Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss

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Steve Cohen

Steve Cohen, outside Citi Field. The fan-friendly Mets owner preaches patience. Attention-deficit Met fans say, “and we want it right now!”

Listen up, frustrated (and spoiled) Yankee fans who think any early season series lost demands an accounting of “what would George do.” Look across town to the owner of the Mets, whose frustrated fan base seems to wish he was prepared to go full-on Boss because the 2023 Mets, thus far, are (shall we say) underwhelming.

Enough Yankee fans think a season is illegitimate unless the Yankees reach, never mind win the World Series. Enough Met fans think, “this year is next year,” upon one terrible inning—in April. The Yankee fan wishes their owner had even an eighth of his father’s notorious impatience. The Met fan wishes their owner might consider selling to The Boss’s ghost.

Not so fast, urges that owner, Steve Cohen, who is disinclined to push the proverbial plunger simply because the team he thought was well constructed has shown cracks aplenty.

Met fans can’t question Cohen’s own passion. Like me, he is a Met fan since the day they were born. Like me, he knows that frustration comes with the territory at least as much as surreal miracles or surreal self-resurrections. He, like me, knows that blowing a faltering team up at the first drop of a bad inning leaves little enough beyond difficult to contain rubble and fallout.

“When things get really bad,” Cohen told the New York Post‘s Joel Sherman over the weekend, “I’m not going to blow up. I don’t think that’s the proper response. I don’t think it solves anything, other than it gives people a one-day story. But it doesn’t really solve anything.” Where was he when George Steinbrenner turned the 1980s Yankees into Jacobin France as it might have been administered by the Rufus T. Firefly Administration?

“There’s plenty of blame to go around from a performance point of view,” Cohen continued. “So blowing up, I’m not sure it solves anything. It would demonstrate, ‘Oh, he really cares. He’s one of us.’ But the reality is it’s not going to solve our problems. And I think in some ways it can be demotivating.”

Hark back to how many times a Steinbrenner tantrum demotivated and demoralised Yankee teams from their top of the line stars to their glittering turned jittery prospects. (Roger Erickson, 1983 pitcher: “They told me I’m their future. I told them, ‘I don’t want to be in your future. It’s frustrating enough being in your present’.”)

“I’ve got enough experience, whether in my business or even in baseball now,” Cohen said, “to know that when things are going great, you are never as great as you think you are, and when things are going really bad, you are not as bad as you think you are. Things can turn around fairly quickly.”

They can. Until they can’t. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, things turn around quickly from tragedy to triumph. (Think of the 2019 Nationals and, what do you know, the 1973 Mets.) Sometimes, they turn around quickly from triumph to tragedy. (Think of the 1964 Phillies, the 1969 Cubs, enough Red Sox teams for the final 82 years of the 20th Century, and the 2007 Mets, to name a few.)

Cohen has the patience of Job. Enough of his fan base seems to wish Job had hit the ceiling running. But neither he nor they expected Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, a pair of future Hall of Famers in the sunsets of splendid careers, to show their ages quite this drastically. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected rotation inconsistency from that pair down to turn into bullpen exhaustion. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected Pete Alonso to hit the injured list with a wrist injury off being hit by a pitch. Neither Cohen nor Met fans expected inconsistent hitting with men in scoring position.

Certainly manager Buck Showalter and general manager Billy Eppler have made an error or three. The Met fans who lack Cohen’s lifelong immersion in the team think the solutions range from throwing out the first manager to throwing out the first general manager—and then getting really mad. But Yankee fans with memories long enough and hubris short enough can tell you how well that worked for The Boss in the 1980s.

It’s not as though the National League is composed entirely of threshing machines. The league is somewhere between modest and mediocre overall this season. The Mets may not look quite as terrible as their surface record and their daily over-under-sideways-downs. And things could have been much worse.

Remember the gnashing when Steven Matz was thought to have gone back on his word and then signed with the Cardinals? How did that work out for the Cardinal Wayward? Matz had an injury-addled 2022 with a 5.25 ERA, and his non injury-addled 2023 has him at 5.72 and demoted to the bullpen.

Remember the prayers that some way, some how, Jacob deGrom might be made a Met for life? The injury-compromised great now requires his second Tommy John surgery. Of all the might-have-beens in baseball history, deGrom is liable to go down as the saddest of them all, a Hall of Fame talent who owned the mound when he was healthy but whose body told him, almost continuously, “Don’t even think about it, Buster.”

Remember how close the Mets got to making Carlos Correa one of their own? Until Correa flunked a physical exam for the Mets, just as he had for the Giants, then re-upped with the Twins. This season, thus far, Correa has a 97 OPS+, a .304 on-base percentage, a pace to hit far enough less than his career-long 162-game average 28 home runs, and he’s one defensive run below the American League average for shortstops. That should be a sigh of relief that he didn’t become a Met and become the planned third base experiment.

Cohen is not going to erect a guillotine in Citi Field or anywhere else just yet. The Boss kept his Yankee guillotine on red alert every month, so it seemed, at the worst of his depths. Meet the new boss, not the same as the old Boss.

“[T]he only other thing I see that, frankly, I’m a little bit troubled by is I’m seeing mental errors that we didn’t see last year and that we can fix,” Cohen continued. “That’s fixable.”

And I just don’t know why that’s happening. We all see it on the field on a daily basis. And that’s, that’s on the players, you know, and they’re working hard. I guess teams get into a funk, that happens. And then come out of it. These are veterans that have performed before, and they’re working hard. They care. They’re good guys. I believe in them.

And they’re smart enough, they care enough, that they’ll fix it on their own. They’ll fix, at least the mental side. We’re going through a bad period, but they know it, and they are willing to own it. Those are what I would call unforced errors that we can fix and we will because these are good guys who are working hard. As much as the fans care, as much as I care, they care even more.

It could be worse. Much worse. To which one fears today’s attention-deficit Met fan would reply, “Off with your head!” Even Cohen knows the present state can’t continue. That he refuses to just blow up the joint is more than admirable. But he may also know that a move or two may have to be made, soon enough.

Commissioner, anyone?

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Adapted from JK’s speech to the Las Vegas chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research delivered 10 June 2023.

Calling baseball commissioner Rob Manfred an inveterate tinkerer is calling Donald Trump and Joe Biden mountebanks. Calling Manfred a visionary denigrates the very definition of vision. But those who pine for the so-called good old days, while letting themselves think Manfred’s lust for rule remaking/remodeling points toward them, must first be made to answer, “Which good old days?”

Certainly not the days when the bases were large stones. Certainly not when pitchers were required to throw no way but underhanded and from a standing position strictly. Certainly not when the one-hop hit to the outfield was ruled an out if the fielder snagged the ball on that hop. Certainly not when none but white men were permitted to play the major league game. 

There are some things from the so-called Good Old Days that ought to be preserved or exhumed, of course. That’s without regard to the particular period of Good Old Days the get-off-my-lawn crowd prefers to revive. There are also things heretofore inconceivable to which today’s governors of our game, Manfred on down, should lend far more thought than they do. But it cannot be Manfred to shepherd it any longer.

Would you like to become baseball’s next commissioner? If your answer is yes, at minimum you’ll need a reasonable station from which to disembark your train. What follows is a fourteen-step platform:

1. The august office itself. Upon assuming office, the new commissioner shall convene a rules committee to explore broadening the means by which commissioners are chosen in the future. There’s no sound reason why the owners alone should choose the game’s public steward and top administrator, since it’s long been proven that under the owners alone the commissioner thinks the good of the game is little more than making money for it, and them.

The commissioner of the future should be elected by the following group of 79 people: Single representatives of the owners and the players, each; and, designated representatives from each of major league baseball’s nineteen umpiring crews.

2.Tick-tock clock. On paper, and in the imagination, the pitch clock seemed sound as a nut. In actuality, it wreaks more havoc than should be allowed. Havoc, and no few injuries ranging from the simple to the serious and back. Not to mention the imposition upon pitchers with unique or at least colourful pitching styles. Those concerned about the coming of the Clockwork Baseball Player should concern themselves about and stand athwart anything that would make that coming reality.

3. Game time. Are we supposed to applaud that, thus far, the pitch clock and its concurrent impositions upon the batter have shaved a whole . . . half an hour on average off the time of play? Are we supposed to applaud that the truest culprit of the elongated major league game—namely, the broadcast commercial blocks after each half inning and during each pitching change—remains unmolested?

The pitch clock’s elimination should be matched by all effort to make a new broadcasting agreement that includes no commercial blocks longer than one minute after half-innings and thirty seconds during pitching changes. (Yes, Virginia, it really does take less time now for a relief pitcher to get from the bullpen to the game mound than for the commercials to play.)

4. Manfred Man. The free cookie on second base to open each extra half inning shall be eliminated. Permanently. The only Manfred man that should ever be in the public mind shall be, once again, the hitmaking band of the 1964-66 British Invasion.

5. We’re on the air, anywhere. Eliminate all blackout rules for television. Allow any major league game to be broadcast in any region regardless of whether the ballpark is in the same broadcast region. Let a million television sets bloom because decades of evidence have proven that, of all the reasons for people to stay away from the ballpark, television like radio before it is the least of those reasons.

(As a relevant aside, I still remember seeing Dodger Stadium fans clutching tiny portable TV sets in the park. With the pictures turned down but the sound turned up. Why? Because they wouldn’t believe what they’d just seen from beginning to end unless they heard it from the late Vin Scully.)

6. Umpires can be impeached, too. The umpires have been laws unto themselves for long enough. It’s past time for them to be held as accountable for their malfeasance as players, managers, and team administrators. There’s no reason on earth for accuracy below 96 percent to be permissible. If you doubt that, ponder that a surgeon with a 96 percent accuracy rating wouldn’t face job security, he’d face malpractise suits.

Umpires with accuracy below 96 percent shall be placed on probation for the rest of the incumbent season or the first half of the following season. Failure to improve will result in suspensions. And, yes, the rule book strike zone shall be enforced strictly. The days of umpires deploying their own strike zones must end. That by itself should help assure accuracy of 96 percent or higher behind the plate.

7. No tank you veddy much. Team ownerships who fail repeatedly to invest properly in their major league product and their minor league support systems shall be put on notice. You have one year to decide: Will you invest properly in your teams, every year, regardless of the free spoils of revenue sharings you receive before each season begin; or, will you sell your team to a local/regional ownership willing to do what needs to be done to put an honestly competitive team on the field.

Tanking is fan abuse, plain and simple. If you can afford to buy a major league baseball team, you can afford to put forth a product that gives honest effort to compete. Rebuilding on the fly has been done for eons, before and after the free agency era.

Concurrently, past commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s ridiculous prohibition on player sales shall be rescinded. Teams shall be allowed to sell their players on an open market for whatever price other teams are willing to pay—and the players to be sold shall receive at least 25-30 percent of the sale price. This will allow the supposedly not-so-rich teams to stay minimally competitive, too.

Call it the Averill-Landis Rule, after the ancient commissioner who thought Hall of Famer Earl Averill wasn’t nuts to demand to know how much of the sale price he might receive when the Cleveland Indians bought him from the Pacific Coast League.

While we’re at it, a tanking team must never be given permission to relocate, which leads to . . .

8. If you want to build it, we will come. Under no circumstances shall any team seeking to build a new ballpark go to the local and/or state government for help. For now we mean you, Oakland Athletics. It takes colossal gall to try strongarming your incumbent locale into building you a new ballpark and, when they call your bluff, try to strongarm Las Vegas into building one for you; or, at least, paying for half if not more of it.

The willful self-destruction of a team fan base should never be sanctioned. Neither should regional taxpayers be made to foot all or most of the bill for a new playpen. The Voice in Field of Dreams assuredly did not say, If you build it, they will pay for it.

9. Interleague, schminterleague. Eliminate it from the regular season. Entirely. Save it for when it truly matters—during the All-Star Game, and during the World Series.

10. Are the All-Stars out tonight? Absent one fan, one vote, one time requirements, eliminate the fan vote. Why? Because the All-Star Game must include rosters containing none but the absolute best players on the season thus far. If this means one or more teams lack All-Star representation, tough. This isn’t T-Ball.

While we’re at it, the next commissioner must rule that the All-Star Game also needs to cease being used as a gold watch, even for future Hall of Famers. They’ll get their tributes appropriately around the circuit without a final All-Star honorarium, not to mention those so qualified getting the big one in Cooperstown in due course.

11. Competition, not compensation. This nonsense must cease. The regular season’s meaning has been compromised long enough. And the saturation of postseason games has compromised more than enhanced the game. There’s no reason on earth why any team not parked in first place at season’s end should be playing for baseball’s championship.

Expansion should be pursued to create divisions with even numbers of teams. Then, two conferences of two divisions each shall be fashioned in each league. The wild cards shall be eliminated entirely.

Then, each league’s division champions will meet in a best-of-three division series. The winners in each league will then meet in a best-of-five League Championship Series. (You want the Good Old Days restored, there’s a splendid restoration.) The World Series shall remain its best-of-seven self with its primacy thus restored. (Postseason saturation will be scaled back considerably under such a system, too.)

Thus will baseball fans no longer be subject to the thrills, spills, and chills of watching teams fighting to the last breath to finish in . . . second or even third place.

12. We want a real ball! Something’s very wrong when the Japanese leagues can develop baseballs pitchers can grip easily and are eminently fair to both sides of the ball but the American major leagues—which own a major baseball manufacturer—can’t. All effort to develop a baseball that doesn’t require that new-fashioned medicated goo for pitchers but is consistent and fair to hitters as well shall be undertaken.

A new, consistent baseball shall be developed and brought into play within one year of the new commissioner taking office. It’s long past time for the thinking person’s sport and those who support and supply it to start thinking. Hard.

13. Pensions. The new commissioner shall convene an immediate panel from among all team ownerships and the Major League Baseball Players Association. This panel, at once, shall agree that it was wrong to eliminate pre-1980 short-career major league players from the realignment of 1980. That realignment granted pensions to all players who accrued 43 days of major league service time, and health benefits to all players accruing one day of major league time.

The calculations shall be done to ensure full and proper pensions, based on their actual major league time, to all 500+ surviving short-career players who played before the 1980 realignment. The 2011 Weiner-Selig stipend—one small payment per 43 days service time, which today equals $718 per 43 days—was laudable, but insufficient.

Those players backed their players union’s actions that led to or upheld free agency, too. They do not deserve to remain frozen out.

14. As your absolute first order of business in office. Before assuming office, the new commissioner’s first official pronouncement shall be to demand . . . a recount.

Strasburg Agonistes

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Stephen Strasburg

The proud and happy MVP of the 2019 World Series may face career-over now.

Stephen Strasburg’s father moved to northern Virginia to be closer to his son. Three weeks after Strasburg got a stress-reaction diagnosis, his father died. The son, an only child, cleaned the father’s apartment out last fall and discovered the old man kept a library of newspapers and magazines chroncling his baseball career.

There it was. From Strasburg’s days as San Diego State’s most-hyped major league draft prospect to his early Nationals splash, all the way to his triumph winning the 2019 World Series’ Most Valuable Player award. And all the injury-addled points around and in between following his early-career Tommy John surgery.

“Time has gone so, so fast,” he told Washington Post writer Jesse Dougherty. “A lot of guys that you played with have moved on and they’re in the next chapter of their lives. It’s crazy to think about how short baseball careers can be.” Crazy and, in Strasburg’s case, sobering and saddening.

A month after that Series triumph, Strasburg got his fondest wish. In essence, and I said as much at the time, he clicked his spiked heels three times and pleaded, “There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!” He got his wish, a seven-year, $245 million contract extension making him a Nat for life. It’s what he didn’t wish for that has Strasburg at a sad crossroads now.

He didn’t wish not to pitch on. But since undergoing thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, Strasburg has pitched only once, last June, before hitting the injured list again, Dougherty observed, with a stress reaction in two ribs. That was well enough after Strasburg underwent carpal tunnel syndrome surgery—and learned the hard way that that was a mere pilot fish for TOS.

If you look at Strasburg now, even at age 34, he still looks as though he could go out and give you seven innings. But he only looks that way. Underneath, his arm and shoulder remain a mess. There’s the very real chance that all the surgery on earth won’t let Strasburg return to the mound again. Ever.

And it’s not for lack of trying. Dougherty has recorded Strasburg’s efforts to rehabilitate, all the way down to limiting his workouts to his lower body only to discover those, too, strain his upper body because of nerve damage. Last fall, Strasburg still hoped to get well enough to pitch again. By now he may be hoping just to accept it if his body finally tells him pitching again isn’t an option.

The Nats have had little beyond trouble since that stupefying World Series triumph. Now they’ve got a bigger pile of it above and beyond their 25-33 record this year and their sitting at the bottom of the National League East heap. Strasburg’s been shut down entirely since late April with severe nerve damage. This may be the prelude to shutting down his pitching career entirely.

The Nats are on the hook for the rest of Strasburg’s contract after they couldn’t insure it.  Dougherty reports that sources close to the Nats say they might not have spent atop Strasburg’s extension to insure the deal if they could have found an insurer willing to work with Strasburg’s injury history. Naturally, the jerk brigades can be expected to say Strasburg went from World Series hero to common thief.

You can’t convince them, try though you might, that even a young man whose pitching career has been marked as much by injuries as by triumphs on the mound doesn’t sign a nine-figure deal expecting to make only eight major league appearances in the time since he signed. Injuries may come with the territory of professional sports, but you can’t name one professional athlete who goes to the park thinking he’d really love to turn his arm and shoulder into a science experiment.

Strasburg’s had enough trouble in his career, whether his injuries or whether misperceptions about him as a man. For the longest time his stoic public demeanor caused people to mistake him for being a jackass. Behind it, he had to learn how to pitch with his mind when his body eroded his fastball somewhat. He took the misperceptions head on in 2019, letting his teammates loosen him up, loosening himself up more with the writers who covered the team.

Stephen Strasburg

It took Strasburg a long time to let joy in his work show before the public, but show it he did as he triumphed in the 2019 Series.

TOS happens when blood vessels and/or nerves between your collarbone and your first rib compress, causing shoulder and neck pain and finger numbness. The surgery for it cuts somewhat invasively into the shoulder and the back. The surgeon removes a cervical rib and a pair of small scalene muscles.

Can pitchers return from it successfully? The known results are a mixed bag. When now-retired former Mets pitching star Matt Harvey underwent the procedure in 2016, FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards took a deep dive. For every Bill Singer or Kenny Rogers or Aaron Cook who can pitch a long enough time after the surgery, there’s a Harvey, a Josh Beckett, a Chris Carpenter, a Phil Hughes, a Noah Lowry who can’t.

“Counting on a pitcher who has been through this injury is a terrifying proposition . . . until we have a better track record of pitchers returning from thoracic outlet syndrome, it will keep its reputation as one of the worst arm injuries that a pitcher could suffer,” wrote Beyond the Box Score‘s Nick Lampe a year before Harvey’s surgery. Post-TOS pitchers might or might not lose velocity on their pitches but they’re very likely to lose pitch command.

If they signed delicious contract extensions before turning up with the condition, they’re going to be targeted as thieves by witless fans and careless writers who prefer gorging on the red meat of a fat contract going upside down to digging deep and seeing whether something physical might be the real cause. As if injuries somehow equal moral turpitude or mortal sin.

Don’t let the injuries or the jerks obscure that, when he could pitch, Strasburg was often remarkable, often enough great, and deadly in the postseason: he has a lifetime 1.06 postseason ERA and a 2.07 postseason fielding-independent pitching rate. His bold pitching in Game Six of the ’19 World Series made possible the Nats’ survival to the seventh game they won surrealistically.

When he stood tallest as the 2019 Series MVP, Strasburg spoke soberly in the midst of the Nats’ celebrations, even as he’d finally learned to loosen up enough to let his teammates hug him and make him show his joy. “When you have the ups and downs, I think you can learn just as much from the downs as you can the up,” he began.

I’ve learned that I’m a perfectionist. I’ve learned that I’m a control freak. And in this game it’s very hard to be perfect. It’s very hard to control things. But the one thing that you can control is your approach and how you handle your business off the field. And when you go out there and compete, it’s just about execution. And you put in all the work in the offseason, in between starts, to go out there and try and be the best version of yourself. And that’s something you can control every time.

Until or unless your body says not so fast, Buster. Yet again. This time, his body may be telling Strasburg it’s time to think about the rest of his life, as a husband, a father, a man. There shouldn’t be a juror on earth—in Washington or elsewhere—who’d vote against him if he does.

No free lunch for the Sinkin’ A’s

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This was once the Athletics’ uniform insignia. Now the A’s themselves are a white elephant—whose owner wants to jam down Las Vegas’s throat after he couldn’t strong-arm Oakland for new digs while deflating the team.

Look, again, to your non-laurels, 1962 Mets. The Oakland Athletics, proud owners of a nine-game losing streak and possibly counting, are off to the worst start of any major league team since the turn of the century. The turn of the 20th century, that is.

After losing 5-2 to the Astros Friday, the A’s sit as the none too proud owners of a 10-43 record after 53 games. The 1962 Mets sat with a 15-38 record through their first 53, after splitting a doubleheader with the Cubs. This year’s A’s stand a chance at knocking the 120-loss ’62 Mets out of the books for baseball’s most beaten team.

The Original Mets, of course, were formed of the National League’s flotsam and jetsam in its first expansion draft and became baseball’s last unintentional comedy troupe. These A’s, in all earnestness, are born of an owner’s ten-thumbed-and-toeless touch. They’re as entertaining and funny as the “Daddy, Daddy” joke about the missing Cabbage Patch Kid and an order to eat the cole slaw.

It’s anything but funny that the A’s may be on the threshold of a free lunch in Las Vegas. Commissioner Rob Manfred says the rest of MLB’s owners could vote some time in June on whether to allow the A’s to move to Vegas—if Nevada’s state legislature is blind or fool enough to approve soaking Nevada’s taxpayers to hand the A’s a new ballpark whose early indications show disaster a distinct possibility.

The preliminary design shows a partially retractable-roof, 30,000-seat park to stand where the soon-to-be-gone Tropicana Hotel & Casino stands, with a long walkway to the home plate entrance and nothing substantial in the way of parking. It’s not unattractive. Even if you’re reminded of early Mets manager Casey Stengel’s reaction to seeing Shea Stadium for the first time: “The park is lovelier than my team.”

All indications seem to be Manfred and his minions thinking the A’s will draw their support purely from walking tourists. Oops. Las Vegas has a population above and beyond the travelers making their pilgrimages to the city’s famous casinos, resort shows, and other entertainment along the fabled Strip and the almost-as-fabled Fremont Street Experience. The city’s real population (653,843) is a little less than half the population of the Bronx. Those who don’t live behind the Strip like coming to the Strip, anyway.

They also like baseball, seemingly. The AAA-level affiliate of the A’s, the Aviators, have led the Pacific Coast League in attendance ever since they became an A’s affiliate, playing in a charming, newly-built Las Vegas Ballpark since 2019. They averaged about 532,000 fans a year in the ten-thousand seat park. Those who think there’s little market for baseball in Vegas, think again.

Double oops. Maybe they did think about it. The artist rendering of the ballpark-to-be lacks parking. Let’s hazard a guess. They think the locals who won’t be walking to the park from the Strip will have to park in adjacent hotel-casino parking garages and then walk to the park. Too many of those garages charge hefty for parking now. Wait until they think about jacking the charges on game days. (Earl Weaver, Hall of Fame manager: This ain’t football. We do this every day.)

An artist rendering of what the A’s propose to soak Las Vegas to build. Where to park? Nearby hotel casino garages? Oops.

It would be nicer if Las Vegas was to get a major league team that behaves and thinks like a major league team. Under John Fisher’s ownership the A’s have behaved and thought like . . . a Triple-A team lacking affiliation. Fisher’s too-well-recorded shenanigans in Oakland have made rubble of a storied-enough franchise and fools of baseball’s Lords, who usually do splendid work making fools of themselves.

Las Vegas isn’t a huge television market. Baseball’s self-immolating television rights and restrictions don’t make things simpler. But the National Hockey League’s Las Vegas Golden Knights, now playing the Dallas Stars in the Western Conference finals, left cable television for free TV. They’re also tapping national as well as regional advertisers. Assuming Fisher isn’t prepared to sell the A’s any time soon, it’s not a given that he’d push toward the same things. More’s the pity.

I’ve lived in Las Vegas since 2007. Would I like major league baseball in town? You might as well ask whether I love playing a Gibson guitar. But here’s another jolt of reality for you: Las Vegas is a lovely place to live, climate-wise . . . from about the second week in September through about the second week in June. Around that are summers that mean a classic Beach Boys ode to having fun all summer long is greeted by a Las Vegas listener with two words. And they ain’t “surf’s up.”

The Aviators in their open ballpark play predominantly at night, when the heat is only slightly less oppressive than Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime. The A’s in Vegas, if they get the park toward which they aim, would probably not even think of opening the dome from about 10 June through about 8 September. Not unless they want to hand out buttons along the lines of those the Giants handed hardy fans in their ancient, oppressively chilled Candlestick Park: Veni, vidi, vixi—we came, we saw, we survived.

That, of course, presumes that there are a) Nevada legislators with something more than oatmeal for brains; and, b) baseball owners with likewise. It’s frightening to think you stand a slightly better chance finding brains among lawmakers.

(You’re laughing at the idea of the A’s being “storied?” They had a dynasty or three during their Philadelphia tenure. They had a couple of well-chronicled and well-remembered powerhouses in Oakland: the Swingin’ A’s who won three straight World Series from 1972-74; the Bashing A’s who owned the American League West from 1988-90 [and won a World Series around an earthquake in 1989]; the Moneyballers who made frugality and on-base percentage virtuous and owned the AL West from 2000-2003.)

That was then. This is now. The Sinkin’ A’s have a tentative agreement with Nevada governor Joseph Lombardo and other local muckety-mucks to seek a mere $380 million in tax dollars toward a ballpark estimated to cost $1.5 billion. Said muckety-mucks, writes The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, “evidently consider it a win that public financing might account for less than 25 percent of the 30,000-seat ballpark’s construction cost. To which I ask: Have they seen the A’s play?”

Or, have they seen how the A’s in their non-glory might distort the championship picture? The American League East is a division in which the weakest team is two games above .500 at this writing. They could have three wild card contestants under the dubious new system. But only one might earn a card, as Rosenthal points out, because, in the AL West in which the A’s now play, the Rangers could win that division but the Mariners and the Astros could claim the other two cards by going 13-0 each against the A’s, which is doing things the easy way.

Don’t laugh. It could happen. As of this morning, the Mariners are 7-0 against the A’s and the Astros, 4-0. “[T]he A’s are so horrifyingly bad,” Rosenthal writes, “the possibility of them having an outsized impact on the postseason should tick off the owners of the AL East clubs, and frankly all of the other owners, too.”

It should also tick Lombardo, local Vegas leaders, and Nevada lawmakers off, too, that a man whose team opened the 2023 season with a team payroll only $17 million higher than Aaron Judge’s 2023 salary, and can’t be trusted to put a genuinely competitive team on the major league field, can even think about such a sad sack drawing in Vegas.

The tourists are liable to think soon enough that, if they’re going to get fleeced, they may as well get there the old fashioned way—at the tables. The locals, of whom there are far more than Fisher, Manfred, and even Lombardo think, know that, if we must see a white elephant, we prefer it on the A’s chests during throwback uniform days.

Some of us, too, have smarts enough to know this: The days of municipalities being soaked for sports stadiums must end. Team ownerships aren’t exactly impoverished. The NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders (they, too, came here from Oakland) got themselves a new playpen called Allegiant Stadium. Tourists will be paying for it for three decades to come by way of Vegas’s notorious room taxes; locals will pay for it by way of “bonds that are a general obligation of Clark County, putting taxpayers on the hook once the reserves run dry.”

In other words, Las Vegas gave the store away to get the Raiders. To get the A’s, it’s not unrealistic to think Las Vegas might give the shopping mall away.

A franchise relocation requires 75 percent of baseball’s owners to approve. The AL East’s owners could make note of the wild card kink described earlier, decide the A’s and their addlepated gnat of an owner are more trouble than they’re worth, and vote no. (They might also ponder that they’re being soaked, too—for revenue shares to a team whose owner won’t return the favour with legitimate competition.) But that would be only 16 percent. If they’re smart, they’re going have to do some smooth maneuvering to get another nine percent to do the right thing.

Brains now require telling Fisher and his minions, not to mention Manfred and his:

You reduced the A’s to the kind of rubble that attracts protestors to the near-empty park and boycotts otherwise. You failed to strong-arm Oakland or Alameda County or California whole into building you a new real estate paradise with a ballpark thrown in for good measure. You want to bring your POS (Planned Obsolescence Show) to Las Vegas? Pay for it yourselves, or stay the hell out.

“He was my North Star, and I was his”

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Jim Bouton, Paula Kurman.

“It brought him back in living colour and at the same time highlighted the excrutiating loss,” writes Jim Bouton’s widow, Paula Kurman, Ph.D. ,about writing her coming memoir of their love story. This photo, from Kurman’s collection, shows the couple not long before their 1982 marriage.

The late Jim Bouton’s love for baseball didn’t extend to surrounding himself with memorabilia. His home only featured two photographs from his pitching career because his wife stumbled upon them seeking something else in their basement. One showed a group hug of Bouton and his Hall of Fame Yankee teammates Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle. The other showed a crowd of Yankees shampooing Bouton with champagne.

“Jim spent no time wishing for the old glory days,” writes Bouton’s widow, Paula Kurman, Ph.D., in the Society for American Baseball Research’s Baseball Reasearch Journal, Spring 2023 issue. “But oh, he loved the game itself.”

Not to watch on TV, or to sit in the stands. We almost never went to professional games. He wanted to play, to run in the sunshine, to throw a ball—to take his trusty old glove, suit up, and join a group of guys similarly obsessed. He wanted to work on his motion, get guys out with strategy and a dancing knuckleball. He had no interest in senior leagues, however, or what he called the “beer-belly league” of the Over 40s.

Somehow, some way, Bouton joined local teams of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, and played. Some, Kurman writes, had seen time in the Show; others still dreamed of it. Her husband was asked often what it was like for a former major league pitcher to play amateur ball. His reply, she records, was, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think of myself as a former anything.”

All that and quite a bit more comes in an excerpt from Kurman’s forthcoming memoir, The Cool of the Evening: A Love Story, a title she borrowed from Bouton’s favourite pitching coach, Johnny Sain. The book is due in “the first quarter of 2024,” Kurman says, adding that writing it helped her through her grief while the pan-damn-ic gave her all the solitude she’d need to write.

“I loved Jim Bouton and was well and truly loved by him for more than four decades,” she writes. “It doesn’t get any better than that. I was his lover, his wife, his best friend, his playmate, his business partner, his confidante. We were each other’s editors, occasional critics, and most appreciative audiences. He was my North Star, and I was his.”

For everything Bouton wrote in Ball Four—not just the randy boys-will-be-boys hijinks and deeper revelations about the reserve era’s abuses, both of which helped make him a major league pariah—the line for which he may remain best remembered is Ball Four‘s closing: You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.

When adding a postscript for Ball Four‘s tenth-anniversary republication (Ball Four Plus Ball Five), Bouton finished by saying his life changed when he first picked up a baseball but changed even more after he put it away. We should have known he’d never really put it away. Not until he absolutely had to.

When the couple moved from New Jersey to the Berkshires, Bouton managed to rig a practise area in their unfinished basement: a makeshift mound outline, and a strike zone outlined in black electrical tape. “Jim was working on his pitching skills to be competitive for the historic Saugerties Dutchmen in the Hudson Valley,” Kurman writes, “and for a team called Mama’s Pizza in the Albany Twilight League—named for the time of day the games were played, not the age of the players.”

Bouton remained in sound enough physical shape for such doings. He’d tiptoe downstairs to his makeshift rehearsal space early in the morning and throw from that circle of the mound for twenty minutes. When the ball hit the strike zone outlined on drywall, and the resonance reached the master bedroom upstairs, Kurman could only laugh through the pillow burying her head.

“All that care to leave the room quietly,” she writes, very much in the cheerfully cheeky voice of her husband’s most famous work, “and now Mr. Thunderfootdownthestairs was pounding the hell out of the wall under the bed with his best shots, completely unaware of the sound transmission.”

(Now, I wonder: Remembering his Seattle Pilots roommate Gary Bell’s annual Christmas card salutation, did Mrs. Bouton ever address her husband as “Ass Eyes?”)

This was also a couple who became motivational speakers and semi-professional competitive ballroom dancers together. They administered a recreational baseball league playing under 19th century rules and helped preserve an old ballpark or three. “Would I have been a better wife if I had said to him, get real, you’re not a young man anymore, stop wasting your time?” she asks.

The answer was no, of course. “I loved his focused intensity,” she continues. “No one was more appealing than Jim when he was having a good time. It didn’t matter if he didn’t reach it, whatever the goal was. We both understood that all the benefits were in the journey.” When she watched him go out to the mound yet again, the elder playing for love of the game against those young enough to be his children, “I fell in love with him all over again.”

Once, they traveled to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David. Kurman said to her husband, “to the amusement of some nearby tourists,” Look, Babe, it’s you! By which she meant the pose as much as anything else. “Replace the stone with a ball,” she writes, “and the slingshot with a glove, and there it is. Perfect.”

Until it wasn’t. Kurman remembers the day Bouton discovered he could no longer play even among his amateur compatriots. A week later, he went to his basement to put “some things” away and spotted his glove and a baseball, waiting for him to play. He sat next to her, put his arms around her, and cried. After awhile, Bouton spoke.

“I only feel safe enough to cry when you’re with me,” he said. “I’m always with you, Babe,” she replied.

Jim Bouton, Paula Kurman

Kurman and Bouton, still crazy (about each other) after all those years. (SABR, also from Paula Kurman’s collection.)

Bouton contented himself with the stone walls he took to building around their Berkshires property and occasional public appearances, though he and his wife agreed mutually that they’d say nothing of his health issues other than his August 2012 stroke. For as long as they could. In 2017, they couldn’t any longer. They revealed to New York Times writer Tyler Kepner that, a year earlier, Bouton’s decline turned into a diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy, “a rare form of vascular dementia. It’s progressive and there is no cure.”

The Boutons managed to appear at a 2017 SABR convention and, thanks to the Times article, Old-Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium in 2018, two decades after the death of Bouton’s daughter, Laurie, helped prompt the burial of any hatchet between Bouton and the Yankees. Though they enjoyed the ceremonies and the tributes, they didn’t stay for the game.

“I feel like I finally belong,” she records Bouton telling her when they arrived home. “I’m part of it, part of them—where I always wanted to be. And you were accepted, too, by the other wives, and by the players. It was different this time. They all wanted to talk to you. The players wanted to know what you thought of things . . . I was so proud to be with you.”

“He was clearly moved and gratified by the acceptance he felt that weekend,” writes Kurman, who was only too well aware that her husband tried as best he could to make light of his former baseball ostracism.

Whatever the motivation of the Yankees in their gracious hospitality and accommodation to our needs, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they were gracious. The deed itself is what counts. That it brought peace to my beloved at the end of his life is something for which I will always be grateful.

She prefaces her excerpt by revealing her husband had three requests of her in the event she out-lived him on earth: 1) Place his archives safely. (They repose in the Library of Congress.) 2) Send his 1962 World Series ring to the Hall of Fame. (That was hard. I’d worn the ring for decades. Jim didn’t wear rings, “in case a game breaks out and I’m called in to pitch.”) 3) Write a book about Bouton “based on notes he urged me to keep during the forty-two years we were together.”

“Nobody knows me the way you do,” he’d say. And, “Write that down,” he’d say when something funny or meaningful or extraordinary happened to us. “Memory fades. Contemporaneous notes are better.”

Suddenly, through the implicit sweetness of the request, I recalled Bouton recording an Astros teammate, pitcher Larry Dierker, approaching him out of the blue (My note-taking is making the natives restless, he’d said elsewhere in Ball Four) to share a thing or two, urging Bouton, “Write this down.”

Bouton met Kurman—a Ph.D. in interpersonal communications and a speech therapist by profession—at a late 1970s fundraiser as his first marriage crumpled. In Ball Four Plus Ball Five, he referred to Kurman invariably as the Magic Lady. The couple married and blended their families (Bouton had three children, Kurman two) in 1982.

His mates on the minor league Portland Mavericks—while he made his pro baseball comeback also in the late 1970s—invariably pointed out assorted elderly women saying, “There’s one for you, Jim.” Finally, Kurman attended a game. “That,” Bouton wrote, “was the day my teammates stopped kidding me about blue-haired old ladies.”

If this excerpt is any indication, you’ll want to read the whole of The Cool of the Evening and believe that maybe Bouton was only half right. Maybe Kurman and Bouton were really a Magic Couple.