Adam Ottavino (left), who thinks the Bambino (right) in today’s game would be very different than in his own game.

Adam Ottavino is an excellent relief pitcher who’s just turned two out of three splendid seasons including a marvelous 2018 (2.43 earned run average; 2.74 fielding-independent pitching rate) into a three-year, $27 million contract, joining a Yankee bullpen already thought to be the bulls in the American League’s china shop. And he charmed further by asking for and receiving uniform number 0, the absolute final single digit the Yankees could offer with 1 through 9 retired.

But Ottavino has also raised temperatures thanks to the exhuming of, shall we say, a less than worshipful observation involving a Yankee icon.

By his own admission on a December podcast Ottavino committed heresy when, pitching some years earlier in Triple-A and talking to a coach, he observed almost offhand that Babe Ruth in today’s game might not post quite the jaw-dropping batting performances he posted in his actual time. Ottavino went far enough to suggest he just might strike Ruth out as often as not, and he does have the kind of slider and sinker to suggest that’s not a fanciful flub.

In some places you might have thought Ottavino committed the rough equivalent of John Lennon’s ancient observation, in an offhand remark made months before its American revelation, that the Beatles in 1966 were more popular than Jesus Christ.

Lennon’s republished-out-of-context remark finally compelled him to clarify, at a sober Chicago press conference, that he’d forgotten in that earlier moment that he was himself one of the Beatles and, memorably, “If I’d have said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have gotten away with it.” When the Yankees introduced Ottavino formally last week the righthander felt just as obliged to clarify.

“I probably used a bad example of the point I was trying to make: the evolution of the pitching in baseball over baseball history,” Ottavino said. “And Babe Ruth’s probably a name that I shouldn’t have used in this example. But I’ve got a lot of flak for it, mostly funny stuff, like my uncle telling me that he can’t go anywhere without hearing about it, things like that. But I meant no disrespect. I’m a huge baseball historian and love the game, and it’s not even something that can be proven anyway, so I find it a little funny.”

The genuine problem with Lennon’s ancient controversy is that there were moments indeed during the Beatles’ extraterrestrial international fame and achievement where you might well have believed them to be more popular than Christ; indeed, at least one clergyman responded to the uproar, “To many people the golf course is more popular than Jesus.” A deeper look indicated that Lennon himself didn’t exactly believe that that possibility was a good thing.

But Ottavino in a couple of ways was quite right. Even amidst the evolution of baseball analysis in my lifetime, you can still find a considerable community that refuses to allow anything other than the image of Ruth as the single greatest baseball player who ever lived without the deviant consigned to the rack.

During the mid-to-late 1990s a Village Voice writer named Allen St. John isolated the point: “Ask someone who the greatest basketball player of all time is. They’ll say Michael Jordan. Ask him who the greatest quarterback is. They’ll say Joe Montana. Ask them to name the greatest heavyweight champion. It’ll be Muhammad Ali. The greatest hockey payer? Of course, Wayne Gretzky. Now ask them the greatest baseball player of all time? And the answer will be Babe Ruth. Now, look over that list of names and ask yourself what’s different about the last one?”

I’m not conversant enough with their sports to suggest possible successors to Ali or Gretzky and have no wish to be, but one suspects LeBron James may have succeeded Jordan and Tom Brady, Montana. May. And they won’t erode the places in their sports’ histories of, say, Bill Russell or Bart Starr.

Writing in Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century in 2002, Allen Barra answered St. John: “Every other sport gets to choose a current or modern player as its greatest, but a baseball fan always has to look at the past . . . A couple of years ago I proposed that Wilt Chamberlain and not Michael Jordan was the most dominant player in basketball history . . . I was scoffed at; how could I say that when the conditions of the game have changed so greatly from the early 60s to now? And yet, when it came time to pick the greatest player in baseball history, four of five picked Babe Ruth without batting an eyelash (the other picked Willie Mays, the player people usually pick who don’t pick Ruth). Apparently, the conditions of basketball had changed radically over the last thirty-five years but in baseball, over seventy years, not at all.”

Barra cited St. John in his book’s leadoff chapter, provocatively titled “Getting Tough with Babe Ruth.” Essentially, he set out to prove a sacred cow’s genuine worth—steak—and he did a splendid job, particularly when he lanced one of the key boils of the Ruthian myths, that being he was the great all-around player who could Do It All better than anyone else could Do It All, and did.

As a full-time pitcher Ruth was good and occasionally great (especially in the 1916 World Series), but a full-time ERA only a few points below his league average in a low-scoring era isn’t exactly Randy Johnson being almost two full runs below his league average in a high-scoring era. And throwing short range as a pitcher throws is an entity unto itself; a right fielder throws considerably different, and with a considerably different eye and aim.

Ruth was a league-average defensive right fielder whose throwing arm was passable but not exactly the model for Roberto Clemente. He was a mediocre baserunner with no speed as a full-time position player, the evidence for which exists above and beyond his colossal blunder in ending the 1926 World Series in the Cardinals’ favour. (With Bob Meusel at the plate and Lou Gehrig on deck, a pair of hitters not exactly renowned for being pushovers, Ruth took off for second base entirely on his own thought and was out by a enough space for a car to pass through.)

Those who do argue Mays over Ruth have power/speed combination evidence on their side, too: remove Barry Bonds if you must because of his involvement with actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, and Mays is the number two power/speed combination of all time, right behind fellow Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson. The Babe? How does number 84 strike you? Might strike you out, actually.

Despite the image of Ruth having thunderous power all over the place, period descriptions (Barra’s phrase) show him the classic pull hitter who probably picked up a lot of non-home run extra base hits going the other way into cavernous left center fields like his own home parks, distance enough that even a leadfoot like himself could leg out a triple.

If today’s fan frets over the obsession with “launch angles,” over hitters obsessed enough with them to neglect other facets of run-creating hitting while pitchers learn to tie them up in their launch obsessions, how on earth does the parabolic Ruthian blast named for a batter whose power swing was itself a body-twisting uppercut not become the very great-great-grandfather of the very launch angle obsession today’s baseball fan and analyst abhors?

Ruth still has as well a concurrent reputation as the most dominant team player of the 20th Century until you look a lot closer. As a full-time pitcher, he was on Red Sox teams good enough to win without him, one of which won a World Series the year before he joined the fun. As a Yankee full-time position player, he went to three World Series as the team’s best player and they won one out of the three; he went to four more with a player of equal ability as his teammate, Lou Gehrig, and won three out of four; he had a thirteen-year stretch of seven Yankee pennants and four World Series rings.

That’s not Gehrig’s thirteen-year stretch of seven Yankee pennants and six World Series rings. That’s not Joe DiMaggio’s ten pennants and nine World Series rings. That’s not Yogi Berra’s fourteen pennants and ten Series rings (and Yogi had maybe the single most important job in the field, guiding his pitching staffs); it’s not Mickey Mantle’s twelve pennants and seven Series rings. On Yankee terms that evidence suggests Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, and Mantle being better and more dominant team players.

What’s absolutely fair to Babe Ruth is to call him the greatest player of the pre-World War II/pre-integration era, playing in a time when major league baseball limited its talent pool by design and, for all manner of perverse reasons, refused to let Ruth play against the best black, Latino, and further international talent. (Ruth himself would have welcomed that chance; he thought nothing of off-season barnstorming baseball tours that included games against Negro Leagues players he admired.)

But then we add to pre-World War II/pre-integration a third condition—the pre-night ball era. Between the limited talent pool he was allowed to face, and the strictly day game he was allowed to play, it’s to wonder whether Ruth’s batting statistics would have become as platinum looking as they are to the naked, un-inquiring eye if he’d played half or more of the time at night. (It’s also to wonder how much gaudier Henry Aaron’s, Willie Mays’s, and Ken Griffey, Jr.’s batting statistics would look if they never had to play at night.)

I’ve yet to read Jane Leavy’s The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, and you may rest assured it’s prime on my to-read list, but the reviews I’ve seen indicate she plumbed as deep as a human could plumb into everything that made Ruth Ruth, from his grotesque childhood and its legacy of insecurities to the baseball fame manufactured six parts Ruth himself and half a dozen parts his era’s pliant sporting press and the randy adolescence of the public relations industry.

“With the help of his shameless business manager, Christy Walsh, Ruth cultivated and grew his celebrity and cashed in on it big-league,” writes one of the best reviewers, Nicholas Frankovich in National Review. “It was extraordinary, of a magnitude unprecedented for an Ameri­can athlete. Ruth was shameless too, so blush not for him, and more amoral than immoral, so temper your head-shaking at his Rabelaisian over­indulgence in food and sex.” Temper it, we presume, without a concurrent thought about all the athletes of the past two decades whose Rabelaisian appetites and thuggish behaviours receive condemnation instead of, pardon the expression, Ruthian indulgence. (If you don’t think the Babe could be thuggish, you don’t know about the time he hung manager Miller Huggins over the end of a moving train to try convincing Huggins to rescind a disciplinary fine.)

Placing Ruth in context and beyond mythology is entirely do-able without writing him out of his own legend or that of the Yankees and the game itself. “The Babe gets a free ride from the modern historians and documentary makers,” Barra wrote, “and his name is often evoked by people who in practise seem to abhor the very kind of big power-big strikeout, low emphasis on speed and defense game that Ruth was most associated with in his own time. Nobody ever gets tough with Babe Ruth . . . The Babe is tough enough to take a few knocks from me. Or anyone. Maybe even tough enough to put up with a modern reassessment and still stay a hero.”

Maybe even tough enough to withstand Adam Ottavino’s gaffe, for which Ottavino beyond a momentary lapse of rhetorical temperance should have owed not one degree of penance.

Anthony Rizzo (far left) and the Cubs went out of 2018 with a whimper and enter 2019 with question marks . . .

You look back and think that it ended almost in a blink. The Cubs’ 2018 season, that is. They had the National League Central under lock and key, almost, and that turned out to be deceptive. Especially when their lineup couldn’t hit with a hangar door when it mattered the most. In two days and 22 innings of baseball, they collapsed.

With practically the same team with which they pulled World Series rabbits out of their hats two years earlier, give or take one or two different pieces, the Cubs needed to play a tiebreaker to win the NL Central—and blew it. Then, they needed to win the wild card game to stay in the postseason at all—and they blew that, too.

In two days of the most important baseball they played all year, after being unable to hold a five-game division lead, the Cubs scored only two runs and went 1-for-8 with men in scoring position. They entered the winter with a somewhat depleted farm, a bullpen with holes, and the possibility that they didn’t strike when replenishments would have made a bigger difference then or now.

Their owner still thinks they have a championship core despite other observers thinking their dynastic window is cloudy at best and closing at worst. Tom Ricketts says the Cubs didn’t have the financial flexibility this time around to play a big ticket or two this winter. And he says that’s kind of a moot point. “We like the team we have,” he told ESPN Radio last week. “We have strong young guys at most positions.”

Last weekend’s annual fan convention didn’t feature Ricketts but did feature team president Theo Epstein. That’s one mixed signal. Another is that the Cubs’ winter has amounted to little more in the way of additions than utility veteran Daniel Descalso and relief pitcher Brad Brach. Also absent from the fan convention was honeymooning first baseman Anthony Rizzo.

Meaning third baseman Kris Bryant became a convention focus. Where it was one thing for him to criticise this winter’s second consecutive sluggish free agency market, but it was something else for him to start a feud with the division rival Cardinals, who need very few excuses to want to do to the Cubs what Sparta once did to Athens.

And all of a sudden it was enough to make you wonder what’s happened to the Cubs’ team leadership. With Rizzo on his honeymoon nobody else was there to give Bryant an assist in choosing his words carefully. The rivalry between the Cubs and the Cardinals is testy enough without Bryant declaring St. Louis a boring city and Cardinals catching mainstay Yadier Molina vowing it wouldn’t be forgotten when the dance gets underway in earnest.

All of a sudden, too, it was enough to make you miss David Ross even more. Grandpa Rossy showed the younger Cubs having fun didn’t mean leaving accountability behind. With him as a mentor they weren’t afraid to call each other out when need be. It took especially with Rizzo, who didn’t skip a beat calling out Miguel Montero when Montero—already on thin ice after he kvetched about his 2016 postseason playing time—was foolish enough to blame his pitcher for seven stolen bases against him in a June 2017 game. Big mistake.

Montero was gone post haste; he bounced from the Blue Jays to the Nationals and called it a career in December. Not the happiest end for a guy who turned his limited 2016 postseason playing time into two of the most important hits in Cub history (the tiebreaking grand slam in Game One of the 2016 National League Championship Series, and driving in what proved the Series-winning run in the top of the tenth) and who’d been a two-time All-Star with the Diamondbacks.

But Rizzo on his honeymoon wasn’t there to stuff a sock into Bryant’s pie hole before he could rag on St. Louis and get the iron into the Cardinals’ spine. When Molina answered everyone listened. There’s probably no more respected member of the Cardinals’ clubhouse. If you think Molina’s going to let the Cardinals forget that joker in Chicago who says their home turf is a bore, think again.

Nobody else was there last weekend to assure Bryant there’d be a cleaning and stuffing party in his dishonour if he got that fast and loose with his tongue again. If Ross was still around he’d have been the first to pull Bryant to one side and remind him a big mouth works best when kept shut. They’re going to need a full season of Cole Hamels joining Rizzo in the clubhouse to bring sense and sensibility back.

And who’s to say a little stronger clubhouse leadership might not have made a difference with Addison Russell? The shortstop slaughtered his market value thanks to treating his now-former wife like a punching bag; the Cubs are standing by their man giving him a very conditional second chance, though his continuing suspension means he won’t be back until May. But would a healthier clubhouse self-policing have kept Russell from making it bad to worse for himself?

The Cubs just added Brach to the bullpen. With closer Brandon Morrow possibly on the disabled list to open the season (Morrow underwent elbow surgery this winter), Brach gives the Cubs pen some needed breathing room. A veteran who can set up or close out and worked a 1.52 ERA for the Braves down last year’s stretch is a guy who keeps your bullpen off the respirator.

Except that the Cubs needed a lefthanded reliever more. And they could have had Andrew Miller for a comparative song, since Miller is looking to prove his solid return from last year’s disabled list isn’t a fluke. Bryant thinks St. Louis is boring? It won’t be Bryant’s team sending Miller out to show the Cardinals a little excitement.

Don’t look now, but nobody in the NL Central is rebuilding. Don’t look further, because the fourth-place Pirates had the best within-the-division record last year. Don’t look further than that, because while the Cubs have added just a utility infielder and a veteran relief arm, the Cardinals dealt for Diamondbacks mainstay batsman Paul Goldschmidt before they reached out and touched Miller. The Reds dealt for Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, and Alex Wood. With Rizzo the Cubs didn’t necessarily need Goldschmidt, but Puig and Kemp would have been solid outfield upgrades and Wood would be a nice piece to shift between the rotation and the pen for them.

The Cubs might have had a few more strong young guys to send out to the mound, starting and relieving, if they’d struck when Kyle Schwarber’s value was at its height. The Schwarbinator may have been one of their feel-good stories of 2016, but for all his power he’s been worth 2.7 wins above replacement-level in four seasons and isn’t exactly much more than a two-tool player in danger of becoming a three-true-outcomes specialist. If he’s not there already.

If the Cubs had flipped him at last year’s non-waiver trade deadline, they might have brought back some younger, healthier pitching. That would have been better insurance in the event expensive Yu Darvish doesn’t return healthy or, if he does, he doesn’t complete the fix on the pitch tipping flaws that got him murdered in the 2017 World Series. Now the power hitting market ain’t what it used to be for guys who can bomb but not do a lot else. Opportunity misplaced.

And unless they can find a defense-oriented taker for pricey Jason Heyward, who still brings it with his glove while still losing it at the plate, the Cubs will be hobbled by the $106 million they still owe him for the next five years. Right there is the likely reason the Cubs haven’t made more than a rumoured run at Bryce Harper, who’d be more of an outfield upgrade than either Puig or Kemp would have been. Unless they’re in the laboratory conjuring up a brew of very creative financing.

The Cubs have been very good at getting creative the last few years. They’d better be now if they don’t want to be bastinadoed by hungry teams of Brewers, Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds, not to mention snide choruses of “Ahhh, wait till three years ago.”

We may yet say “Thank you Mariano” for something he couldn’t possibly have known he might provoke . . .

There’s another reason to heave a big sigh of relief now that Mariano Rivera’s unanimous election to the Hall of Fame is consummated and confirmed. At long enough last the ridiculous tradition of no unanimous Hall elections has been fractured. But does it also mean a new headache for Hall of Fame voting through no fault of his or anyone’s own?

Baseball inspires debates as often as it inspires jaws to drop, but few things about the game inspire as many debates which do drop jaws as often as Hall of Fame debates. They drop jaws, run temperatures up scales, and produce almost as much foolishness as political debates with about a sixteenth of the damage.

I guarantee it: Even the jaw dropper involving Harold Baines’s election to the Hall of Fame by the Today’s Era Committee provoked fewer days of rage than the mildest politically based dispute. I’m on record as saying Baines has about as much business in the Hall of Fame as Danielle Steele has winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, but nobody was likely to want to run me out of town and into a dungeon’s shackles over it. (I think.)

As much fun as it is to get into Hall of Fame debates, the one that was really never that much fun was over why this, that, or the other guy didn’t get into Cooperstown unanimously . . . and why assorted members of the Baseball Writers Association of America decided in their voting, as too many without such votes have, that nobody was entitled to go in unanimously simply because certain no-questions-asked greats of the past didn’t.*

“[I]t appears that after a certain point, every player’s flaw was being not as good as Babe Ruth (who was elected, though not unanimously, in the inaugural class) or Willie Mays (who got nearly 95 percent four decades later),” writes ESPN’s Sam Miller. “From that point on, it was enough for a writer to argue that a player couldn’t possibly merit unanimity, on account of his being inarguably worse than Ruth and Mays.”

Aside from laughing your fool head off when you ponder that worse things can be said of you than your not being as good as Ruth or Mays, Miller has a point though he didn’t come right out and say it. You don’t have to be Babe Ruth or Willie Mays to be a Hall of Famer. You don’t have to be their kind of great. You just have to be great at all, under the terms of the game you played when you played it.

In my lifetime I can think of a number of Hall of Famers whom you might have thought to be unanimous choices but weren’t. But if they were that obviously Hall of Fame great (there are several writers-vote Hall of Famers whose cases kind of snuck up on you when you looked at their careers deeper, including newly-elected Mike Mussina) what was to keep them from being unanimous choices? Not just because they were going to go in anyway but because the voting writers saw them as so obviously Hall of Fame-great.

But it came down too long to, The Hall of Fame’s inaugural five (Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Honus Wagner) weren’t unanimous; Joe DiMaggio wasn’t unanimous; Stan Musial, Sandy Koufax, and Bob Gibson weren’t unanimous; Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Tom Seaver weren’t unanimous; so, why should anyone else get to be unanimous? 

And I suppose the answer really was as Miller describes it: By God they weren’t perfect. Well, there isn’t one player who ever played the game who was. And that, Miller argues, is a patently ridiculous way to measure a Hall of Famer regardless of whether you also live on comparing one player to another:

This has always been obnoxious — a petty veto power a tiny minority of the voters have chosen to wield — but it also cuts directly against one of baseball’s main themes: It’s a game of failure. You fail seven out of 10 times and make the Hall of Fame, they say. But here the Hall’s gatekeepers had decided that in fact failure was prohibitive. No matter how good you got, you had to be perfect or else not worthy of some recognition these vetoers denied you.

Funny thing about that: Within the defined perimeters of the job he did to make himself a Hall of Famer, Mariano Rivera was close enough to perfect. When Worcester Telegram-Gazette writer Bill Ballou first decided publicly he’d rather not submit his ballot than send one in without a vote for Rivera (he changed his mind in time to vote for Rivera), one of his arguments compared The Mariano to Craig Kimbrel, the Red Sox closer, and how worthless saves are: he noted Kimbrel went six for six in postseason save conversions last fall despite a 5.90 ERA, nineteen baserunners allowed, and that when Kimbrel pitched “Boston’s victories felt like defeats.”

I couldn’t resist rejoining that comparing Mariano Rivera to Craig Kimbrel was tantamount to comparing a millionaire who got that way from his own creation to one who got that way from organised crime. If all you looked at were the saves, you’d have Rivera as the all-time leader and maybe—big maybe—nothing much more. It’s when you remembered how he got those saves that you saw a so-obvious-Stevie-Wonder-could-see-it Hall of Famer.

And when you look deeper, what do you see? You see a guy whose money pitch (the cutter) is in the same conversation of singular pitches as a Koufax curve, a Steve Carlton slider, a Hoyt Wilhelm knuckleball, a Bruce Sutter splitter, a Pedro Martinez changeup, an Elroy Face forkball. (By the way, Face, the redoubtable Pirates reliever of the 1950s and the 1960s, has a borderline Hall of Fame case as the arguable pioneer of the modern relief closer.)

You see a guy whose lifetime ERA plus (205+), the measure of your overall run prevention that’s adjusted to all the parks in which you pitched and not just your home park, is the highest in baseball history at this writing among pitchers whose careers involved their working 1,000 innings or more. (Did I forget to remind you that Rivera was a righthander whose home parks could normally spell disaster for righthanded pitchers—yet lefthanded hitters hit five points lower against him lifetime than righthanded hitters did?)

You see a guy who was just as deadly with occupied bases as he was with the bases empty, deadly enough to earn 42 postseason saves with 31 of them involving his having been asked for four or more outs and often coming into the games with men on base. One of these days I’d love to see a truly deep study of how relief pitchers fare when they’re brought in with men on base and in scoring position and whom among them were better than serviceable when it came to keeping earned runs off the records of the men they relieved. (Maybe such a study already exists; if so, I’d love to see it.)

But in case you missed when I first recorded it, batters swinging with men on base at all hit .210 against Rivera lifetime (and that’s three points less than they hit against him with the bases empty), and when they hit with men in scoring position against him they hit .214 lifetime. There are other bona fide Hall of Fame pitchers who weren’t that deadly against the hitters who faced them.

When Luis Gonzalez whacked the World Series-winning hit off him in 2001, it was the extremely rare exception, not the rule. When the almost non-descript Jay Payton tore a three-run homer out of him with two out in the bottom of the ninth of Game Five, 2000 World Series, it was the extremely rare exception, not the rule. (The Mariano shook that one off to finish the Yankees’ Series conquest by catching Kurt Abbott looking at strike three.)

There was never any argument over whether Rivera would make the Hall of Fame at all in his first appearance on the writers’ ballot. So why on earth should there have been any over whether he’d become the first to get there unanimously? Because, well, you know all those other, previous, too-obviously-first-ballot Hall of Famers who didn’t get there unanimously, too. And Rivera just blew those arguments away with the same aplomb with which he blew hitters away.

If anything, the one possible land mine in Rivera’s unanimous election might be that we revive the perfection argument all over again—future relief pitchers who prove to be Hall of Fame worthy in their line of work (with or without a reconstitution of a relief save) may be compared to him and dismissed because, well, they won’t prove to have been as near-perfect as he was. This is the last thing we should want or Rivera himself might seek.

But another ESPN writer, Buster Olney, says something else new might come about thanks to Rivera’s unanimous election: “Now that this is finally possible, moving forward, the new 100% standard will help to create an inner circle of HOFers—the players who are unanimous selections from 2019 forward.” There’s something good and bad about that, and it’s not even The Mariano’s fault.

Good because obvious Hall of Famers from this point forward (I’m talking about you, Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, and Mike Trout) won’t be diminished by the petty prejudices and hypocrisies of even single voting writers. (I’m talking about you, Ken Gurnick, who refused publicly to vote for Greg Maddux on his first ballot because you refused to vote for anyone who played in the era of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances—yet voted only for Jack Morris that year despite Morris having pitched his final seven seasons in that era.)

Bad because there may come too many instances of people judging Hall of Famers not by the actual way they played the game but by whether or not they got into the Hall of Fame unanimously. Mike Trout and Max Scherzer becoming unanimous Hall of Famers (yes, it could happen, depending on the rest of their careers) shouldn’t be allowed to diminish Willie Mays or Randy Johnson for it.

It’s one thing to revise history based on real evidence and real conditional differences (the latter, of course, were hardly his direct doing) and conclude Babe Ruth was the greatest player of his time and of the pre-integration/pre-night ball era but not of all time. It’s something else again to decide he’s less a Hall of Famer than someone else simply because he wasn’t the unanimous Hall of Fame selection he should have been.

Who’d have thought we’d have a chance to get to the place where we go from diminishing Hall of Famers because their forebears weren’t unanimous selections to diminishing them because their forebears were unanimous selections? Well, I did say half the fun of baseball is in the debates it inspires. But as Yosemite Sam once said, maybe that’ll learn me to keep my big mouth shut.

* In the interest of fair disclosure, I should point out that the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, of which I am a life member, does ceremonial Hall of Fame votes every year—and, alas, the IBWAA didn’t vote for Mariano Rivera unanimously. The lone holdout was a member who writes about the Mets for Forbes and says, erroneously, that The Mariano is the most overrated player of all time.

Sonny Gray didn’t have many reasons to smile as a Yankee, unless he was on the road . . .

Yankee Stadium old and new alike haven’t been for everyone. Few showed it more harshly than Sonny Gray, who won’t have it to kick him around anymore. The Yankees finally brought off a trade that sent Gray to the Reds with minor league relief pitcher Reiver Sanmartin for second base prospect Shed Long and a competitive-balance draft pick for later this year.

The deal became a three-way trade when the Yankees promptly shed Long upon the Mariners for minor league outfielder Josh Stowers, who played last year one level lower than Long. Leaving them room on their 40-man roster, the deal now has some wondering whether the Yankees might make a play for free-agent starter and former Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel.

As noted by MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon, Gray didn’t have a choice in his actual trade destination, but once the deal was done and the Reds would be his new team, he jumped on the chance to sign a three-year contract extension with the Reds totaling $30.5 million, to kick in after his current deal expires. The answers seem simple enough: if the Reds wanted him that badly, the feeling was mutual.

Gray grew up in Tennessee, outside Nashville, and his father often took him to Reds games, where he enjoyed both the baseball and the Skyline Chili sold at Great American Ballpark. And the Reds’ pitching coach now is Derek Johnson, who’s known Gray since the righthander was fourteen and who coached him at Vanderbilt University. For Gray putting on a Reds uniform is a sort-of homecoming.

Yankee Stadium isn’t exactly famous for being a comfort to righthanded pitchers, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more oppressive home-road split than Gray recorded last year. At Yankee Stadium he pitched fifteen games with a ghoulish 6.98 earned run average. On the road, Gray pitched fifteen games with a superb 3.17 ERA. At home he had a 1.98 walks/hits per inning pitched rate; on the road, a 1.16 WHIP. Batters hit .318 against Gray in Yankee Stadium but .226 against him on the road.

If you bring aboard Gray’s overall performance as a Yankee, which he became near the July 2017 non-waiver trade deadline, his home ERA was 6.55 and his road ERA was 2.84.

There will always be those players who succumb to the pressure of pitching in Yankee Stadium in the Yankees’ pinstripes with all the franchise’s history and expectations (of all the cliches about the Yankees the truest one is that they consider seasons failures when they don’t get to the World Series), but by his own admission Gray can’t figure out what made him such a bust in Yankee Stadium but a comparative smash on the road.

“I’m not going to lie,” he told a conference call with reporters after the trade announcement. “I felt comfortable taking the mound. I felt good. It just didn’t work out. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.”

Gray has known deeper sorrows than Yankee Stadium. His father was killed in an automobile accident on the same 2004 day, when Gray was fourteen, that Gray went out as a high school freshman and threw four touchdown passes in a football game. The least applicable question you can present regarding him is his makeup.

He spoke about his father briefly, too. “I know he’s looking down with the biggest smile on his face right now,” Gray said. “He was a huge Reds fan. That was my immediate reaction was looking back and me growing up as a kid and him having Reds hats on everywhere we went. That was a cool trip down memory lane for me, for sure.”

What makes the Reds think Gray will thrive in a home park that’s even more cozy for hitters than Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch? For one thing—and this may surprise those who saw Gray last season and decided he was one of the classic Yankee flops—FanGraphs has figured out that five pitchers threw 100 innings or more with 20 percent plus strikeout rates and 50 percent or better ground ball rates . . . and one of them was Gray, with a 21.1 percent strikeout rate and an exactly 50 percent ground ball rate in 130.1 innings of work.

There’s also the Derek Johnson factor. “I’ve known D.J. since I was fourteen years old,” Gray said. “He knows what makes me go. He definitely knows what I’m about.” And the feeling is mutual.

“I really think that Sonny’s best attribute is how competitive he is,” Johnson told Sheldon. “You’re talking about a guy who blew through the minor leagues and became a quality major leaguer early. I think it’s not only a testament to his ability, but also his drive, his competitiveness. He’s almost a born leader. It shows on the field, and I’m just really excited about those traits coming back out and him doing his thing.”

When Gray came up with the Athletics in 2013 he had a couple of bullpen appearances and a return trip to the minors, but they brought him back that August, made him their fifth starter, and he ended up pitching well enough including back-to-back postseason spot clinchers, the 2013 game that clinched the American League West (SONNY WITH A CHANCE OF STRIKEOUTS said one banner hung from a ballpark rail, when Gray started Game Two of the ALDS) and the 2014 game that clinched a wild card.

Gray even finished third in the American League’s Cy Young Award voting in 2015, when Keuchel (then with the Astros) won the prize. He had a solid fastball and a terrific array of breaking balls including a changeup he can throw up to 88 mph and a cutter that almost hits 92. But in 2016, after two seasons making a case as the A’s arguable staff ace, he had two serious disabled list residencies including elbow and forearm inflammation and a right trapezius muscle strain earlier. He pitched well enough to start 2017 that the Yankees found him attractive in the first place.

When he pitched poorly Gray never shied from holding himself accountable, even when the Yankees moved him to the bullpen for a spell last year, but he couldn’t bring himself to say whether or not the Yankee Stadium spotlight, which sears as often as not, got the better of him.

“It’s no secret [2018] didn’t go as good for me as you would like,” Gray told the reporters on the conference call. “But at the end of the day, I showed up every day and was ready to put in the work. I honestly think you can go through some hardships at times and come out the other end better than you ever were. That’s honestly how I feel. I learned a lot [in 2018] . . . unfortunately, I got to sit and watch a little more than I would have liked. I got to learn a lot not only about baseball but about myself and about what makes me tick.”

The closest Gray would come to admitting he wasn’t comfortable pitching in Yankee Stadium was when he assessed his chances in Great American Ballpark, saying that park’s hitter coziness doesn’t exactly bother him. “I’m not huge into that type of stuff,” the 29-year-old righthander said. “You can pitch, and you’re comfortable pitching somewhere, you can go out and get the job done for sure.”

The A’s were thought to be interested in bringing Gray back, and the Giants were thought to be in play for him as well. But the Reds have him and Gray was happy enough about it to sign on for three years beyond 2019. (He would have become a free agent for the first time after the 2020 season.)

“I’ve got a really good feeling,” he said about joining the re-tooling Reds. “We’re trying to turn the corner here and trying to start winning a lot of games, and that’s exciting for me for sure. It just feels right for me. It just felt right the whole time.”

“He’s going to be out to try and prove something, not only to other people but to himself as well,” Johnson told the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I think that when you have that type of player on your hands, some really good things can happen.”

Just make sure he doesn’t overdose on that Skyline Chili.