analyst.) I knew Gibson lived in Bellevue (Angell said he was handy enough to build most of the improvements on the home including a magazine-ready patio) and I knew of his restaurant, not to mention that he was usually at the restaurant at least ten hours a day.

The temptation to go there to eat and hopefully meet him even for a few moments was equaled only by my fear that he’d see me as just another witless fan, even if I wouldn’t insult him by trying to be like the cab driver whose wannabe reverie he’d deflated so deftly.

Three months ago, I guess I did the next best thing. Challenged by an online forum participant who still buys into the myth that a home run hit off Gibson one inning was meant that batter getting a shot in or near the head his next time up, I was crazy enough to look at the game logs. Every game in which Gibson pitched. To see whether and when he really did hit anyone in the same games he surrendered home runs, and whether he’d hit a home run hitter in the same game, especially the hitter’s next time up.

Well, now. That review told me:

* Thirty-six times in his 528 major league games including 482 major league starts, Bob Gibson surrendered at least one home run and hit at least one batter in the same game.

* He only ever hit one such bombardier—Hall of Famer Duke Snider—the very next time the man batted in the game.

* He hit three such bombardiers not the next time up but in a later plate appearances in games in which they homered first.

* He surrendered home runs after hitting batters with pitches in fourteen lifetime games.

And, unless I missed something somewhere, Gibson’s most frequent plunk victim was Roy McMillan, a shortstop for the Braves (when he first took a Gibson driller) and the Mets, who was a study defensively but about as much of a hitter as Wilt Chamberlain was a baseball player. Gibson hit McMillan five times lifetime; McMillan could have been forgiven if the mere mention of Gibson’s name inspired lustful thoughts of first degree murder.

The fifth time was 20 August 1965, against the Mets in New York. McMillan took one in the bottom of the third. With two out in the top of the fifth Mets starter Al Jackson hit Gibson with a pitch. (The plunk hurt the Mets more than Gibson as it turned out: the Cardinals scored from there on a single, a double steal, an RBI triple, an RBI single, and another RBI triple.) McMillan must have wanted to offer to have Jackson’s children right then and there.

Right now about the only thing anybody wants to offer Bob Gibson is every prayer they can think of. He’s up against an enemy that won’t respond easily to a brushback, a knockdown, a plunk, or an elegantly violent strikeout.

I wish now that I’d taken the chance to meet him back in my Omaha days. I probably would have liked and respected him. Even more than I’d liked and respected him when he pitched. All I can do now is join those praying for him.