The All-Scar Game

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Austin Riley, Pete Alonso

Austin Riley’s (Braves, left) kneeling throw to kneeling scooper Pete Alonso (Mets, right) ended the bottom of the All-Star Game eighth with a double play . . . (MLB.com photo) . . .

The best thing about Tuesday night’s All-Star Game? Easy. That snappy eighth inning-ending double play into which Athletics outfielder Brent Rooker hit. He shot one up the third base line to Braves third baseman Austin Riley, who picked and threw on one knee across to Mets first baseman Pete Alonso, who scooped on one knee to nail two outs for the price of one, doubling Blue Jays second baseman Whit Merrifield up.

That play preserved what proved the National League’s 3-2 win over the American League in Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. They got the second and third runs in the top of that eighth, when Elias Díaz (Rockies) pinch hit for Jorge Soler (Marlins) with Nick Castellanos (Phillies) aboard after a nine-pitch leadoff walk and nobody out. Díaz sent Orioles righthander Félix Bautista’s 2-2 splitter off a bullpen sidewall, then off an overhang into the left field seats.

It meant the first NL All-Star win since 2012. It also meant Díaz becoming the Rockies’s first-ever All-Star Game Most Valuable Player award winner. Otherwise? It meant almost nothing. Because the worst thing about this year’s All-Scar Game was . . . just about everything else.

Mr. Blackwell, call your office. All-Star Game specific threads have been part of it for long enough. They began ugly and devolved to further states of revulsivity. But Tuesday night took the Ignoble Prize for Extinguished Haberdashery. The only uniforms uglier than this year’s All-Star silks are those hideous City Connect uniforms worn now and then during regular season games. Both should be done away with. Post haste. Let the All-Stars wear their regular team uniforms once again.

Who are those guys? They sort of anticipated long ovations for the hometown Mariners’ All-Star representatives. But they didn’t anticipate they’d be longer than usual. To the point where two Rays All-Stars—shortstop Wander Franco, pitcher Shane McLanahan—weren’t even introduced, when they poured in from center field among all other All-Stars. (Rays third baseman Yandy Díaz, an All-Star starter, did get introduced properly. But still.)

Maybe the two Rays jumped the gun trotting in while the ovation continued, but they should have been announced regardless.

While I’m at it, what was with that nonsense about bringing the All-Stars in from center field instead of having them come out of the dugouts to line up on the opposite base lines? Some traditions do deserve preservation. Not all, but some. What’s next—running the World Series combatants’ members in from the bullpens? (Oops! Don’t give the bastards any more bright ideas!)

Down with the mikes! In-game miking of players has always been ridiculous. But on Tuesday night it went from ridiculous to revolting. When Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi took the mound miked up, the poor guy got into trouble on the mound almost at once. He had to pitch his way out of a two-on, one-out jam in the second inning. He sounded about as thrilled to talk while working his escape act as a schoolboy ordered to explain why he put a girl’s phone number on the boys’ room wall.

What’s the meaning of this? We’ve got regular-season interleague play all year long now. The National League All-Stars broke a ten-season losing streak? Forgive me if hold my applause. So long as the entire season is full of interleague play, the All-Star Game means nothing. Wasn’t it bad enough during those years when the outcome of the All-Star Game determined home field advantage for the World Series?

The road to making the All-Star Game mean something once more is eliminating regular-season interleague play altogether.

Elias Díaz

. . . saving the lead (and, ultimately, the game) Elias Díaz gave the NL with his two-run homer in the top of the eighth. (And, yes, the All-Star uniforms get uglier every year. Enough!) (AP Photo.)

Tamper bay. Sure it was cute to hear the T-Mobile Park crowd chanting for Angels unicorn star Shohei Ohtani to come to Seattle as a free agent. The problem is, he isn’t a free agent yet. He still has a second half to play for the Angels. I’ll guarantee you that if any team decided to break into a “Come to us!” chant toward Ohtani, they’d be hauled before baseball’s government and disciplined for tampering.

I get practically every fan base in baseball wanting Ohtani in their teams’ fatigues starting next year. If they don’t, they should be questioned by grand juries. But they really should have held their tongues on that one no matter how deeply you think the All-Scar Game has been reduced to farce. Lucky for them the commissioner can’t fine the Mariners for their fans’ tamper chants. (Not unless someone can prove the Mariners put their fans up to it, anyway.)

Crash cart alert. Cardiac Craig Kimbrel (Phillies) was sent out to pitch the ninth. With a one-run lead. The National League should have put the crash carts on double red alert, entrusting a one-run lead to the guy whose six 2018 postseason saves with a 5.90 ERA/6.74 fielding-independent pitching still felt like defeats. The guy who has a lifetime 4.13 ERA/4.84 FIP in postseason play.

Kimbrel got the first two outs (a fly to right, a strikeout), then issued back-to-back walks (six and seven pitches off an even count and a 1-2 count, respectively) before he finally struck Jose Ramirez (Guardians) out—after opening 0-2 but lapsing to 2-2—to end the game. Making the ninth that kind of interesting should not be what the Phillies have to look forward to if they reach the coming postseason.

Sales pitch. How bad is the sorry state of the Athletics and their ten-thumbed owner John Fisher’s shameless moves while trying and failing to extort Oakland but discovering Nevada politicians have cactus juice for brains? It’s this bad—when the T-Mobile crowd wasn’t chanting for Ohtani to cast his free agency eyes upon Seattle, they were chanting “Sell the team!” when Rooker whacked a ground rule double in the fifth.

Can you think of any other All-Star ballpark crowd chanting against another team’s owner in the past? Not even George Steinbrenner’s worst 1980-91 antics inspired that. That’s more on Fisher, of course, but it’s still sad to think that a team reduced to cinder and ashes with malice aforethought captured an All-Star Game crowd’s attention almost equal to the attention they might have paid the game itself.

The ten million-to-one shot comes in

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Domingo Germán

German’s uniform number must have felt like adding insult to injury to the Athletics Wednesday night.

When the late Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in Game Five of the 1956 World Series, New York Daily News writer Joe Trimble was stuck for an opening line. His News colleague Dick Young handed one to him, practically in a glass case: The unperfect man pitched a perfect game.

That pretty much robs anyone of using it as a headline for Domingo Germán, who became the fourth Yankee pitcher to come away with a perfect game Wednesday night. Which is a shame, because Germán can be seen as having made Larsen resemble a saint.

Before he married in 1960, Larsen was a wild oat whom no less than Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle called the greatest drinker he’d ever known. That was saying something considering Mantle’s own prodigious taste for distilled spirits. The night before he went to a no-windup delivery and reached baseball immortality, Larsen went out—still steaming over an early Game Two hook—and got smashed.

Germán’s is a more grave backstory. He missed 2019’s final eighteen games plus the entire pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 after slapping his girlfriend during retiring Yankee legend CC Sabathia’s charity party late in the 2019 season. His 2021 return didn’t thrill all his teammates, even though there’d been Yankee fans swearing that a lack of formal criminal charges meant he should have been back in 2020.

“Sometimes,” relief pitcher Zack Britton said, before Germán’s 2021 return, “you don’t get to control who your teammates are.”

The Yankees entered spring training this year without figuring Germán in their starting rotation plans. Not until Frankie Montas needed shoulder surgery, Carlos Rodòn injured his forearm and then his back, and Luis Severino incurred a lat injury. And Germán himself—who has said he started undergoing treatment for depression following his 2019 incident and counseling to improve as a husband and father—dealt with shoulder inflammation last year.

Nothing in Germán’s 2023 entering Wednesday suggested he’d have anything coming such as what he’d do in Oakland’s RingCentral Coliseum—pitching the 24th perfect game in Show history and the fourth in Yankee history, following Larsen, David Wells, and—with Larsen and his Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra in attendance for a ceremonial pre-game first pitch—David Cone.

Germán was ejected, then suspended ten games, for too much of that new old-fashioned medicated goo on his hand after a May outing in Toronto. Before that, in April, he was suspected but allowed to wash his hands during a game against the Twins.

From early May through mid-June, Germán became, perhaps surprisingly, the best Yankee starting pitcher who wasn’t named Gerrit Cole, including a two-hit performance against the Guardians 1 May and six and two-thirds one-run ball against the Dodgers on a Sunday night game in June that was televised natinoally.

Then, his two outings prior to Wednesday night saw Germán abused by the Red Sox for seven runs in two innings; and, bushwhacked by the Mariners for ten runs including on four home runs.

I don’t know what Germán did on Tuesday night. I do know that he went out to the mound Wednesday night with absolutely nobody in the sparse-enough RingCentral house, perhaps including himself, expecting him to come away with the first perfect game ever pitched by a man whose previous start saw him take a ten-run beating.

That includes factoring that the A’s were the opposition. This year’s A’s have become such a pathetic set after long enough dismantling and disembowling under the all-thumbs hand of their owner that a perfect game against them might be considered doing it the easy way.

Especially since, during the top of the fifth, the Yankees made bloody well certain that Germán could go back out to the mound, pull up a lounge chair, and pitch from a sitting position serving up balls on tees without incurring serious damage.

They entered the inning with a mere 1-0 lead thanks to Giancarlo Stanton’s fourth-inning, two-out, first-pitch home run. They finished it with a 7-0 lead following an RBI double (Kyle Higashioka), a run home on a throwing error off a bunt (by Anthony Volpe, who stole third during the next at-bat), an RBI single (DJ LeMahieu), a two-run single (Stanton) after another A’s error enabled the bases loaded, and a two-out RBI single.

The Yankees then scored once in the top of the seventh (on Josh Donaldson’s sacrifice fly) and thrice in the top of the ninth (a run-scoring throwing error, an RBI double, a run-scoring ground out) to finish the 11-0 pile-on. It’s the fattest winning score in a perfect game since the Giants staked Matt Cain to a 10-0 conquest in 2012 and only the second time a perfect game pitcher had double-digit run support to work with.

All the while, Germán kept feeding the A’s things onto which they couldn’t attach sneaky eyes through the infield or wicked distractions in the outfield. He struck nine batters out, all before the eighth inning, and should have handed his defense at least equal credit for the perfecto as he might have accepted for himself. This is Germán’s gem with a win factor assigned, result of his strikeouts divided by the sum of his ground and fly outs:

  Score K GB FB WF FIP
Domingo Germán 11-0 9 8 10 .500 5.30

Essentially, Germán himself was responsible for half the game’s perfection. Which actually places him well enough ahead of Larsen’s perfecto (WF: .350) but behind those of Wells (.688) and Cone (.588).

Among the perfect games pitched in the World Series era (1903 forward) with available game logs, Germán’s win factor is higher than six perfecto pitchers (Larsen plus Charlie Robertson, Tom Browning, Dennis Martinez [the lowest at .227], Kenny Rogers, Mark Buehrle, Dallas Braden) but lower than eleven. (Cain, Wells and Cone, plus Jim Bunning, Sandy Koufax [tied for highest with Cain: 1.077], Catfish Hunter, Len Barker, Mike Witt, Randy Johnson, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernández.)

You might care to know that Germán shares a .500 WF with one perfecto pitcher, one-time Yankee Philip Humber. But Germán’s curve ball, considered a sharp pitch when it’s thrown right, was responsible for nineteen of his 27 outs, including seven of his strikeouts.

“He threw that curveball in any count that he wanted to,” said A’s infielder Tony Kemp postgame. “It was spinning differently and moving differently. He put his fastball where he wanted to. Changeup as well. He just kind of mixed them.”

Larsen beat a somewhat aging but still formidable Dodgers team who’d ground their way to their final pennant during their Brooklyn life. Germán took on an A’s team that’s been compared often enough to the 1962 Mets—while lacking that team’s circumstantial popularity and flair for inadvertent ensemble comedy.

Those Mets merely got no-hit by Hall of Famer Koufax—who threw one of the most voluptuous curve balls in history himself—while Koufax’s Dodgers slapped eleven runs out of Met pitching . . . on 30 June 1962. These A’s accomplished something on 28 June 2023 that those Mets didn’t. They were victimised by Germán and the Yankees without the relief of the five walks Koufax surrendered.

Washington Post sportswriting legend Shirley Povich led his story of Larsen’s World Series perfecto with, “The million-to-one-shot came in.” It’s not unfair to suggest Germán was the ten million-to-one shot.

But you wonder whether his unusual uniform number—the only available single-digit number on the Yankees anymore, chosen when he gave Rodón his usual number 55 to indicate a new beginning for himself—didn’t look more swollen in the A’s eyes, adding insult to injury, than it looked on Germán’s back. Zero.

Smash, slash, and smother

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Mike Trout, Brandon Drury

Trout accepts congrats from Drury after his leadoff blast in the third—unaware that Drury would hit the next pitch out and Matt Thaiss would hit the next pitch after that out, opening the thirteen-run third-inning carnage against the Rockies Saturday night.

Saturday night was one night the Angels could well afford Shohei Ohtani having an off night. One RBI single in seven plate appearances might be cause for small alarm ordinarily. But who the hell needed Ohtani, on a night that the Angels dropped a 25-1 avalanche atop the walking-wounded Rockies in Coors Field?

The Rockies went into the game knowing they’ll miss right fielder Charlie Blackmon another few weeks, hitting the injured list with a broken right hand, after he tried playing through it following the hand having been hit by a pitch in Kansas City. They were already missing Kris Bryant with a heel injury. Not to mention three key starting pitchers including Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela.

But nobody saw Saturday’s kind disaster coming when the Angels opened a 2-0 lead after two full innings.

They spent the second inning nailing a pair of back-to-back base hits before Rockies starter Chase Anderson plunked Angels right fielder Mickey Moniak on 0-2 to load the pads, and David Fletcher slashed a two-run single on the first pitch—all with nobody out.

Anderson looked rehorsed after he induced a double play grounder and caught Ohtani himself looking at a full-count third strike. You’ll find fewer more grave instances of looks being deceiving than what the Angels did to him in the top of the third.

It only began with future Hall of Famer Mike Trout leading off by hitting a 1-0 pitch over the center field fence, then with Brandon Drury hitting Anderson’s very next pitch over the left center field fence, and then with Matt Thaiss hitting Anderson’s very next pitch over the right field fence.

Three pitches. Three thumps. To think the fun was just beginning for an Angels team whose past few seasons have been anything but in the end.

Not even the most cynical observer of the thin-aired yard known as Coors Field expected what happened after Thaiss completed his circuit around the bases, and after Anderson walked a man, induced a force out at second, surrendered a base hit, and induced a pop out around the infield:

* Taylor Ward singling home new Angel toy Eduardo Escobar, acquired from the Mets a day or so earlier and going 2-for-4 in his Angels premiere.

* Ohtani singling Moniak home and sending Anderson out of the game in favour of Matt Carasiti.

* Trout walking to re-load the pads.

* Drury sending a two-run single up the pipe.

* Thaiss walking to re-set first and second.

* Hunter Renfroe yanking a bases-clearing double, one of his team-leading five hits on the night.

* Esobar singling Renfroe home.

* Moniak sending a two-run homer over the right center field fence.

The third-inning carnage ended only when Carasiti got Fletcher to ground out right back to the mound. And wouldn’t you know that at least one Twitter twit harrumphed about the injustice of it all after Moniak connected: “21st-century MLB, taken to its most absurd extreme. This is one example of why I can’t get that excited about homers, anymore.”

Not even over three straight to open an inning in which only five of the thirteen runs scoring in the frame scored by way of home runs and half the hits were singles? Not even over five runs scoring off singles and three off a double? Not even ten of the thirteen Angel runs of the inning coming home with two outs?

You want to harrumph about something, harrumph about why the Rockies were caught woefully unprepared and left two relievers in to take fifteen for the team. Not just the six Carasiti surrendered of his own as well as adding two to Anderson’s jacket, but poor Nick Davis starting in the top of the fourth.

The Angels slapped him silly for eight runs on seven hits including back-to-back one-out RBI singles followed by an RBI double, another bases-loading walk, a two-run double, and Fletcher hitting a three-run homer. Then Davis got Ward to ground out and struck Ohtani out swinging to stop that inning’s carnage.

Davis survived a pair of two-out singles in the fifth. I confess—I couldn’t resist tweeting at that point: “With apologies to the Roaring Twenties, after five it’s Angels 23, Rockies skiddoo.”

The Rockies’ righthander wasn’t quite so lucky in the sixth, but he might have felt just a small hand of fortune: the worst the Angels did to him in that inning was a double (Moniak) and a single (Fletcher) to open the inning with first and third, before the Angels’ 24th run scored on a force out at second.

That would be the same way the Angels got their 25th and final run of the night two innings later, with Karl Kauffmann on the mound for the Rockies. The only thing spoiling the Angels’ smothering shutout would be Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle leading the bottom of the eighth off with a 1-0 drive over the center field fence off Angels reliever Kolton Ingram.

Just days earlier, the Angels were humiliated by back-to-back shutouts courtesy of the Dodgers. Now, they ended Saturday night setting a franchise record for runs in a single game—a franchise record they broke by one, having scored 24 against the  Blue Jays in an August 1979 game. They also became the first in Show in the modern era to score twenty or more runs in a two-inning span.

All that on a night when the only Angels not to get any hits were one pinch hitter and two mid-to-late game insertions. And, when they secured themselves in second place in the American League West—six games behind the division-leading Rangers.

“Today,” said Moniak postgame, “was just one of those days, where everyone was feeling good and we were getting the right pitches to hit.” That may yet qualify as the understatement of the season.

Danny Young, RIP: The hard climb and fall

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Danny Young

It took Danny Young just over a decade to make the Show, and a shoulder injury following a harsh cup of coffee to return home.

The 21st Century’s first official grand slam wasn’t hit in the United States. The Mets and the Cubs opened the 2000 season on 30 March in Japan’s Tokyo Dome. The game went to an eleventh inning, and Cubs manager Don Baylor sent a longtime minor leaguer named Danny Young to the mound to pitch the top half.

The first student from Woodbury, Tennessee’s Cannon High School to make the Show in the first place, Young started auspiciously enough, getting two quick outs on a grounder to shortstop by Robin Ventura and a pop fly around the infield by Derek Bell. Then he surrendered a base hit to Todd Zeile before walking the bases loaded by way of Rey Ordóñez and Melvin Mora.

Mets manager Bobby Valentine sent Benny Agbayani out to pinch hit for relief pitcher Dennis Cook. Young’s first pitch to him missed for ball one. Agbayani hammered the lefthander’s second pitch over the center field fence. After Jay Payton’s followup double, Young escaped when Edgardo Alfonso flied out to center field.

“Even though I gave up a grand slam, I still looked around and it’s like, ‘That’s Mark Grace right there. I’ve got Sammy Sosa in the outfield’,” said Young—found dead at home at 51 Sunday—to Fox Sports. “They patted me on the back and let me know it was going to be all right. I had a lot of the guys come to me and say, ‘Welcome to the big leagues.’ They were like, ‘Things like this happen.’ I should have gotten out of the inning. It was just nerves and knowing within myself that something was wrong.”

It took Young long enough to get to the Show in the first place. Drafted by the Astros at nineteen in 1990, he played for nine minor league teams affiliated to three major league franchises over the decade to follow before he finally made the Cubs after the turn of the century. He never complained about being drafted in the 83rd round, either.

“If I was a first-rounder,” he once told Fox Sports writer Sam Gardner, “I might not have made it, because I had a thirst and a hunger to make it because of where I was drafted. If they’d have set a million dollars down in my hand at that time, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. So maybe that was just meant to be my turn.”

He simply didn’t expect to be on the wrong side of history when he finally got his turn in a Cub uniform in Tokyo.

He knew he’d had control issues from the outset—in his first minor league season he struck 41 batters out in 32.2 innings, but he also walked 39—but he also knew he could learn plenty enough about the game he loved but knew too little about. “I struggled just because it was a new process for me,” he told Gardner. “I still had this fear of making a mistake and the coaches just thought, at the time, ‘This guy is just having a hard time picking this stuff up’.”

Before they released him to be picked up by the Pirates organisation, the Astros even tried as radical a class as they could think of: they hired Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, then working free-lance as a roving pitching instructor, to work with Young and with a kid named Billy Wagner in spring 1994.

Young had absolutely no idea who his new teacher was.

“Then I come to find out a couple years later,” Young said, “and people are looking at me like, ‘Dude do you know who you were with?’ I just didn’t know baseball, but they didn’t know that I didn’t know baseball. I just went out there and pitched.” Ever the gentleman, Koufax gave Young a signed ball that Young kept in a clear ceramic ball on a pedestal in his home.

“[I]t was overwhelmingly mind-blowing, the things that he knew about the directional part of pitching that I didn’t really grasp at first,” Young told Gardner of his Hall of Fame teacher. “And as I went along, it got better. I was a late bloomer, so I didn’t really understand the concepts that he was teaching me, but he taught me to find a comfort zone and how to tune out the crowd and what’s going on around me.”

The Pirates, too, remained as patient as possible as Young continued to struggle finding the comfort zone Koufax preached. As in the Astros organisation, Young tried everything he could think of, from changing deliveries and arm angles to changing speeds and back. Only when the Cubs picked him in the 1997 Rule 5 draft did Young begin to smell something close enough to success, or at least real major league potential.

He moved up the chain until he made the team in spring 2000. After Agbayani’s Tokyo blast, the Cubs returned Stateside and Young got into the next three straight games against the Cardinals. The first outing: two walks in two-thirds of an inning but no runs allowed. The second: a two-out double by Fernando Tatis, Sr. but another scoreless escape. Maybe Young was getting it at last.

The third: disaster—a pair of two-out walks, leaving a mess for his relief Brian Williams to clean up in the fourth inning, a mess that continued with a bases-loaded walk, a grand slam by J.D. Drew, and three runs charged to Young that he wasn’t on the mound to surrender himself.

The Cubs sent him back to Iowa after that. Young continued struggling until he finally spoke up further about an issue he’d felt in Tokyo, when he first mentioned to Mark Grace—after a pickoff throw that bounced to first—that he felt something wrong with his shoulder. It turned out his rotator cuff required major surgery, the first of five on the shoulder.

After 2000, Young retired from the game he’d never really had the chance to learn even rudimentarily in a Woodbury where baseball wasn’t exactly a well-taught sport. At least, not until Young returned home to spend the rest of his life raising his family and teaching and coaching the game to local kids.

“I played tee-ball, played Babe Ruth, played Dixie Youth Baseball and high school, but there was no real coaching,” he told Gardner. “And for the [coaches], that was no fault of their own. We hauled hay, we fished, we did whatever we did, and then we went out on the field and had fun. We had teams, but it wasn’t competitive. I mean, I ended up being a right-handed hitter because none of the coaches knew how to teach me how to hit left-handed.”

If only the Danny Young who went home to teach the game on his native ground had been available to the Danny Young who originally caught the Astros’ eyes, however deep in that 1999 draft. He might have had more to show for his long slog to the Show, and in the Show itself.

He never struck a major league hitter out, he walked six, he surrendered five hits, but he kept a big league attitude. For himself, and for his wife, Sarah, their six children, and their two grandchildren. The battler who surrendered this century’s first major league grand slam should only know peace and fulfillment in the Elysian Fields to which he was taken—cause unknown at this writing—too soon.

On Freese and perspective

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David Freese

David Freese comes down the third base line after sending the 2011 World Series to a seventh game with a leadoff blast in the Game Six bottom of the eleventh.

If there’s one sub-pastime that animates baseball faithful almost as much as the game itself, it’s arguing. Especially about who belongs in the national Hall of Fame, and who doesn’t. Now you’re about to ponder a twist you probably never thought you’d have to consider.

You may never hear of any Hall of Famer declining the honour because he felt honestly that his career really didn’t justify it. But now there’s David Freese, the biggest of the big from the 2011 World Series, who’s turning down his election to the Cardinals’ team Hall of Fame because he feels his career doesn’t justify it.

The Cardinals aren’t the only team whose greatest moments were often written by others than their national Hall of Fame legends. But I’d be willing to bet they’re the only one who’ve just had one of those authors turn their own team Hall of Fame down. If I’m wrong, I’d be glad to know whom else.

This is a team who’s had enough big moments to stock a warehouse. Including, but not limited to, Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander (who was or wasn’t hung over) fanning Hall of Famer Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded in the 1926 World Series, an inning before the Redbirds threw Babe Ruth out stealing to end it—with Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig on deck while Bob Meusel was at the plate.

There was Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter’s mad dash home in the 1946 World Series. There was Hall of Famer Bob Gibson’s perseverance in Game Seven of the 1964 World Series, then busting Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s single Series game strikeout record in 1968. There was Jack (The Ripper) Clark’s monstrous three-run homer to snatch a pennant from the Dodgers who were an out away from forcing a seventh 1985 National League Championship Series game.

There was Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols’s glandular home run off Brad Lidge that only staved off the Cardinals’ elimination in the 2005 NLCS; and, his three bombs in 2011 World Series Game Three—starting in the sixth inning, finishing in a kind of reverse cycle. (A three-run shot, a two-run shot, and a solo shot.)

And, almost superceding the entire foregoing, Freese in Game Six of that Series. You had to have some kind of mojo working to supercede all that. Freese had it that night. When he hit a game-tying, opposite-field triple with the Cardinals down to their final strike in the ninth; then—in the bottom of the eleventh—sent the Series to a seventh game (which his team also won) by hitting a full-count, leadoff homer straight over the center field fence.

It added the World Series MVP to a trophy case that already included Freese’s being named the 2011 NLCS MVP as well. He’d done bloody well splendid for a kid who’d grown up a Cardinals fan, gave up on the game before college, but took it up again to become the Padre for whom the Cardinals traded aged Jim Edmonds only because they needed a third baseman with a little pop in their minor league system.

Then he earned the starting 2011 third base job, missed time early when hit on the hand by a pitch, and returned to play out the season with a Cardinals team that more or less backed into the postseason when the Braves collapsed as the Cardinals managed to reheat just enough.

“[S]ure, he might trade his career for a Hall of Fame career, but then again he might not,” wrote The Athletic‘s Joe Posnanski in 2020, recounting his own sixty top baseball moments. “There are 270 players in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is only one player who grew up in St. Louis and got to live the dream again and again for the team he grew up loving. I suspect David Freese is pretty happy with how it turned out.”

Freese’s happiness has been won hard enough. He’s spent a lifetime battling clinical depression, including a lapse into alcoholism as a way to battle it. He kept quiet about that battle until well after he’d left the Cardinals: he didn’t take it to the public until eight months after he married Mairin O’Leary and—after two seasons as an Angel—had become a Pirate.

David and Mairin Freese

Freese with his wife, Mairin. They met and married after he left St. Louis and began putting his inner burdens—including the outsized weight of the hometown sports hero—in their proper places.

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

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

He came to his hard-earned inner peace only after the Cardinals traded him away. (Then-manager Mike Matheny told him candidly it might be the only way he could begin remaking himself.) He had one or two more moments in the postseason sun, as a Dodger in 2018. He hit a pair of leadoff bombs—in Game Six of that NLCS and in Game Five of a World Series the Dodgers lost in five to a Boston Rogue Sox team of replay room reconnassance rapscallions.

Then, he retired after the 2019 season. Long after he’d begun enjoying life outside baseball, including learning the piano and becoming an avid traveler with his wife and two young sons. “Freese no longer saw his stupefying 2011 postseason as a cross to bear from behind the wall of depression,” I wrote in 2020.

He looked forward to taking his . . . son to a live Cardinals game in due course. Not to mention showing the little boy what Daddy delivered in Game Six. And all that postseason, including a still-record fifty total bases and 21 runs batted in.

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

That’s the guy who took an honest look at his career and, still at peace and happiness with how it turned out, decided he was honoured that Cardinal fans voted him into the team’s Hall of Fame but that they gave the honour to the wrong player.

Lots of not-so-greats have come up bigger than their own selves in baseball’s biggest hours. Such men as Al Gionfriddo, Dusty Rhodes, Don Larsen, Moe Drabowsky, Al Weis, Donn Clendenon, Gene Tenace, Brian Doyle, Bucky [Bleeping] Dent, Dave Henderson, Mickey Hatcher, Sid Bream, Mark Lemke, Tony Womack, Edgar Renteria, Scott Spiezio, David Eckstein, Steve Pearce.

They don’t all get the chance to prove publicly that they were better men than their isolated moments at the top of baseball’s heap. This weekend, Freese struck a big blow for putting a brief spell of baseball greatness into the kind of perspective that comes only from a man who made himself greater than his signature professional achievement.