The Phillies throw out the first manager

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Joe Girardi

Girardi’s Philadelphia nightmare ends with his execution Friday morning.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A front office builds a team with money no object and no other cohesive object in mind. They front-load the team with sluggers, leaving little room for defensive fortification, overtaxing a fine starting rotation, and discover they can’t out-slug the wasted defensive outs or the bullpen’s arson.

All of which leaves their third-year manager half lost for finding ways to prevent late-inning collapses, early-inning slaughters, and solving the riddle of how he could have been handed what amounts to a desperation roster built with no forward thinking and not even a nod toward replenishing the farm or delivering mid-season fortification.

Then, seeing that uncohesive, porous mess deliver a 22-29 season-opening record, they reach into their heart of hearts, pray hard, and decide it’s time answer all the last fortnight’s speculation and throw out the first manager of the season.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2022 Phillies. Sitting twelve games behind the division-leading Mets in the National League East. Unlikely to improve even to a shot at one of the NL’s wild cards unless their fielders patch up the holes in their gloves and their defensive routes and their bullpen discovers more than just bull.

For openers. It’s not that Joe Girardi is any sort of managerial genius. He’s been a fairly overrated manager in his entire skippering career. But this one’s on that front office, led by Dave Dombrowski, an executive with a too-well-known tendency to sacrifice a future for a today that doesn’t always strike platinum. Not to mention the classic mealymouthed style of explaining why Girardi should have become the sacrificial lamb.

It has been a frustrating season for us up until this point, as we feel that our club has not played up to its capabilities. While all of us share the responsibility for the shortcomings, I felt that a change was needed and that a new voice in the clubhouse would give us the best chance to turn things around. I believe we have a talented group that can get back on track, and I am confident that [interim manager] Rob [Thomson], with his experience and familiarity with our club, is the right man to lead us going forward.

Translation: We still thought this team could slug more than enough to out-fly fielders who might as well be scrubwomen wearing oven mitts and save the asses of relief pitchers who forget to check the gasoline cans at the gates. And if you think we’re going to execute the people responsible for building that mess in the first place, you don’t know us vewwy well, do you?

Except that four of the Phillies’s sluggers (Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins, J.T. Realmuto, and Kyle Schwarber) haven’t been slugging quite to the extent they were expected to slug, even if three of them dialed long distance during that ten-inning fall to the Giants last Monday.

The slugger who’s been hitting like the defending MVP he is and who just so happens to be their best defender, Bryce Harper, has a torn UCL in his throwing elbow that’s limited him to a DH role for long enough now. He’s been around the league average in right field when he played before the injury; he’s posting a .943 OPS/.166 OPS+ so far that are not too far under the numbers (1.044/181) with which he led the entire Show last year.

The Phillies have achieved the surrealistic feat of outscoring their opposition yet awakening this morning seven games below .500. The big reasons, as ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle reminds us, are a 4-10 record in one-run games and a fourth-highest-in-Show fourteen losses in games during which they held a lead at one or another point.

“Measures such as these are never wholly on the manager,” Doolittle writes, “but they are certainly not data points in his favor. The best embodiment of Girardi’s struggles is probably an early-May loss to the Mets in which Philadelphia blew a 7-1 lead it carried into the ninth inning. It sure seems the heat under his seat kept rising after that game.”

The Phillies also continued leaning upon Corey Knebel to close out games—but why? He spent May picking up four nebulous saves and earning very nebulous credit for one win during which he surrendered the game-tying run in the top of the ninth and was bailed out in the bottom by a two-run infield error.

Meanwhile, Seranthony Domínguez has been an assassin out of the pen through today: he has a 1.83 ERA and a 1.92 fielding-independent pitching rate in 19.2 innings’ work thus far. Knebel: 3.27 ERA/4.01 FIP. You tell me who should be getting the work when the games are squarely on the line—and screw the “save situations,” the real moments when a game needs saving aren’t limited to the ninth inning.

So maybe continuing to assign “roles” to his dubious-enough pen instead of training his eyes upon the best of the group falls on Girardi. He’s hardly the only manager who might still believe in “roles” instead of what the game moment and the records as they are tell him. Maybe his long-time associate Thomson will pay closer attention and move accordingly, even with the continuing dubious straitjacket of the three-batter minimum for relievers.

But everyone with eyes to see looked upon the stockpile of designated hitter-types Dombrowski and company assembled when the lockout ended and that hurry-up spring training began and said, with no sarcasm intended, just what Jayson Stark asked aloud in The Athletic: “Can a team as defensively challenged as the Phillies win anything?”

In one way Dombrowski did work with a hand tied behind his back. Last winter’s free agency market—rudely interrupted by the ridiculous owners’ lockout—offered him little enough chance to fix a dead-last defense (the 2021 Phillies were the Show’s worst for defensive runs saved) at all, never mind in one grand sweep. But there remains the sense that he didn’t have to go all the way the wrong way.

Fair play: There have been teams who could and did hit their way to even the World Series despite having defenses helpless even against a division of babies in carriages. Just ask the 2015 Mets, whose porous defense enabled them to lose a World Series in five games despite taking leads into the ninth inning in three of their four losses.

Maybe these Phillies have done their notoriously negative-think fan base a big favour. (Remember the Philadelphia wedding. Clergyman to the happy couple: I now pronounce you husband and wife. Clergyman to the gathering: You may now boo the bride.) Not by firing Girardi but by collapsing early and often under the weight of their slug-now/defend later construction. They’re not likely to make the postseason even as an outside entrant in the expanded wild card picture. They won’t be able to break the hearts the 2015 Mets broke.

But Girardi isn’t exactly innocent. Another Athletic writer, Britt Ghiroli, isolates the point. Again, stop me if you’ve heard this before, as in when his days managing the Yankees came to a halt, but make note of where Ghiroli places the core responsibility:

Two things seem to have sunk Girardi: recent bullpen-management moves that came under fire and players telling The Philadelphia Inquirer that it didn’t look like they were having any fun on the field. (They aren’t very fun to watch on the couch, either.) Girardi is known as a no-nonsense guy, and although clubhouse culture can be overrated, once players start mentioning it, it almost always spells doom for the manager. This is still a mess Dombrowski created, a defense far worse than anyone envisioned and a bullpen problem that just never seems to go away. Firing Girardi doesn’t make the Phillies a playoff team, or even a competitive unit. But it does quell the masses, at least temporarily.

The only thing missing now is Dombrowski saying, “I didn’t fire Joe. The players did.” The questions now include just how long before the Phillies’s administration gets what previous team regimes finally got and sends Dombrowski on his not-so-merry way, too, in favour of a builder whose materials aren’t limited to collapsible shelves.

Guest column: Gladstone—Pension shock for Shockley

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Costen Shockley

Costen Shockley as a Phillie. After his trade to the Angels for 1965, he left baseball rather than return to the minors, fearing for his family’s discomfort.

By Douglas J. Gladstone

If you grew up rooting for the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies—and even if you didn’t, you’ve probably heard or read about the team because, by now, the story of that squad’s heartbreaking collapse over the last week of the season is etched in history—you probably remember Costen Shockley.

To countless Delawareans, Shockley was a legend. Not because he was one of the “Whiz Kids,” and not because he was all that great a player, but because he valued family first: he quit the game after being traded to the West Coast* so he wouldn’t have to abandon his wife and small child. He found jobs in construction and, by all accounts, never looked back or regretted his decision to place his family ahead of his career.

In a Society of American Baseball Research publication entitled The Year of Blue Show: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, the love Shockley had for his family was clearly in evidence. Authorr Mel Marmer quotes Shockley as having said the following:

In June (1965), when I approached (manager) Bill Rigney and asked if I was going to stay with the Angels, he said yes. So I moved my wife and baby out to California (from Delaware). Then (on June 12) they asked me to go to the minors instead, to Seattle. I wasn’t going to have my wife drive to Seattle. She didn’t know anything about the city. I never really adjusted to the big-league atmosphere. I wasn’t making any money then, only $1,000 a month. It cost me $600 to rent an apartment; I was using up my bonus money ($50,000); the major league minimum was only $6,000. . . So, I quit. I took my family over baseball. Do I think I could have played in the big leagues? Sure, I think I would have done well.

A resident of Georgetown, Shockley, who died on May 30, had his priorities straight.  Too bad neither Major League Baseball nor the union representing current players, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, do.

See, Shockley was one of the ever dwindling group of retired men not receiving an MLB pension. As of this writing, there are only 511 left.

All these retirees don’t receive a traditional pension for having played the game they loved because the rules for receiving MLB pensions changed over the 1980 Memorial Day Weekend. None of these men accrued four years of service credit, which was what ballplayers who played between 1947–1979 needed to be eligible for a pension.

Instead, effective this past March, for every 43 game days of service a pre-1980 player accrued on an active MLB roster, all he receives is a yearly payment of up to $11,500.  That’s $718.75 for every 43 game days. By the way, that payment went up a whopping 15 percent. It used to be $625 for every 43 games on an active roster.

But now that he’s dead, Shockley’s loved ones won’t even get the $2,872 for his approximately four months of service; and that’s before taxes are taken out. Because if you’re a non-vested, pre-1980 player, the bone the league and union are throwing you cannot be passed on to a surviving spouse or designated beneficiary.

In rejecting the $300 million deal his former club, the Washington Nationals, offered him before signing with Philadelphia, current National League Most Valuable Player Bryce Harper famously rationalized that he didn’t want $100 million deferred on the back end of his contract. “What does that do for me?,” he asked. “What does that do for my family?”

Family means different things to different people, I suppose. The Pittsburgh Pirates embraced the concept of family when the team won the World Series in 1979. That is why MLB and MLBPA—Costen Shockley’s baseball family—need to do right by the remaining non-vested retirees now. Before it’s too late.

Douglas J. Gladstone is the author of A Bitter Cup of Coffee; How MLB & The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve.

* On 3 December 1964, Shockley was traded with pitcher Rudy May to the California Angels for notorious pitcher-playboy Bo Belinsky. May went on to enjoy a fine sixteen-season career for four major league teams, including the Yankees’ 1981 pennant winner.

Short-career pre-1980 players to whom I have spoken have attested that one reason for their freeze-out is that they were seen mostly as September call-ups. For the record, Shockley played his first major league game for the Phillies in July 1964; and, he made the Angels out of spring training 1965, playing in forty games before electing to leave baseball rather than go to the minors for his family’s sake.—JK.

If we must retire one more Yankee number . . .

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Gil McDougald

Gil McDougald, the infield jack-of-all-trades for the 1950s Yankees. If we must have yet another retired Yankee uniform number, let it be his. 

My rejoinder to Dr. Paul Semendinger’s argument to co-retire Yankee uniform number 9 in honour of Hank Bauer (it’s already retired for Roger Maris) provoked a pleasant enough debate, when Dr. S. republished it on his Yankee blog Start Spreading the News a couple of days ago. Well, it was pleasant until some comments.

Nobody attacked me, but some of the arguments addressing retired Yankee uniform numbers went from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. Now there came calls from one or another place to think about retiring the numbers of such Yankee ghosts as Spud Chandler, Tommy Henrich, Graig Nettles, Willie Randolph, and Roy White.

Let’s just say for openers that the Yankees have so damn many retired uniform numbers that they’ve made the honour almost meaningless. I’ll say it again: Be not surprised if you live long enough to see the middle of this century featuring all active Yankees wearing triple digits on their backs.

But let’s say, too, that in the cases of Chandler and Henrich, there’s more than one number to ponder. Presumably, Chandler’s likeliest target for uniform retirement would be 21, which he wore for the bulk of his Yankee career. Oops. Paul O’Neill’s getting the honour of number 21 retired.

Henrich wore four numbers in his career. Of those, he wore 7 from 1939-42, when he went into World War II service; and, 15 from 1946 until his retirement after the 1950 season. Ol’ Reliable’s 7 was taken in due course by Mickey Mantle. And 15 is retired already—for Thurman Munson. Whoops.

Semendinger has no apparent issue with co-retiring uniform numbers as it is. He thinks (erroneously) that there’s nothing wrong with declaring 9 co-retired between Maris and Bauer, not to mention Nettles who wore it as a Yankee. I’ll answer that again soon, promise. But I’d like to see him come right out and argue that Chandler ought to be part of O’Neill’s number retirement or, even better, that Mantle should share 7’s retirement with Henrich or Munson should share 15 likewise.

Not even the most casual of the casual among Yankee fans would stand for that without a rip-roaring fight. (Or would they?)

Chandler was a tough righthanded pitcher for three Yankee World Series winners (1941, 1943, 1947). Much of his reputation rests on a fluke 1943, when he posted both the lowest ERA (1.64) and fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP: 2.54) of his major league career. Credited with a league-leading 20 pitching wins, Chandler was named the American League’s Most Valuable Player even though the award probably should have gone to Cleveland’s Hall of Fame shortstop Lou Boudreau. (Boudreau: 8.1 wins above replacement-level, leading the league; Chandler: 7.3.)

Why call Chandler’s 1943 a fluke? Easy: 1) Baseball was already depleted of enough prime talent by World War II. (The Yankees themselves lost Henrich, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Red Ruffing, not to mention a catching prospect named Yogi Berra.) 2) His ’43 ERA was 1.20 below his career mark. 3) His ’43 FIP was 75 points under his career mark. He did get a late major league career start thanks to several minor-league injuries, and the injury bug also kept him out of a few World Series pre-1941.

Chandler himself was pulled into the Army after the ’43 Series, though his injury history kept him from combat. He returned near the end of the 1945 season, posted two more solid seasons in 1946 and 47, but age and injuries compelled the Yankees to release him at 39 in April 1948.

He was a good pitcher who was probably held back by his minor league injuries in the 1930s (he didn’t throw a major league pitch until he was 29) and a few more injuries as a Yankee, where he was respected for a toughness that sometimes bordered on recklessness. But if you’re even thinking about retiring or co-retiring the uniform number of the 377th starting pitcher of all time, who isn’t even one of the ten best Yankee pitchers ever, you should quell that thought post-haste.

Henrich was a terrific player whose travel over the top of the mountain toward his decline phase was rudely interrupted by World War II—Ol’ Reliable lost three seasons to the war. He was one of the solid men when he returned, too; somehow, he remained much the same player after the war as he’d been before it.

As a matter of fact, my Real Batting Average places Henrich (.558) just behind Paul O’Neill (.565 as a Yankee) and way ahead of Hank Bauer (.500), while the defensive metrics show Henrich pretty much a match for both those men, whom Dr. Semendinger think deserve equal uniform retirement. Well, now. Henrich is ranked as the 58th best right fielder ever; Bauer, the 88th best. Case closed.

But you’re not even going to think about compelling Munson or Mantle to share a uniform retirement even with Henrich. You’re not going to compel a shared uniform retirement between the second-best catcher in Yankee history, the arguable greatest all-around player ever to wear the Yankee uniform, and the guy who isn’t quite one of the Yankees’ top ten right fielders. Not unless you require psychiatric evaluation.

Think of Monument Park as the Yankees’ team Hall of Fame. That’s where you honour the Chandlers, the Henriches, the Bauers. Strike their Monument Park plaques. (While we’re at it, do likewise for Nettles and White; Randolph already has his plaque there.) That’s it. They don’t quite deserve uniform number retirements.

Co-retired numbers are also unwarranted insults. Yogi Berra didn’t deserve to be co-retired with Bill Dickey; Berra was ten times the catcher Dickey was and he’s a hair’s breadth ahead of Johnny Bench as the greatest all-around catcher who ever strapped it on. And Roger Maris was insulted without warrant more than enough in his Yankee career without handing him one more by compelling him to share retired number 9, even with Hank Bauer.

You want to think about a Yankee uniform retirement that a) hasn’t been done yet (believe it or not) and b) would do honour to a truly underrated Yankee great? I’ll give you one. Number 12. It’s the only number Gil McDougald wore in his entire Yankee life. Of all the not-quite-Hall of Famers to play for Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel under his platoon-and-multiples system, McDougald was the best of the group.

He was a fair hitter (he led the league with nine triples in 1957) and a 1951 American League Rookie of the Year. (Even though Minnie Miñoso really deserved the award.) But he was a defensive virtuoso at the three toughest infield positions, finishing his career in double figures on the positive side for defensive runs above his league average at all three. (Second base: +46. Shortstop: +16. Third base: +13.)

Maybe McDougald gets short shrift even among Yankee fans because he wasn’t exactly one of the most glittering Yankees of his time. Maybe, too, he gets such short shrift because of Cleveland pitching legend Herb Score.

You know, the line drive McDougald cracked off Score’s face in 1957 that people to this day believe ruined the Cleveland lefthander’s career. False. Score returned in 1958, had a shaky season’s start before he began to find his proper form again . . . then blew his left elbow out pitching eight innings on a damp night. That, and not the McDougald liner, ultimately put paid to Score’s effectiveness and, soon enough, his pitching career.

McDougald tried to visit Score in the hospital but was blocked by hospital personnel. Yet Score’s sister disclosed decades later that their mother told her, “It’s bad, but he’s got the finest doctors in the world and they will do everything that they can. You need to go down to the church and say your prayers for Herb, but more than that to pray for Gil McDougald. That man is a hurting man.”

Indeed. McDougald wouldn’t quite be the same player after the Score incident, even though Score’s mother herself reached out to him as her son did to tell him the injury was nobody’s “fault.” (McDougald in gratitude visited the older woman regularly for the rest of her life as well as swapping holiday cards with Score himself.) The Yankees left him open to the American League’s first expansion draft but he elected to retire, instead.

“The way that Stengel used him,” Bill James has written of him (in The New Historical Baseball Abstract), “kept him from becoming a star . . . But then, Gil McDougald wasn’t born to be a star. He was born to be a Yankee.”

The sad irony is that McDougald suffered an almost Score-like injury in spring training two years earlier, when a batting practise line drive caught him behind his ear while he was chatting with coach Frank Crosetti. The ball fractured a hearing tube; in his baseball retirement, successful with a dry cleaning business and a building maintenance business, as well as coaching Fordham University baseball, McDougald went completely deaf by the mid-1970s.

New York Times writer Ira Berkow told the story in “McDougald, Once a Quiet Yankee Star, Now Lives in a Quiet World” in 1994. Not long after, McDougald received a cochlear implant that restored his hearing. (“They’ve turned the music back on,” he said happily.) Both Berkow’s original story and the happy followup (“For McDougald, the Miracle of Sound”) were republished in 2009’s Summers in the Bronx: Attila the Hun and Other Yankee Stories.

McDougald got to live another fifteen years with his restored hearing until his death at 82 in 2010. Like too many honours it should have been done while he was still alive to appreciate and accept. But if there’s one more Yankee who really does deserve his uniform number retired, McDougald does.

On Kapler, the Anthem, and the atrocity that provoked him

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Gabe Kapler

Kapler’s intended National Anthem protest hasn’t provoked a flood of outrage—yet.

This time, a funny thing happened after Giants manager Gabe Kapler said the atrocity in Uvalde, Texas moves him to stay in the clubhouse until “The Star Spangled Banner” finishes playing before games, because he’s “not okay with the present state of the country.” The funny thing that happened was . . . nothing.

No flood of outrage. No choking social media to death with demands for Kapler’s termination, if not execution. No threatened boycotts of Giants games. No politicians from the top down demanding Kapler be run out of a job, run out of town, run out of the country. No mass demonstrations around AT&T Park. No thunderous editorials calling for a Giants organisational shakeup.

This time, the country seems very much united across all lines of race, ethnicity, and even political belief in outrage that nineteen Uvalde police officers were in or around the Robb Elementary School building and did nothing to thwart the eighteen-year-old shooter who killed nineteen young children, a pair of teachers, and whose murders may have caused the fatal heart attack of the husband of one of those slain teachers.

The outrage deepens when learning as we have that those Uvalde police even tried thwarting efforts by the adjacent Border Patrol and federal marshals to stop the massacre. “As sickening as it is,” writes Reason‘s Robby Soave, “this is worth repeating: With the children wounded, bleeding, dying, and frantically–quietly–calling [9-1-1 on cell phones] for help, the police stood by, waiting for even more assistance. They told the Border Patrol to hold off, and they actively restrained parents outside the school who begged them to help and even volunteered to do so themselves.”

“Second Amendment supporters often counter, ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ Except the hallway of Robb Elementary School had no shortage of good guys with guns, and yet they did not stop the massacre until it was far too late,” fumes an editorial by National Review, a publication not known to suffer criticism of law enforcement without a fight. “Perhaps that slogan should be revised, ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun and the willingness to act.’ No Uvalde cops acted when it could have made a difference.”

From the atrocity of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minnesota police to the atrocity of Salvador Ramos at Robb Elementary, Kapler—one of baseball’s most articulate and genuinely sensitive managers—looked upon the state of these United States and discovered he simply couldn’t partake of a dubious pre-game ritual because Uvalde slams an exclamation point down upon a country in self-inflicted peril.

“When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde,” wrote Kapler in a blog entry last Friday, “my father taught me to stand for the pledge of allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well or to protest and stay seated when it wasn’t. I don’t believe it is representing us well right now.”

About the only truly pronounced demurral Kapler incurred came from Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa, who came out of retirement to take the White Sox bridge last year. “I think he’s exactly right to be concerned . . . with what’s happening in our country,” La Russa told reporters before a game against the Cubs. “He’s right there. Where I disagree is the flag and the anthem are not appropriate places to try to voice your objections.”

Apparently, La Russa forgot the anthem’s line about “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” The brave were thwarted actively and incompetently at Robb Elementary, the only people Ramos set free were nineteen children and two adults from their earthly lives, and those Uvalde, Texas pays to be brave in the presence of evil—to put it in the absolute most polite language available—didn’t exactly do what they’re paid to do last Tuesday.

We can debate La Russa’s demurral and Kapler’s quiet outrage all day long. La Russa thinks Kapler’s intended protest disrespects the men and women of the military who defend what the flag and anthem purport to mean. I fear La Russa dismisses the prospect that those very men and women would think, appropriately, that they didn’t put their hides on the line to defend either police becoming criminals or police doing nothing to prevent mass murder while blocking others from trying to prevent it or while allowing it to continue inexplicably.

Some of Kapler’s fellow skippers get it. “[He] is very passionate about things he believes in and that’s his way of protesting,” says his downstate rival, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. “I don’t think any of us are happy with what’s going on in our country. I do respect people using whatever platforms they have to address that.”

Alex Cora, who played with Kapler on the 2005-06 Red Sox and now manages the Red Sox, gets it, too. “He’s a good friend of mine and the kind of guy I respect from afar for what he’s doing,” Cora says, “and if this is what he’s doing, good for him. I understand his reasons. He was very open about it and I know there’s a lot of people that are going to support him.”

One of those people is also Chris Woodward, the manager of the Rangers. “I think we’re all frustrated, especially in this country,” he says. “Nobody’s happy. It’s not about which side you’re on. It’s just we’ve got to get better as a society . . . I’m not going to really make comment either way on whether I would or wouldn’t do what he did.”

Kapler made a Memorial Day exception to his intended protest before today’s game against the Phillies. “While I believe strongly in the right to protest and the importance of doing so,” he said, “I also believe strongly in honoring and mourning our country’s service men and women who fought and died for that right. Those who serve in our military, and especially those who have paid the ultimate price for our rights and freedoms, deserve that acknowledgment and respect, and I am honored to stand on the line today to show mine.”

Maybe now it’s time to revisit an argument I made a few years ago: It’s time at last to re-think “The Star Spangled Banner” before sporting events.

What began as a spontaneous show of respect by a Red Sox third baseman, as a Navy band played “The Star Spangled Banner” during the seventh-inning stretch of a 1918 World Series game, has become at once a ritual of habit and—since the NFL’s Colin Kaepernick over police brutality in 2016—a flash point whenever professional athletes seize upon its playing to protest quietly, usually by kneeling, over assorted outrages.

The song wasn’t even the sanctioned National Anthem when Fred Thomas (on leave from the Navy to play in the 1918 Series) turned and saluted the flag. That didn’t happen until the 1930s. But the song’s playing before every last sporting event regardless of day, evening, or calendar significance, renders it meaningless except as pressuring crowds into a patriotic gesture.

I’ve suggested it before, but it’s worth repeating yet again: An everyday anthem during baseball season means nothing but false patriotism, compulsory patriotism, the sort of patriotism you see in countries unworthy of it but likely to execute those who say or behave so.

Faithful readers (all three of you) may remember my saying this in prior writings on the matter: I don’t write lightly about this. I’m the paternal grandson of a New York police officer, and I’m an Air Force veteran. My grandfather would have fumed over Uvalde police doing nothing and trying to stop others from doing something, anything to save those children and teachers. And though I wasn’t in a job requiring direct combat, I wore the Air Force uniform knowing well that I had sworn by implication to die if it came to that on behalf of defending these not always so United States.

I accepted and lived it proudly. And I damn well didn’t spend four and a half years of my life in a military uniform, doing a military job, on behalf of those engaged to protect us from the criminals either becoming the criminals themselves or living down to the admonition, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Neither did the men and women we commemorate today who died in actual combat.

So, one more time. Save “The Star Spangled Banner”—and, while we’re at it, “God Bless America” in the seventh-inning stretch—for baseball games played on such national holidays as Memorial Day, Flag Day, the Fourth of July, and Labour Day. Save it otherwise for Opening Day, the All-Star Game, Game One of the World Series, and even Game Seven if the Series gets that far.

The rest of the season, can it.

We can live quite well without the National Anthem before every last game without losing the only patriotism that truly matters, that in and of the heart. Even when that patriotism is challenged as murderously as it was in Uvalde, Texas last week. A challenge so murderous that the manager of the Giants prefers no compulsion to false or diluted patriotism when his country is compromised by evil.

Note: The foregoing essay was written originally for publication by Sports Central.

Paul O’Neill vs. Hank Bauer?

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Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer

Hank Bauer (far right) with (left to right) Mickey Mantle, Casey Stengel, and Yogi Berra, in 1954. A key element in Stengel’s platoon system, Bauer was immortalised by a comic as a man “with a face that looks like a clenched fist.” (UPI photo.)

My Friday morning e-mail included a copy of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America’s Here’s the Pitch newsletter. Fair disclosure: I contribute to that newsletter once a month at minimum, sometimes more if called upon, and no one has requested my assassination over anything I’ve written there. Yet.

Further fair disclosure: Paul Semendinger, Ed.D., is an educator, elementary school principal, enthusiastic Yankee blogger, and author of The Least Among Them. He has even been agreeable enough to republish a few of my own writings on his blog Start Spreading the News.

Dr. Semendinger may not be so agreeable about my demurral from this: he says in this morning’s HTP that Hank Bauer deserves a Yankee uniform retirement number just as the forthcoming Paul O’Neill does. (O’Neill’s 21 will be retired this season.) Until this morning’s e-mail, and nothing against O’Neill himself, I’d never considered him a candidate for uniform retirement.

Not just because the Yankees have retired a few too many numbers already (21); not just because eight of the 21 don’t belong to Hall of Famers. (Thurman Munson’s 15 is retired, but he deserves a plaque in Cooperstown and will get one in due course from the Hall’s Classic Era Committee covering pre-1980 players.) Yankee players may be wearing triple-digit uniform numbers exclusively by the time this century is half over.

O’Neill was as solid a ballplayer as you could ask. So was Bauer. They have much in common. They were both right fielders with good throwing arms and route instincts; they both hit for extra bases as often as not; they both played on multiple World Series winners. They were both the kind of men to whom teammates looked in the clubhouse as well as on the field.

They also both played in high-offense eras though O’Neill’s was somewhat higher than Bauer’s. Neither is close to having been a Hall of Famer, but Dr. Semendinger thinks Bauer was the better ballplayer by margin enough. I’m no more convinced of that than I am that either man deserves a number retirement, however excellent they happened to be.

The traditionalists might care to note that O’Neill has a higher batting average as a Yankee than Bauer: .303 vs. .277. Even allowing the righthanded Bauer some slack for having to hit to that cavernous left center field in the old Yankee Stadium, that’s a big river between them. Bauer hit only a couple of points higher at home while slugging a few points less at home.

O’Neill was a lefthanded batter who hit better at home in two cavernous ballparks (Riverfront Stadium, the remodeled old Yankee Stadium which kept the shorter right field porch) than on the road. But the splits aren’t as wide between the two as you might think.

So we should take a look at the two right fielders as Yankees according to my Real Batting Average metric: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, dividing that sum by their total plate appearances. Dr. Semendinger may or may not like this:

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Hank Bauer 5375 2123 491 24 19 33 .500
Paul O’Neill 5368 2313 586 51 69 13 .565
Paul O'Neill

Paul O’Neill at the plate during his Yankee seasons.

How could Bauer have only nine more plate appearances than O’Neill despite playing three more seasons as a Yankee than O’Neill did? Simpler than you might think if you know where to look.

Bauer has been remembered as one of the near-typical elements of Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel’s platoon system, usually in hand with fellow outfielder Gene Woodling. He averaged 117 games a season as a Yankee. O’Neill wasn’t a platoon player in the Joe Torre era and averaged a percentage point short of 140 games a season in the pinstripes.

And in nine fewer Yankee plate appearances O’Neill has 190 more total bases, drew 27 more walks, and was handed 27 more intentional walks. I submit the last indicates the pitchers in Bauer’s time feared him at the plate less than the pitchers in O’Neill’s time feared him.

Dr. Semendinger points to Bauer’s 29.3 wins above replacement-level as a Yankee and O’Neill’s 26.7 WAR as a Yankee as further evidence. Well, now. If you got to play three more Yankee seasons than the next guy even if you were almost the same kind of player, of course you’re going to have 2.6 more WAR.

Bauer also has one leg up for being a slightly better defensive right fielder than O’Neill was, but have a look at their offensive WAR as Yankees: O’Neill (29.9 oWAR) has Bauer (24.0 oWAR) beaten by a decent distance. Bauer’s seven-year peak WAR is 25.7 . . . but O’Neill’s is 27.4.

Dr. Semendinger made a point of noticing Bauer’s 158 home runs in a Yankee uniform. I did mention both men had some power. But I forgot to mention O’Neill hit 185 out as a Yankee. It’s not exactly Bauer’s fault that Stengel saw him as the kind of player who’d shine in his platoon system as a platoon man, though Bauer did get remarkable enough playing time for a man made a key part of that platoon system.

But O’Neill wasn’t considered a platoon player, and I submit the final numbers say O’Neill was just that much more valuable to his generation of Yankees than Bauer was to his. Not so fast, Dr. S. might rejoin.

“If O’Neill deserves credit for being a leader on four championship teams, Bauer also deserves that same credit, and then some,” he writes. “Bauer was a leader on seven World Championship Yankees teams.” It’s O’Neill’s fault that he didn’t have the full caliber of teammates Bauer had?

Let’s see. Bauer played with three full-time Hall of Famers: Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle. O’Neill as a Yankee played with two enshrined full-time Hall of Famers (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera) and a third who belongs in Cooperstown (Roger Clemens) but isn’t there yet thanks to continuing suspicions (as opposed to, you know, evidence) about involvement with actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances.

Bauer’s teams had the slightly better role and platoon players. (Imagine if O’Neill’s Yankees could have had their own Gil McDougald, to name only the most versatile.) They also had Berra behind the plate doing what almost no other catcher in major league history did: helping their pitchers pitch better as Yankees than they did a) with any other Yankee  behind the plate and b) on any other team in their careers.

Bauer also played in the pre-division era where you finished in first place or you went home for the winter a couple of weeks early. He got to play in nine World Series and on seven Series winners, of course, and he finished with a .245/.279/.399 career postseason slash line. O’Neill played in seven division series, six League Championship Series (five as a Yankee), and six World Series with five rings (four as a Yankee) to show for it . . . and his career postseason slash line is .284/.363/.465.

Does this mean Hank Bauer doesn’t deserve Yankee recognition? Of course not. But if you’re going to even think about retiring his uniform number, too, you’re going to have a problem. Dr. Semendinger thinks it’s not that big a problem:

[H]ere’s the beautiful thing—retiring Hank Bauer’s number wouldn’t change anything uniform wise. His number 9 is already retired for Roger Maris.  By retiring the number in Bauer’s name as well, the Yankees would simply be recognizing another great Yankee.  The fact that this is so easy and obvious makes me wonder why this hasn’t been part of the plan already.

Hank Bauer

Bauer managed after his playing days and skippered the Orioles to their franchise-first World Series championship in 1966.

He’s kidding, right? There’d be nothing beautiful about co-retiring number 9, it’d be a downright insult—to Roger Maris, for whom it was retired in the first place, a man who was probably the single most insulted and disrespected Yankee great of them all.

Maris busted the single-season home run record held by an all-time Yankee idol and received more opprobrium than praise for doing so, for not being the glib, movie-star-handsome idol just about every Yankee fan prayed would break it if it had to be broken. And if you insist on going there, Maris was a better man than both the guy whose record he smashed and the guy Yankee World prayed would do it instead.

What might have been regarding Maris’s career remains unknown; he was ground down first by the unwarranted attacks for pursuing and breaking ruthsrecord (that’s how they said it back then, folks) and then by numerous injuries.

The Yankees have also insulted one great with a co-retired number already. There was no way they should have retired number 8 for anyone other than Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra . . . but the Yankees made it a co-retirement with Bill Dickey, the pre-integration great who mentored and taught Berra the fineries of the position. (Surely you’ve seen Yogi’s observation, “Bill is learning me all his experiences.”)

Dickey on the surface resembles a better hitter than Berra, but Dickey played in an even higher-offense era than Berra did, and Berra shook out as the far better receiver and handler of pitchers behind the plate. (Yogi also caught the same number of World Series winners as Dickey while catching one more pennant winner, by the way.)

Dickey deserved a plaque in Monument Park more than he deserved a uniform retirement. Yogi deserved the uniform retirement exclusively. Bauer absolutely deserves the Monument Park plaque (O’Neill has one), but that’s it. (For that matter, so does another Stengel Yankee, Gil McDougald.) But number 9’s retirement deserves to belong to Maris alone.

Bauer was an underappreciated ballplayer, generally. He could hit leadoff, hit third, hit almost anywhere in the order and deliver. He was also underappreciated for his World War II service as a Marine in the Pacific. That service didn’t exactly harm him as a player; he’d played only one minor league season in 1941, then enlisted at age eighteen after Pearl Harbour. (His father had to sign his enlistment papers. “I traded a bat for a rifle,” he once said.)

He saw action among the Marines who invaded New Georgia, Emirau, Guam, and Okinawa, taking shrapnel in his thigh that stayed for life because it was considered too dangerous to remove. He also battled malaria while he was at it in the middle of all that. He returned to the Yankee system and didn’t get his call to the parent club until 1949; he might (underline that) have made it about two seasons sooner otherwise.

But as Bauer settled into his fine Yankee career, according to Bill James (in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract), he endured a nastier insult than even the time comedian Jan Murray immortalised him as a man “with a face that looks like a clenched fist”:

A Congressman trolling for publicity published a list of athletes who had gotten “soft duty” in World War II, and put Bauer’s name on the list. This didn’t get the distinguished gentleman the kind of publicity he had been hoping for. “Did I say Bauer?” said the Congressman. “I meant Sauer, Hank Sauer.” Sauer had also seen combat, although not as much as Bauer, so that didn’t help much.

Paul O’Neill looked the military type (you could see him just as readily in an Air Force uniform as a Yankee uniform) but he never saw military service, never mind combat. He was 27 and six years into his baseball career when Saddam Hussein’s takeover attempt of Kuwait stirred Operation Desert Storm. As much as O’Neill looked the part, the military might not have wanted to recruit a fellow his age, anyway.