Brooks Robinson, RIP: Swept up to the Elysian Fields

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Brooks Robinson

Nothing got past The Hoover too often in two decades at third base.

When Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson celebrated his 83rd birthday, I couldn’t resist having a little mad fun with his nickname, actual or reputed. Commonly known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner, I recalled longtime Washington Post writer Thomas Boswell calling him The Hoover.

Considering how he beat, swept, and cleaned at third base for two decades, I thought Boswell had it more dead on. So did Reds first baseman Lee May during the 1970 World Series. May first called Robinson—who died at 86 on Tuesday—the Human Vacuum Cleaner at that time. Then, May asked, right away, “Where do they plug Mr. Hoover in?”

Anyway, I thought of other great fielders at third and otherwise. Almost none of them were quite on Robinson’s plane. (“I’m beginning to see Brooks in my sleep,” lamented Reds manager Sparky Anderson during that Series. “I’m afraid if I drop this paper plate, he’ll pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first.”) But they were some of the best their positions ever hosted.

Fellow Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt combined breathtaking power at the plate with his own kind of sweeping and cleaning at third. Considering that plus his sculpted physique, I thought that, for him, it could only be the classic Electrolux, the sleek tank vacuums of 1924-2004.

You couldn’t possibly top The Wizard of Oz for Ozzie Smith at shortstop, but I tried. For him, I designated Aero-Dyne, the model name of Hoover’s first tank-style vacuum cleaner. Nor could you possibly top Graig Nettles’s actual nickname, Puff the Magic Dragon, and I was kind enough not to try. But for others, I came up with things like these:

The Constellation—Roberto Clemente. Hoover’s once-famous, Saturn-shaped canister, born as a swivel-top in 1951, seems to fit Clemente since it often seemed that his ways of running balls down and cutting baserunners down did emanate from somewhere beyond this galaxy.

The Courier—Andruw Jones. That machine was Sunbeam’s brilliant 1966 idea of stuffing vacuum cleaner works into what resembled a Samsonite hard-shell suitcase. Jones traveled so many routes so well becoming baseball’s all-time run-preventive center fielder that you could only think of him as the Courier delivering messages of doom to opposition swingers and runners.

The ElectrikBroom—Keith Hernandez. Mex was as sculpted at first as Schmidt was at third. As vacuum cleaners went, the classic Regina ElectrikBroom was the Bounty paper towel of its time: the quicker picker upper. That was Hernandez at first base.

Eureka—Ken Griffey, Jr. Tell me you saw him turn center field into his personal playground and making spectacular catches without thinking, “Eureka!” 

The Hoover Junior—Mark Belanger. Robinson’s longtime partner at shortstop and the second most run-preventive player at his position ever behind The Wiz. The only reason he won’t be in the Hall of Fame is because he couldn’t hit if you held his family for ransom.

The Kirby—Kirby Puckett. Should be bloody obvious. 

The Premier—Johnny Bench. Should be self explanatory if you saw him behind the plate. (After watching Robinson’s third base mastery against his team in that 1970 Series, Bench quipped of his MVP award, “If he wanted the [MVP prize] car that badly, we’d have given it to him.”)

The Roto-Matic—Clete Boyer. That Yankee third base acrobat moved around so much cutting balls off at the third base pass you could have mistaken him for the swiveling hose atop Eureka’s canister cleaner of the same name.

The Royal—Curt Flood. The king of defensive center fielders when Mays began to show his age. (Maybe it should have been a wet-dry vac, since it was said so often that three-quarters of the earth is covered with water and the rest was covered by Flood.)

The Swivel-Top—Willie Mays. That General Electric canister of the early 1950s boasted of giving you “reach-easy” cleaning, and Mays was nothing if not the reach-easy center fielder of his time.

There was more to Robinson, of course, than just his third base hoovering. There was the decency that enabled this white son of Little Rock, Arkansas, to welcome African-American son of Oakland, California by way of Beaumont, Texas Frank Robinson, upon the latter’s controversial trade out of Cincinnati after the 1965 season. “Frank,” Brooks said, “you’re exactly what we need.”

Brooks & Connie Robinson

Brooks Robinson and his wife, Connie, at the dedication of Brooks Robinson Dr. in Pikesville, Maryland, just off the Baltimore Beltway, in 2007. The Hoover and the stewardess whose feet he swept her off aboard a 1959 flight to Boston were married 63 years.

There were the eighteen All-Star Games, the sixteen straight Gold Gloves, the 1964 American League Most Valuable Player award, the 1970 World Series MVP. (Forgotten amidst the beating, sweeping, and cleaning at third base that Series: The Hoover hit a whopping .429 with his plate demolition including two home runs.)

There were the 39.1 defensive wins above replacement level (WAR) and the 105 OPS+, making Robinson one of only two players ever to have 30+ dWAR and an OPS+ over 100. The other? Fellow Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr.

There was the end of his career, the final two seasons when the Orioles essentially carried him despite his diminution at the plate and his age-reduced range at third—simply because a) they thought so well of him as a man, and b) they knew he needed the money. Bad. And he wouldn’t in position to benefit from the advent of free agency.

He was broke and in debt thanks to his off-season sporting goods business. Not because he made mistakes but because he was taken advantage of. “At every turn,” Boswell wrote (in The Heart of the Order), “Robinson’s flaw had been an excess of generosity.”

How could he send a sporting goods bill to a Little League team that was long overdue in paying for its gloves? He’d keep anybody on the cuff forever. Said Robinson’s old friend Ron Hansen [one-time Orioles middle infielder], “He just couldn’t say no.” As creditors dunned him and massive publicity exposed his plight, Robinson answered every question, took all the blame (including plenty that wasn’t his), and refused to declare bankruptcy. He was determined to pay back every cent. With great embarrassment, he returned tens of thousands of dollars that fans spontaneously sent him in the mail to soften his fall.

When the Orioles gave him a Thanks Brooks Day upon his 1977 retirement, the master of ceremonies was Associated Press writer Gordon Beard. “Around here,” he said, “people don’t name candy bars after Brooks Robinson. They name their children after him.”

This was the fellow who’d autograph anything proffered—including, it’s been said, a pet rock and a bra. A fellow who so appreciated what he was able to do for a living for his first two decades of adulthood that, when the end came nigh, he could only be grateful for having been there at all.

“Every player I’ve ever managed,” cantankerous Orioles manager Earl Weaver told Boswell, “blamed me at the end, not himself. They all ripped me and said they weren’t washed up. All except Brooks. He never said one word and he had more clout in Baltimore than all of them. He never did anything except with class. He made the end easier for everybody.”

Robinson in retirement climbed out of his financial hole well enough, becoming a popular localised Orioles broadcaster in the 1980s with a flair for candid and perceptive analysis even when it meant being critical. If he lacked anything in those years, it was ambition. He never sought to manage in baseball and he never sought a national audience on the air, but he did have partial ownership of a pair of minor league teams for a time.

The Orioles have retired only six uniform numbers and one is Robinson’s number 5. His statue looms inside Camden Yards, where the Orioles and the Nationals observed a moment of silence before Tuesday night’s game, lined up outside their dugouts, in respect. The American League East-leading Orioles beat the Nats, 1-0.

Robinson also served as chairman of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association’s board of directors. If there’s any single blemish on his resumé, it’s that he didn’t move the group toward helping to gain redress for pre-1980 short-career players frozen out of the 1980 pension re-alignment. “He dropped the ball, says A Bitter Cup of Coffee author Douglas Gladstone. “He never went to bat for them, many of whom were his teammates.”

In recent years, the first-ballot Hall of Famer dealt with health issues such as prostate cancer (he 32 radiation treatments), a subsequent followup surgery, and a fall that hospitalised him with a shoulder fracture in 2012. He also became an Orioles special advisor, insisting that it be tied to community events. He was quoted as telling owner John Angelos he’d do anything except make baseball decisions: “That’s passed me by, if you want to know the truth.”

The only love deeper than baseball in Robinson’s life was his wife, Connie, whom he met in 1959 aboard an Orioles flight to Boston when she was a stewardess on board. (They married in 1960.) When he auctioned off his volume of remaining memorabilia (My children, they have everything they ever wanted from my collection), the proceeds went to a foundation the couple established for worthy Baltimore causes, a Baltimore adopted son to the end.

Now The Hoover will beat, sweep, and clean the Elysian Fields. He might even pick up a paper plate and throw Sparky Anderson out at first.

ESPN writer in depth: Oakland was had

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Oakland Athletics fans

Few fans are more abused by the shenanigans of their team’s owner than A’s fans.

Come November, seemingly, baseball’s owners may have the chance to vote on whether or not to let Athletics owner John Fisher finish what he started, namely hijacking the A’s to Las Vegas. Seemingly.

Getting it to their vote is a three-layered process. It should end with the A’s told to stay put, with Fisher told to sell the team, and with new owners tasked for good faith work with Oakland that will keep the A’s there without one taxpayer’s dime to pay for it.

Right now, the best news for abused A’s fans is that the team isn’t going to equal the 1962 Mets for season-long futility. As of Thursday morning, the A’s sat at 46-106 with ten games left to play. They’re 7-11 in September including a current seven-game losing streak, but even if they lose those final ten they won’t overthrow the Original Mets. Swell.

Because the worse news, according to an in-depth examination by ESPN’s Tim Keown, is that Fisher and his trained seal David Kaval “blindsided” Oakland with their plan to move the A’s to Las Vegas. It’s also that Fisher running the so-called “parallel track” between staying in Oakland and moving to Las Vegas might well have been a one-way track in disguise.

Bottom line: Oakland was had. Fisher’s failed attempt to strong-arm the city into all but handing him a $12 billion Howard Terminal development project that seems to have included a by-the-way new ballpark for the A’s turned into Fisher picking up his badly-abused baseball toy and carting it off to Vegas in due course.

On 19 April, according to Keown’s examination, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was driving home from a local business opening, comfortable that the gap in keeping the A’s in Oakland was down to a mere $36 million once the city learned of $64 million in federal grants coming toward Howard Terminal.

That’d teach her. Because as she drove, Keown said, Kaval called. Oops. “Hey, just a heads up. Somebody leaked to the press that we have a binding deal with Las Vegas.”

“Thao had scheduled a week of intensive talks with the A’s and a team of mediators to bring the deal home,” Keown wtote. “Hotel rooms were booked. Flights were reserved. Thao even gave it a name: The Negotiation Summit. At the event the evening of Kaval’s phone call, Thao told Leigh Hanson, her chief of staff, ‘I really think we’re going to get this over the finish line’.”

Not quite. After one call leading to another leading to another, Fisher himself called Thao. She told Keown Fisher said, quote, “I feel really bad. I really like you and I like working with you, but we’re going to focus all our energy on Las Vegas.” “In the very beginning,” she said she replied, “I literally asked you, ‘Are you serious about Oakland?’ and you said yes. But if your focus is on Vegas, good luck.”

The leaked story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Thao’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson told Keown, “Not sure it’s a leak when you’re quoted in the story. Pretty sure that’s not how leaks work. If you’re going to be strategic, try not to be so sloppy.”

Sloppy? That doesn’t begin to describe this disaster. Neither does it begin describing Fisher and Kaval not only pronouncing the $12 billion Howard Terminal plan dead, but also trading Fisher’s so-called “legacy” project in Las Vegas—55 acres off the Strip, and a community park atop a ballpark—for nine acres where the Tropicana Hotel now sits.

Except that Keown says further that the A’s relocation application to MLB now doesn’t even include a ballpark proposal. Sketches were produced and published back last spring, of course, but there’s not only no park propsal in the application—a ballpark which would  have to be domed or retractably-roofed thanks to Las Vegas’s notoriously hot summers—there’s no financing plan noted and no architect designated.

All that after Nevada lawmakers approved and Gov. Joseph Lombardo signed a bill authorising $380 million public dollars to build a ballpark on the Tropicana site, and sports economists began tabulating how much higher prospective cost overruns would run the taxpayer price tag no matter how much the A’s would kick in to help cover them.

Nevada fell hook, line, and stinker after Fisher and Kaval essentially tried and failed to game Oakland. “Fisher wanted to build a new, state-of-the-art ballpark at Howard Terminal because he had a vision of changing those 55 acres around the Terminal,” writes Cup of Coffee‘s Craig Calcaterra, interpreting the damning Keown report.

Fisher wanted to be a hero; he didn’t want to build a new stadium because it would be good for the fans, or it was simply something the team needed after playing in a decrepit ballpark for so long. He wanted the plaudits. When Fisher didn’t get exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted it from Oakland, he wasted no time in taking the next-best deal in Vegas.

Hilariously, the Fisher and Kaval’s rush to Vegas has been largely disorganized. Keown notes that in the Athletics’ revenue projections, they assumed an annual attendance of 2.5 million fans, but their proposed new ballpark in Vegas would only seat 30,000. Multiply 30,000 by 81 home games and you get 2.43 million — a mathematical impossibility, even if they sold out every single home game. Furthermore, the Athletics don’t have an actual ballpark design, a financing plan, an interim home for the team until they open the new digs, nor do they even have an architect.

After Lombardo signed the aforesaid bill, I wrote this: “An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there’s something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams’ own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling ‘Stop!'”

But who will yell? Especially with the Rays reaching a deal for their own new $1.3 billion ballpark in St. Petersburg, for which the Rays reportedly will only have to pay half, with the other half coming from city and Pinellas County governments, which means from taxpayers living in or visiting that area.

Will it be the preliminary three-owner review panel of Mark Attanasio (Brewers), John Middleton (Phillies), and John Sherman (Royals), not exactly the Three Stooges but three of the smartest owners among a group not exactly renowned for brains?

Will it be commissioner Rob Manfred (whose hands are anything but clean in the entire A’s mess) and an eight-member executive board, knowing Manfred is too willing to grant Fisher and the A’s a bye on the usual required nine-figure-plus relocation fee?

Will it be enough among the remaining thirty owners if and when it gets far enough for their vote? Will they be willing to a Fisher who more or less abused the living daylights out of Oakland and its baseball team before deciding he and it have a future in Las Vegas, long-enough-suffering A’s fans in Oakland be damned?

The Attanasio-Middleton-Sherman panel should be brainy enough to do what they can to recommend against rewarding Fisher-Kaval’s bad faith playing and convince enough of their peers to vote no. “This whole process” Calcaterra writes, “has been even more of a circus than we thought.” In the Fisher-Koval circus, it seems the clowns and the animals trade off on holding the keys.

But at least the A’s won’t meet or beat the Original Mets for season-long futility. Isn’t that just peachy?

The Shoh is on hiatus

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Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout

Ohtani (left) is done for the season, an oblique injury added to his elbow’s now-reinforced UCL tear. He can walk in free agency, but Trout (right) may be entertaining trade thoughts a lot more deeply now . . .

George F. Will once wrote (in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball) that A. Bartlett Giamatti was to baseball’s commissionership what Sandy Koufax was to the pitcher’s mound, having “the greatest ratio of excellence to longevity.” The Athletic‘s Marc Carig wrote last Satuday of Shohei Ohtani, “singular excellence is no match for collective mediocrity.”

Last Friday, Ohtani’s Angel Stadium locker was empty, and a large duffel containing his equipment and other belongings sat in front of it, after he was placed in the injured list at last—with an oblique strain. “No ceremonial sendoff,” Carig wrote. “No expressions of gratitude. Just a tender oblique and a good old-fashioned Gen Z ghosting. How appropriate. Now the credits roll on a baseball travesty.”

Ohtani has also undergone surgery on his pitching elbow at last. His surgeon, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the same surgeon who performed Ohtani’s prior Tommy John surgery—called the new procedure “reinforcement” of the torn ulnar collateral ligament, not full Tommy John surgery. It means Ohtani won’t pitch again until 2025, but he will suit up as a DH in 2024. For whom, only time and the off-season free agency market to be will tell.

“Thank you very much for everyone’s prayers and kind words,” Ohtani said on Instagram following the Tuesday procedure. “It was very unfortunate that I couldn’t finish out the year on the field, but I will be rooting on the boys until the end. I will work as hard as I can and do my best to come back on the diamond stronger than ever.”

Note that he didn’t say for whom he expects to come back after signing a new deal this winter.

A baseball travesty? The Angels had the two greatest players of their time together in their fatigues for six years, and they couldn’t support the two with a competent, competitive supporting cast who could pick it up when one or both was injured. It was as if the 1962-66 Dodgers had swapped in the ’62-’66 Mets for everyone except Hall of Famers Koufax and Don Drysdale.

Carig called it “sabotage.” You could think of far worse applications. “They did this through general mismanagement and their own brand of incompetence,” Carig continued. “Those sins endured despite their churn of managers and front-office regimes, only further reinforcing that the full credit for this failure falls at the feet of the constant throughout it all: the owner, Arte Moreno.”

It may be wasting breath and writing space to recycle that Moreno brought a marketer’s mentality to a baseball team, aiming once and forever at what George Steinbrenner used to call “name guys who put fannies in the seats,” without stopping first to ponder whether they’d equal a cohering team on the field and at the plate and whether his true baseball people had other such cohering parts in mind. And, whether it was always good for a player’s health.

Baseball people who did stop to ponder such things didn’t last long under Moreno’s command. Whether by way of the owner’s caprices or by way of their own mistakes turned into impossible-to-ignore disaster, Moreno’s Angels have been the Steinbrenner Yankees of the 1980s as you might have imagined them if The Boss hadn’t been so shamelessly public a nuisance.

Think about this: It took an oblique strain almost four weeks later for the Angels to do what should have been done when Ohtani’s ulnar collateral ligmanent tear took him off the mound but not out of the batter’s box. The adults in the room should have overruled Ohtani’s understandable desire to continue at least with his formidable bat, disabled him entirely, and placed his health at top priority.

You can only imagine the look when last Friday came with Ohtani’s packed duffel in front of his locker. Don’t be shocked at it. If he can’t play the rest of the season, he can come to the park in moral support without having to unpack it or bring it from home.

Someone had to find the adults in the Angel room in the first place. Apparently, there were none to be found. Whether draining the farm at the trade deadline for one more run at it that proved impossible, whether turning right around and waiving most of what they drained the farm for, whether managing the health of their two supermarquee presences, the Angels room remains bereft of adults.

Oft-injured third baseman Anthony Rendon, who’s had little but injury trouble since signing big with the Angels as a free agent, developed a habit of discussing his injuries with a wary sarcasm, until he finally cut the crap and said the shin injury incurred on the Fourth of July wasn’t the mere bone bruise the Angels said it was but, rather, a full-on tibia fracture—and that he only learned it was a fracture in mid-August.

Now, Rendon was asked whether he was actually considering retirement from the game. “I’ve been contemplating it for the last ten years,” he said. If he actually does it, it would give the Angels something other teams would love but might raise fresh alarms in Anaheim: financial flexibility. Just what they need, more room for fannies-in-the-seats guys assembled with no more rhyme, reason, or reality.

Mike Trout, the player of the decade of the 2010s and still formidable when healthy, has been injury riddled the past few seasons. He may not be jeopardising his Hall of Fame resume, but something is badly amiss when he feels compelled to return perhaps a little sooner than he should return, then ends up back in injury drydock yet again after one game.

Once upon a time it was impossible to think of Trout anywhere but Anaheim. But trade speculation and fantasies around him have sprung up now more than in the recent past. Trout himself has dropped hints that he’s exhausted of the team doing either too little or not enough (take your pick) to build a genuinely, sustainingly competitive team around himself and Ohtani.

That’s not what he signed up for when he signed that blockbuster ten-year, $370 million plus extension a year ahead of what would have been his first free agency. That’s not what he signed up for when he showed the world he wasn’t that anxious then to leave the team on which he fashioned and burnished a jaw-dropping Hall of Fame case.

It was Trout, too, who welcomed Ohtani to the Angels with open arms and personal charm, then had to find too many ways to grin and bear it as the pair—when healthy—performed transcendence while surrounded by unimportance. If Trout now questions the Angels’ commitment to competitiveness and their regard for the health of those in their fatigues, pondering himself as well as Ohtani, only fools would blame him.

Most major league teams would kill to have even one such king of kings on their roster. Two of this year’s affirmed division winners (the Braves, the Dodgers) have at least one each. (Ronald Acuna, Jr., Braves; Mookie Betts, Dodgers.) The Angels had the two most singular such kings of kings and blew it higher and wider than the Hiroshima mushroom cloud.

“What remains stunning in all of this,” Carig wrote, “is the level of waste. The Angels have succeeded like nobody else in doing so little with so much.”

Sound organizations create a plan and then follow it. These Angels, not so much. A throughline can be drawn from Albert Pujols to Anthony Rendon, with Ohtani and Trout’s extension in between. What’s clear is that all of these big-ticket transactions weren’t part of some grand plan. Rather, they were the product of a billionaire collecting baubles, just faces to slap on a billboard.

Ohtani’s free agency is still liable to become a bidding war of stakes once thought unfathomable. With or without his recovery time limiting him to a DH role, Ohtani’s going to have suitors unwilling to surrender until he does. Which one will convince him they know what they’re doing to fashion truly competitive teams around him? We’ll know soon enough.

But considering that baseball medicine can still be tried by jury for malpractise, whomever plans to out-romance the Angels for Ohtani and seduce them into a deal for Trout had better come with adults in the room to manage them and their health prudently. There’s no point telling the billionaire with his baubles and billboards to grow up otherwise.

The Bloom is off the Red Sox rose

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Chaim Bloom

Chaim Bloom standing in the rain in Fenway Park. The rain on the Red Sox’s 2023 parade has only begun its end with his firing as chief of baseball operations last Thursday.

When the Red Sox hired Chaim Bloom to run their baseball operations, he had the Right Stuff so far as they were concerned at the time. They decided it was time to play belt-tightening ball, rather against their nature. They figured the guy who’d learned how to play it during all those Tampa Bay years would be the ace of their front office staff.

They may also have figured he was Houdini enough to escape the shackle they imposed upon Bloom from the outset. He wasn’t. Maybe not even the savviest mind in baseball could have been.

Bloom may have been reared in the Rays’ frugal ways, but he wasn’t foolish enough to want to lose Mookie Betts, an absolute franchise player. Being all but forced to trade Betts rather than pay him his worth when he’d reach free agency the following season signed and sealed Bloom’s fate long before it was delivered last Thursday.

He probably didn’t want to lowball Xander Bogaerts, either. But it assured Bogaerts’s free agency departure. Then Bloom, under who knows whose persuasions, turned right around and handed Trevor Story Bogaerts money before Bogaerts was even out of town.

Not even rebuilding the farm his predecessor Dave Dombrowski drained in building their 2018 World Series winner could save Bloom with the Red Sox, after all. And Bloom walked into a situation in which there was a kind of elephant in the room due to be exposed not too long after he walked in.

That, of course, was the tainting of that ’18 Series winner. In due course the ’18 Red Sox were exposed as having operated a replay room reconnaissance ring for sign-stealing. They (and surely others) didn’t go even half as far as the 2017 Astros’ far more elaborate such intelligence agency. But it left the ’18 Series winner under a toxic cloud regardless.

Rebuilding the farm may be to Bloom’s credit, but managing trade deadlines isn’t. This July, the Red Sox had the best month in baseball. But in every August that Bloom ran the front office, the Olde Towne Team had losing records. This season put it into blaring microcosm. The Red Sox this July: 15-8. This August: 13-15.

Oh, they can still hit. As of Sunday morning the Red Sox were second in the American League in hits and in team batting average, fifth in runs scored and team on-base percentage, fourth in team OPS and team total bases, and top of the heap as doubles hitters.

But their pitching is a mess. They’re fifth from bottom in the league for team ERA, and the team’s fielding-independent pitching (FIP: sort of their ERA when the defense behind the pitching is removed from the equation) is a ghastly 4.44. No Red Sox starter has an ERA lower than Brayan Bello’s 3.71 but he has a 4.19 FIP.

And, after Bloom mostly stood pat on dealing pending free agent pitchers at the 2022 trade deadline, he could only watch when Bogaerts signed with the Padres and Story was lost for this season after elbow surgery. Saying this year’s Red Sox defense is porous is speaking politely.

Before this year’s trade deadline, third baseman Rafael Devers—whom Bloom did extend to keep in the Red Sox family—said flatly the team needed pitching help. They still need it. Everyone knows this year’s Red Sox can still hit, but opposing lineups prepare to face this year’s pitching model tabulating the hikes in their batting stats before the first pitch.

And was there any more embarrassing set of days this year than when Betts returned to Boston in Dodgers fatigues in late August, proceeding to treat the Red Sox like piñatas with a .467/.500/.800 slash line for the set including seven hits, two doubles, and a two-run homer over the Green Monster seats? In the middle of maybe the best season of his career, yet?

Bloom isn’t entirely to blame for the Red Sox mess. When the team’s ownership decided belt-tightening and falling below the luxury tax threshold was the preferred operating mode, they picked a guy who’d spent fifteen years learning how to maneuver and produce winners with a Rays team loaded with genius for building winning teams out of youth and  bargain parts.

Forcing Bloom to trade Betts a year ahead of his scheduled free agency equaled an airline board forcing the carrier to swap its 787s for commuter jets. Bloom built the Red Sox’s 2021 American League Championship Series entrant, but that series also exposed them as never missing opportunities to miss opportunities. (And, never stopping ALCS MVP Yordan Alvarez’s almost one-man demolition show.)

In a way, Bloom shouldn’t feel terrible about that. Getting that far in the postseason hasn’t always guaranteed Red Sox executive survival. Just ask Dombrowski, who lasted only ten months after that 2018 Series conquest, in large part because he drained the farm Ben Cherington rebuilt.

Just ask Cherington himself, now the Pirates’ baseball operations chief. He un-sunk the ship sunk by the Bobby Valentine nightmare of 2012 (a nightmare imposed on Cherington when he was overruled from the top in wanting someone else), turned it into the 2013 Series championship, but got shown the door when Dombrowski became available following his execution in Detroit.

Red Sox Nation doesn’t stay with their team expecting it to behave like a midmarket team when building or replenishing and then to perform like a team with one somewhat lopsided half but the other half looking half lost and half baked. The future may look bright with Bloom’s farm remaking, of course, but this year’s Red Sox are out of the AL East race officially, on the threshold of wild card elimination, and the bright future looks a little too distant for now.

It won’t do, either, to say, well, they’re playing .500 ball and even had a winning record while being dead last in the division. That’s not what Red Sox Nation expects. But it wasn’t really Bloom’s fault. When he walked into the job and was handed the immediate Betts trade mandate, the Red Sox ownership all but assured Bloom’s tenure equaled being hoisted for failure.

So who will have the honour of picking up where Bloom now leaves off? Excellent question. It only begins with a solid candidate named David Stearns getting picked off by the Mets to run their baseball operations. Already the Red Sox hunt for a new baseball ops chief has strike one in the count.

Which means nothing if the team’s ownership wants to continue playing the financial game like another poor relative. “They’re the Boston Bleeping Red Sox,” says Athletic analyst/Smart Baseball author Keith Law, “and it’s time they start acting like it again.” Perhaps a little past time.

A Stork hopes for delivery of pension redress

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George Theodore

Just keeping this issue in the forefront is the best thing . . . Eventually, somebody who really has the power may say hey, I didn’t realise this was happening, let’s do something about it . . . Hopefully something can happen.”—George (The Stork) Theodore, a 1973 pennant-winning Met, shown here in 2016. (University of Utah photo.)

His major league playing career lasted 105 games, thanks largely to a 1973 outfield collision that resulted in a serious hip injury. But George (The Stork) Theodore remains a favourite among longtime Met fans and the organisation itself, invited to both the farewell of Shea Stadium and the opening of Citi Field, and invited to commemorations of the 1973 Mets’ pennant winner.

That was then: The 6’4″ Theodore endeared himself to fans with hustle when he got playing time, plus signing autographs amiably and talking to the sporting press with far more than mere boilerplate.

This is now: The Stork is a retired elementary school counselor, with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s degree in social work, who’s been honoured for that work more than once, including an Educator of the Year award from the South Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce plus an Excel Teacher of the Year award.

“I was going to do that a few years. I was actually trained in medical social work,” said the 76-year-old former outfielder/first baseman, by phone from his Utah home, this week. “Then I found out that it was really my calling, and I enjoyed it, working with the young children in elementary school, and ended up with a career of 38 years there in the public schools.” About his awards as an educator, “I was honored at that, and humbled, because I didn’t feel I was any better than a lot of my compatriots.”

Drafted by the Mets in 1969, Theodore was a member of the ’73 pennant winner who had two World Series plate appearances, which he still calls “not bad” for a man who says he was on the Mets’ postseason roster mostly as a designated team cheerleader. But the Stork wishes only that the game he loved would favour himself and over five hundred more remaining players with short major league careers who played prior to 1980—and continue going without major league pensions.

He’s been interviewed often in the years since his playing career ended, but the pension issue isn’t always raised at those times. “It’s in a minor way,” he said of that subject, “but the interviews are basically about the ’73 team, though we try to sneak in something about the pension issue there.”

The issue, of course, is that when baseball’s owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association re-aligned the game’s player pension plan in 1980, they changed the vesting times to 43 days’ major league service time to qualify for full pensions and a single day’s service time to qualify for health benefits—but excluded such players as Theodore whose pre-1980 careers fell short of the former four-year vesting requirement.

Ask whether he could isolate whom among that year’s player representatives voted to exclude himself and his fellows—from each team’s player rep to then-league reps Steve Rogers (Expos pitcher, for the National League) and the late Sal Bando (Brewers third baseman, for the American League)—and Theodore isn’t entirely sure.

“I know they were kind of in a hurry to get [pension realignment] done to avoid a strike,” he said. “And I know that [original Players Association executive director] Marvin Miller—who was really the backbone of our union, getting all the wonderful things—was really disappointed that, as he looked back, that he didn’t pull in those people before and include them in that 1980 bargaining.”

The sole redress Theodore and the others have received since has been a stipend negotiated by the late Players Association executive director Michael Weiner with then-commissioner Bud Selig—$625 per 43-day service period, up to $10,000 a year before taxes. That amount was hiked fifteen percent as part of the 2021-22 owners’ lockout settlement. But the recipients still can’t pass those monies on to their families upon their deaths.

Had Weiner not died of brain cancer in 2013, would he have been able to go forward from the 2011 stipend deal to get something more? “That’s a good question,” Theodore  answered. “The whole system is not one of legality, but one of ethics. Baseball didn’t turn out to be what it is now just on it’s own. It’s been a slow, steady, building block process. And every player who played was a part of that.”

The Players Association formed originally to address pension issues in 1954. Its annual revenues now are believed to be $56.8 million. MLB’s annual revenues reached a reported $10.5 billion in 2022. Both the owners and the players kick into the players’ pension fund.

If those numbers are accurate, they add up to $10,556,800,000 per year. The union and the owners could agree to grant the remaining 500+ frozen-out, pre-1980 short-career players full pension status—based on their 43-day major league service periods—without going broke by a far longer shot than anything Shohei Ohtani can hit over the fence.

“I was just happy to be playing baseball and excited to get any opportunities,” Theodore said of his career. “I was one of the last people drafted.” [In 1969, round 31; one of the very few drafted out of the University of Utah.] “And so I knew my career was always in jeopardy. I knew many of my friends who signed at the same time, they’d have a bad week or two and they were gone.”

Because of that, he said, he wasn’t involved directly in Players Association actions, and credits A Bitter Cup of Coffee author Douglas Gladstone for helping to make him and numerous others of his short-term peers aware of the pension shortcoming.

Several pre-1980 short-termers have said they believe they were frozen out of the realignment because they were seen mostly as September callups. But most of the surviving 500+ either made teams out of spring training at least once or saw major league action in months prior to any September. Theodore himself made the Mets out of spring training in 1973.

The Stork was considered a strong defender with a good throwing arm and league-average range. “I was a fast runner, too,” he said. But the lack of game action didn’t bode well for his improvement as a major league hitter despite having recording solid batting marks in the minors. He had a splendid .817 OPS to show for his minor league seasons and posted a .972 OPS between A level and AA ball in 1971.

“I needed to play in order to be like that,” Theodore said. “Like many young players, playing once or twice a week, you don’t get your reflexes that you need.”

Deployed mostly as a left fielder in the majors, Theodore swears his better position was first base, where he played in eighteen major league games including twelve starts. “But we had John Milner there,” he said, “and Ed Kranepool, too. First base was really where I think I was the most effective because of my size and range. I could prevent bad throws just by stretching out.”

Still, Theodore became a fan favourite. “I always appreciated that,” he said. “I just know that I tried to give my best any time I played. Whether it would end up that way or not. And I responded to the fans, too. I enjoyed meeting fans and giving autographs. It was all new to me and I enjoyed every minute of it.”

His nickname didn’t hurt, either. Minor league teammate Jim Gosger—once with the Red Sox; an original Seattle Pilot;, and, very briefly, a 1969 Met when he completed an earlier trade (he didn’t make their postseason roster), before moving to two more teams and returning for brief spells with the ’73-’74 Mets—hung it on him. Theodore denies the longtime story that Gosger came up with the nickname when seeing the tall man holding a teammate’s baby.

“But he did call me the Stork, somehow” he said, chuckling. “I’m not sure why he decided on that nickname, but it stuck, and it endeared me to a lot of people.”

George Theodore

Theodore was carried off the field on a stretcher after a hip-dislocating collision with center fielder Don Hahn on 7 July 1973. Surrounding are (left to right) manager Yogi Berra (8), right fielder Rusty Staub (4), relief pitcher Tug McGraw (45), and second baseman Felix Millan (16). Braves center fielder Dusty Baker (12) looked on in concern.

But whatever further progress the Stork might have made ran into a thunderous obstruction on 7 July 1973. Atlanta’s Ralph Garr whacked a seventh-inning drive toward which Theodore and his close friend, Mets center fielder Don Hahn, converged in left center . . . and collided violently. Theodore suffered a dislocated hip while Garr ran out what proved an inside-the-park two-run homer, and missed most of the rest of the season.

Call it a classic Mets example of no good deed going unpunished. An inning earlier, Theodore led off with a walk, took second on a sacrifice bunt, and scored the game-tying run when Hahn doubled deep to left. The collision and Garr’s inside-the-parker in the seventh put the Braves up 5-3 (they’d scored on an RBI single just before Garr batted); the Braves eventually won, 9-8, in a game that changed leads twice more before it finished.

Theodore said he might have matured into a solid major leaguer had it not been for that injury, but he remains grateful that the Mets put him on their 1973 postseason roster. The ’73 Mets were an injury-riddled team until key regulars returned for the September drive that ended—under relief pitcher Tug McGraw’s rallying cry “You gotta believe!”—with them winning the National League East and then the National League Championship Series from the Reds.

George Theodore

The Stork, tall and happy as a Met.

In the World Series, which the Athletics won in seven games, Theodore pinch-hit for Mets pitcher Ray Sadecki in Game Two in Oakland and grounded out to shortstop. In Game Four in New York, with the Mets up 6-1 (it proved the final score), Theodore was sent out to play left field in Cleon Jones’s stead for the top of the eighth, but he popped out to third base to end the bottom of the inning. Those were his only appearances that postseason.

“They didn’t have to do that,” he said of being on the postseason roster. “I hadn’t played for three months and I was more or less a cheerleader and emotional support for the team, until the World Series. Then all of a sudden I’m called to pinch hit and went into the outfield in another game.

“It’s funny how fate works,” the Stork continued. “Not playing for that long, and I felt very comfortable there. And then I went in for Cleon Jones, who was sick most of the game and throwing up out in left field, and it’s 35 degrees, I think. And [A’s third baseman] Sal Bando, hits a line drive out to left center field, and somehow I reacted and went and snagged that ball. It’s just kind of a surreal, you wonder, just who’s helping you make these moves.”

His days as a major league Met ended in 1974 (he’d retire after a 1975 at their Tidewater AAA farm), but that year handed him another kind of gift: he met a Met fan from Queens named Sabrina, who eventually became his wife and a Salt Lake City elementary school teacher.

Theodore cherishes his memories with the Mets, especially having as a teammate Hall of Famer Willie Mays in his final major league season until nagging injuries and age finally wore him down for good. And he cherishes likewise that Met fans still remember and appreciate him. But like his fellow pre-1980, short-career players, the Stork wishes only that some way, somehow, baseball will redress their pension shortfall more fully.

“We’re now in our 70s and 80s and maybe 90s, some players,” he said. “Just keeping this issue in the forefront is the best thing . . . Eventually, somebody who really has the power may say hey, I didn’t realise this was happening, let’s do something about it . . . Hopefully something can happen. If nothing more, the [Weiner-Selig] annuities can be increased. It’s amazing that we got the annuity in many ways.”

It would be more amazing if baseball awakened wide enough to understand Theodore and his fellow pre-1980, short-career players were frozen out of proper pensions wrongly in that 1980 re-alignment. At least as amazing as Theodore’s 1973 Mets turned out to be.