La Russa doubles down cluelessly

Posted on by
2
Tony La Russa

Tony La Russa may be more clueless than he accused his own player Yermin Mercedes of being.

Tony La Russa wanted his live rookie Yermin Mercedes to learn a lesson in respect for the game. A Hall of Fame manager who came out of retirement to take the White Sox bridge, La Russa should remember that respect cuts in more than one direction.

If it was “disrespectful” and “clueless” for Mercedes to swing 3-0 in the top of the eighth with the White Sox blowing the Twins out 15-4 at the time, what was it for the Twins to send an infielder named Willians Astudillo out to pitch in the first place?

Astudillo threw a meatball that couldn’t even be called a knuckleball on 3-0. Whether Mercedes didn’t hear or chose not to listen to La Russa hollering to take the pitch, he drove it over the center field fence for the sixteenth White Sox run.

Mercedes and his teammates celebrated the blast when he returned to the dugout. La Russa was more than unamused. He called Mercedes out to the press after the game and again Tuesday morning. It was practically an engraved invitation to the Twins to do what relief pitcher Tyler Duffey finally did—in the seventh inning.

Duffey threw behind Mercedes with the first pitch of the plate appearance, which turned out to be the first and last of Duffey’s evening. Both Duffey and Twins manager Rocco Baldelli were ejected post haste for the drill attempt.

The attempt was foolish on a pair of levels. If you need that badly to send an opposing hitter a message, you do it the first time you see him at the plate and be done with it. You don’t do it near the potential end of the game, especially when you’re down a pair of runs and you can’t really afford an enemy baserunner who has the potential of coming home on a followup hit or two.

Lucky for the Twins that Alex Colome relieving Duffey wrapped a second walk around a pair of strikeouts for the side. They were even luckier that Miguel Sano hit his second homer of the night in the bottom of the eighth to tie before Jorge Polanco walked it off with an RBI single in the bottom of the ninth.

For a story he seemed to think was one big nothingburger in the first place, expressing surprise more than once previously that it took hold as firm and long as it did, La Russa doubled down on a Wednesday Zoom call with the press.

“If you’re going to tell me that sportsmanship and the respect for the game of baseball and respect for your opponent is not an important priority,” said La Russa on a Wednesday Zoom call with the press, “I can’t disagree with you more. You think you need more [runs] to win, you keep pushing. If you think you have enough, respect the game and opposition. Sportsmanship.”

La Russa’s Wednesday starting pitcher Lance Lynn demurs. It was probably the most intelligent observation amidst the entire debate. “The way I see it, if a position player is on the mound, there are no rules,” Lynn was quoted as saying. “Let’s get the damn game over with. And if you have a problem with whatever happened, then put a pitcher out there.”

Maybe you got why the Twins decided it might not be wise to spend any more of their pitching staff when they looked dead and buried by eleven runs with a couple of innings left to play. But maybe La Russa, the Twins, and those applauding La Russa while trying to shame Mercedes would care to re-learn a little baseball history.

Specifically, they might care to re-read the pages that remind you it’s not unheard of for a team to recover from a double-digit deficit before the last inning’s played and either win the game late or force the final decision to extra innings. We take you back to 1925, presumably one of the golden years the Old School/Old Fart Contingency has in mind when speaking of how much more grand was the grand old game in those grand old days.

The Indians had the Philadelphia Athletics buried 14-2, 15-3, and 15-4. Until they didn’t, thanks to the eighth inning. You know, the same inning during which Mercedes drove the infielder’s 49-mph canteloupe over the fence. Listen up, students: The A’s arose from the dead and buried with a thirteen-run eighth—a two-run triple, six RBI singles including two sending pairs of runs home, and Hall of Famer Al Simmons with the exclamation point of a two-out, three-run homer before the inning ended.

Those A’s overcame deficits of twelve, twelve, and eleven runs to nail a 17-15 win.

You don’t even have to go that far back, students. In 2001, the 116 game-winning Mariners sat on the wrong side of such a comeback. They’d had the Indians pinned 12-2 . . . until the Tribe told them, “you only think you have us pinned.” Three runs in the seventh, four in the eighth, five (all with two outs, yet) in the ninth. John Coltrane, call your office: they call it Ascension. (The Indians eventually won it in the eleventh, 15-14.)

Fifteen years later, the Padres only thought they had a somewhat different crew of Mariners sunk with a 12-2 lead after five. The Mariners ordered, “Up periscope!” Five runs in the sixth, nine in the seventh. Deficit overcome: ten runs. Oops. That all happened before the eighth. Double oops: what’s the point?

The points include that you should also get Lynn’s point. Lynn’s, and and Dodger pitcher Trevor Bauer’s:

Dear hitters: If you hit a 3-0 homer off me, I will not consider it a crime.

Dear people who are still mad about a hitter hitting: kindly get out of the game.

Can’t believe we’re still talking about 3-0 swings. If you don’t like it, managers or pitchers, just be better.

La Russa was far less aware of the aforementioned and other double-digit deficit closures than he was of his immediate need to school Mercedes. “There will be a consequence he has to endure here within our family,” he said after Monday’s game. “It’s a learning experience.”

No wonder any Twin pitcher thought he had a license to kill on Tuesday. And after Duffey attempted just that, La Russa went weasel about it: “It wasn’t obvious to me. The guy threw a sinker. It didn’t look good. So, I wasn’t that suspicious. I’m suspicious if somebody throws at somebody’s head. Then I’m suspicious. I don’t have a problem with how the Twins handled that.”

Translation: If one of you lot breaks the Sacred Unwritten Rules on my watch, your back means nothing to me.

Further translation: A Hall of Fame manager didn’t think there was anything wrong with waiting through four preceding plate appearances on Tuesday night before deciding it was time to teach Mercedes a lesson in manners. Mercedes’s teammates probably had every reason to believe the Twins really did shake off the Monday night mash until Duffey went behind his legs.

The Twins were probably lucky Duffey didn’t trigger a bench-clearing brawl over it.

There were moments over this week’s first three days when you’d have thought baseball’s worst problem of the week was Mercedes swinging on 3-0. As if the continuing free cookie on second to start each extra half inning, the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers, the continuing metastasis of hit batsmen courtesy of control-challenged pitchers built for speed and not smarts, and the continuing embarrassment of the National League lacking the permanent designated hitter, were just nuisances like a fly at a picnic.

There were moments, too, when you’d have thought La Russa was merely the unappreciated genius trying to teach the no-respect millenials a little lesson in manners. He’d certainly like you to think so. “What did I say publicly?” he asked aboard that Wednesday Zoom conference, before answering. “I said a young player made a mistake—which, by the way, he did—and we need to acknowledge it. Part of how you get better as a team is, if something goes wrong, you address it.”

Who’s the genius who decided to address it in the public media, instead of keeping it behind clubhouse doors, and thus leave his own player prone to a duster? Who’s the genius who didn’t stop to ponder what sort of “respect” was shown his team when the other team sent an infielder to face them in the eighth instead of continuing an honest effort to come back even with two innings left to play at minimum?

Who’s the genius who also didn’t see his own starting pitcher Lucas Giolito gassed in the early seventh on 27 April, then left him in anyway and watched him surrender back-to-back an RBI double and a two-run homer, giving the lowly Tigers a lead they wouldn’t relinquish?

Who’s the genius who let pool-noodle-bat Billy Hamilton hit with two on and one out in the top of the tenth on 5 May, despite better than decent bench help ready and waiting—then watched his lead runner get thrown out trying to steal third, before Hamilton struck out for the side? In a scoreless interleague game the Reds would win when Jesse Winker walked it off with an RBI single in the bottom of that inning?

(Who’s also the genius who did enough of his part—with a lot of help from a cronyism-stacked Today’s Game Committee—to jam Harold Baines down the Hall of Fame’s throat three years ago, when Baines’s only qualification for the honour, if that, was a 22-season major league career that amounted to making the Hall of Fame the Hall of the Gold Watch?)

Funny thing about “traditions.” Baseball’s include that the game isn’t over until the final out. Baseball’s late Hall of Fame philosopher Yogi Berra interpreted it to mean, “It ain’t over until it’s over.” If you’re worried about a hitter swinging 3-0 against a reserve utility infielder, maybe you should worry more about that infielder’s team deciding the game was over two innings early regardless of the score and on which end of they sat short.

The Twins weren’t trying to be sportsmen as much as they were trying to save their pitching staff to fight another day. Well and good, and with its own risks attached. Throwing at Mercedes late in the following night’s game doesn’t mitigate that.

The Old School/Old Fart Contingency still fuming over Mercedes squaring up the infielder’s meatball like to think they’re standing up for the game’s integrity. They might want to ponder how much “integrity” is present when a team playing a game with no clock surrenders before the game’s actually over.

Clean, legal, case closed

Posted on by
Reply
Manny Machado, Tommy Edman

Machado (left) checks on Edman after the Sunday drop slide that blew enough social media up Monday.

Manny Machado isn’t now and never has been a controversy-free baseball player. He’s one of those players who can trigger an uproar  without doing or saying a thing. Sometimes all he has to do is smile.

But it isn’t every day that a man to whom controversy seems as natural as playing third base kicks up a little storm for doing the right thing. Especially when it’s something fundamental he was taught very early in his career.

On Sunday, the Padres’s third baseman reached base in the fourth inning, when the Cardinals’ own third baseman Nolan Arenado committed a very rare (for him) throwing error. Then, Machado ran toward second on a Jake Cronenworth ground ball to Cardinals second baseman Tommy Edman.

Edman fielded the ball cleanly while still a few steps behind the proper basepath. Then he stepped into Machado’s path with thoughts about starting a double play. He got the force tag on Machado. At that moment, Machado dropped into an almost excuse-me, soft slide that still upended Edman to keep him from throwing the none-too-fast Cronenworth out at first.

You couldn’t blame Edman for looking about as thrilled as a dental patient after he recovered from the upending. But the first thing Machado did immediately after the slide was move to see whether Edman was injured on the play. (He wasn’t.)

Whether Machado went rogue yet again ran over social media and enough of the sports press well into Monday. That was after Cardinals starting pitcher Kwang Hyun Kim told reporters he thought Machado should have been called for interference, which would have made Cronenworth out at first. Kim also seemed surprised Cardinals manager Mike Schildt didn’t argue for a review to get the call.

It wouldn’t have done Schildt any good if he’d tried, and he probably knew it. The written rules give the baserunner the right of way on the proper basepath, and you can watch the play fifty times from fifty angles and see nothing indicating Machado interfered with Edman fielding the ball in the first place.

Machado was well prepared to execute such a play. His long-enough-time Orioles manager Buck Showalter taught him the play. “I’m still trying to figure out what the story is,” Showalter told The Athletic‘s Dennis Lin.

Showalter told Lin the play was routine business in the Yankee system from his years managing in that system and finally the Yankees themselves. If the runner executes the drop-slide, it breaks up double plays no matter how far you get caught before second base and with little damage otherwise. Showalter indicated to Lin that not only were players taught how to do it running the bases but infielders were taught to be prepared for such drop-slides.

“The first thing I did,” Padres manager Jayce Tingler told Lin, “was I gave him a high-five. I thought it was a play, honestly, that won the game.”

The Padres entered the bottom of the fourth in the hole 2-0. Machado’s reach on the Arenado error led the inning off. After the force out during which Machado kept Edman from turning the double play, Kim walked Tommy Pham and surrendered a bases-loading line single up the middle to Austin Nola—before walking two runs home back-to-back enabling the Padres to tie the game.

Genesis Cabrera relieved Kim and surrendered a sacrifice fly (Patrick Kivlehan) and an RBI single (Ivan Castillo) back to back before catching Trent Grisham looking at strike three for the side. The Cardinals got a run back when Paul Goldschmidt scored as Yadier Molina dialed Area Code 4-6-3 in the top of the sixth, but Grisham made the game 5-3 with a two-out RBI double in the bottom of the inning. The Padres bullpen made sure the game finished with that score.

Tingler may well have been right. Machado’s slide as Edman crossed right into his proper basepath just might have won the game for the Padres, or at least set up their best chance to win.

Kim had more or less cruised through the first three innings, shaking off only a two-out base hit in the third while otherwise striking out the side. If he was staggered by the Machado slide enough that he couldn’t believe his manager didn’t demand a review and an interference call, on a play for which no interference and no foul play was involved at all, maybe the Padres pounced from there on a pitcher who just might have taken himself out of of his own concentration zone.

Showalter asked aloud whether Machado gave the Padres the best chance to win, and whether it was a clean play? Then, he answered his own question. “Of course it did,” he told Lin. “Outs are precious, and the game, as much as home runs seem to be there, it’s still about ninety-foot increments—who can keep the other team from getting ninety feet and who can gain ninety feet by something offensively. It should be embraced. It’s a great, thinking man’s baseball play.”

According to Lin, Machado’s former Oriole teammate Adam Jones called the play a legal and intelligent play. Also according to Lin, Jones’s comment got a resounding agreement from an old shortstop-turned-coach-and-manager—a fellow named Larry Bowa, who wasn’t exactly renowned for subtlety or gentility as a player or a leader.

The old Bowa might even have thought Machado’s comparatively dainty slide showed Edman a little too much mercy. Compared to Bowa in his time, the typical hard-nosed player often resembled a marshmallow stick figure.

Machado has faced accusations of dirty play in the past. Even if Tingler himself says it’s become a tired narrative. But Sunday’s play reminded too many fans of the play they think destroyed Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia’s career back in 2017, the takeout slide at second that injured Pedroia at the back of his left knee. What they don’t remember is that that by itself didn’t put paid to Pedroia’s career.

The tenacious second baseman actually—and perhaps foolishly—managed to gut 105 games out in all 2017 and finished with a .369 on-base percentage plus six defensive runs saved above his league average at second base. But he could play only three games in 2018 and six in 2019, before sitting 2020’s pan-damn-ically mandate irregular season out and retiring three months ago.

“It’s funny,” Pedroia told NBC Sports Boston’s John Tomase after his retirement conference. “I remember when I got the first MRI after the play, a doctor said, ‘Hey, man, you could not only ruin the rest of your career but the rest of your life with this injury. You tore all the cartilage off on your medial compartment on your femur and your tibia. Your cleat just got stuck, and it’s a bad deal.’

“And I said, ‘Well, can I play’,” Pedroia continued. “And he said, ‘Yeah, you could try to. It’s going to go. When it goes, you’ll know.’ So I just remember everyone there saying, ‘Hey, we need you.’ So it was a no-brainer. If I had to do it all over again, it wouldn’t even be a question. Of course I would.”

In other words, Pedroia knew the risk of trying to continue playing despite the severity of the injury. We’ll never know for dead last certain whether some sort of knee surgery at the time instead of trying to continue despite that injury might have saved and enabled continuing his career.

About the play itself? In the immediate moment after the actual play, Pedroia himself told anyone who’d listen that he never once believed Machado intended that slide to be either dirty or injurious. Indeed—just as he’d do with Edman on Sunday—the first thing Machado did after coming to his feet was try to aid Pedroia. Machado also sent Pedroia a post-game text apology to Pedroia, who replied that he knew Machado wasn’t trying to injure him.

Without now mentioning Machado by name, Pedroia told Tomase, “Unfortunately, I just got caught in the wrong position and that was it. But I think I’m at peace with everything knowing that I did my best and the training staff and the doctors did everything we possibly could’ve to try to continue to play baseball.”

That effort earned Pedroia serious points in the guts-and-glory department. It also forced him in the end into the partial knee replacement last December that guaranteed he can never run again.

Machado was no more responsible for ending Pedroia’s career than Yankee infielder Gil McDougald was for ending onrushing Indians pitcher Herb Score’s in 1957. Score recovered from McDougald’s liner into his face, returned in due course, looked like his old self opening 1958, then blew his elbow out on a cold, wet night. He sat ten days, then tried foolishly to pitch through it, and by his own admission changed his motion to overcompensate for it “and ended up with some bad habits.”

Score hung on with the Indians until they traded him to the White Sox following the infamous Colavito-for-Kuenn deal in 1960. He didn’t regroup any better with the White Sox or in their minor league system, finally retiring to the Indians broadcast booth in 1964. It didn’t stop Cleveland from believing McDougald drilled a hole into Score’s career any more than the actualities stop Boston and elsewhere from believing Machado plowed a hole into Pedroia’s career.

But that was then, this was Sunday, and Lin would remind you that Nationals shortstop Trea Turner executed an almost exact match slide against the Mets, earlier this season,  though Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor actually stopped short of Turner and didn’t tumble over Turner onto the ground.

Nobody went boo or ballistic over that play, by the way.

“If [Machado] would’ve stopped and they threw to first and threw back to second and tagged him, nobody would’ve said a word,” Showalter told Lin. “If he had let him tag him softly up top, like most people do, nobody would’ve said a word. But because he tried to figure out a way to keep that from happening, I mean, it should be extolled.”

For all we know, too, there may be those willing to rag and bag Machado because the actual slide made him resemble a large sack of dog food falling nonchalantly and accidentally off a low warehouse shelf.

If Machado just stopped short like a good little boy and let that nice Edman consummate the double play he was “entitled” to consummate (some of the social media flappers can make you think that’s what they’re thinking), his critics would probably rag and bag him for not trying to bust up that double play by any means necessary. Hell if you do, hell if you don’t.

The bench is for fannies, not fists

Posted on by
Reply
Huascar Ynoa

Repeat after me, young marksman: To err is human, to forgive is not bench policy when it meets a flying fist.

I don’t want to be a spoilsport or anything, but some baseball traditions manage to hang around in spite of themselves. Traditions like the guy who performs a feat of back-to-back derring-do one moment, then swings himself out of the starting rotation and into “a couple of months,” maybe the rest of the season, on the injured list the next.

Let the record show that Braves pitcher Huascar Ynoa had every right on earth to feel frustrated Sunday evening, after the Brewers slapped him and his silly for five runs on nine hits, including Avisail’s two-homer that bumped out of center fielder Endier Inciarte’s glove web over the wall, en route a tough enough 10-9 Braves loss.

Let the record show further that rightful frustration doesn’t necessarily counsel you that it’s wise beyond your years to punch the dugout bench out after you’ve been removed mercifully enough from further slappage.

“I knew he had done it and it was sore,” said Braves manager Brian Snitker, after the Braves’ team flight back to Atlanta, “but in the flight it started bothering him more. They checked [Monday] morning and it was a fracture. It’s a shame.”

Maybe hitting home runs including a grand salami during back-to-back starts gives a young man an unlikely and perhaps unreasonable sense of his own invincibility. But maybe Ynoa will learn the hard way that, frustration or no, bad outing or no, benches are for fannies, not fists.

He joins not that fraternity of ballplayers who sent themselves to the injured list in freak accidents. He joins the dubious brotherhood of boneheads who thought they could punch their way out of their bad moments by taking on inanimate objects that don’t hit back but leave mucho damage when they’re hit at all.

The core reasons are as varied as the ways you can win or lose a ball game. There’s no way to predict just what will make a player mad at himself in any inning, on any day.

When Pat Zachry established himself as a new Mets ace, after being traded there in a package sending the Reds the old (and Hall of Fame) Mets ace (Tom Seaver), he faced his old buds from Cincinnati a year later and ran right into Pete Rose’s then-36-game hitting streak.

Zachry kept Rose quiet until the seventh, when Charlie Hustler slapped a single. A couple of batters later, Zachry was lifted from the game and not a happy trooper about it. He decided to kick whatever came within reach of his hoof . . . until he saw a stray batting helmet. He reared back to deliver, then—as if the helmet was the football Lucy kept jerking away from Charlie Brown—swung his foot, missed the helmet, and nailed a concrete block.

Broken foot. Season over. Zachry was probably grateful if no teammate decided to serenade him upon his return the following spring with a chorus or three of a certain old hit by Paul Revere and the Raiders.

A.J. Burnett had a tough enough time pitching in 2010 without deciding the way to take out his frustrations after the Rays made a pinata of him one fine day was to punch out . . . the clubhouse doors. The good news was that Burnett didn’t miss serious time. (Cue up Teddy Pendergrass.) The better news: He wasn’t half as foolish as another short-term Yankee six years earlier.

Kevin Brown wasn’t having a bad 2004 despite a few little injuries in The Stripes when he ran into the Orioles in early September, came out in the sixth inning, and tried to challenge a clubhouse wall with his fist. Guess who won that debate and took Brown out of action for three weeks. We’ll have a wild guess that it was a long time before Brown could listen to a certain Pink Floyd song without cringing.

Legend has it that Elvis Presley was given to picking up a pistol and blowing out the screen whenever he saw something (or someone) he didn’t like on television. Jason Isringhausen once saw and raised Elvis, during his final season as a Cardinal: Having a bad 2008 as it was, Isringhausen decided like Popeye that was all he could stand because he couldn’t stand no more, after Jason Bay blasted a three-run homer on his dollar.

He punched a television set out—cutting his hand and ending up on the old disabled list for fifteen days. The least advisable music with which to serenade him the rest of the year was probably this Allan Sherman chestnut about a pair of early 1960s TV addicts, even if the song was funny as hell otherwise.

Boys will be boys, grown men will be boys, but when on earth will even the most severe competitors finally figure out that certain inanimate objects (in the case of Isringhausen’s would-have-been-victim, inanimate is in the eye of the beholder) live by the motto, “To err is human, to forgive is not my policy?”

Lucky for Ynoa that he doesn’t yet have even a short-term a reputation as, shall we say, a testy guy. John Tudor, ordinarily a quiet fellow who preferred to let his pitching do about 90 percent of his talking, had that reputation to some extent. It was more than a little unfair.

When he felt like using his mouth to cover the other ten percent, Tudor was actually thoughtful, articulate, sensitive, self-aware, and modest. (His least favourite subject was himself.) At least, he was with writers who treated him like a man and not a commodity. When he incurred difficult times with the press, as he did down the stretch in 1985, Tudor could and did bristle enough to challenge at least one writer to put his fists where his mouth was.

When he got knocked out of Game Seven of that World Series at the earliest time in his career that he’d ever been chased (his often-troublesome shoulder gave out), Tudor went into the clubhouse, took a swing at an electric fan with the hand by which he earned his living, and needed a hospital to stitch it up. Tudor apologised publicly one week later. (The following spring training, he admitted to Thomas Boswell the incident and bad press still bothered him: “I can’t worry about it, but that’s not saying I like it.”)

But in the immediate moment, word of Tudor’s ill-fated fan-shake reached the press box. Apparently, at least one of the occupants was one of his least favourite writers. The feeling was surely mutual enough. Said writer whose identity is lost to time and memory is said to have cracked, “Ahhhhh, the sh@t finally hit the fan!”

Call him anything, but don’t call him a thief

Posted on by
Reply
Albert Pujols, Mike Trout

This wasn’t just a celebratory hug after Pujols walked a win off with a sacrifice fly; Albert Pujols made Mike Trout a friend as well as a protege.

When the Angels decided it was time at last to let Albert Pujols go as gently as possible into that good gray baseball night, I wasn’t the only baseball observer to say it was heartbreaking. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one, either, to say his decline following his first Anaheim season was just as heartbreaking.

But I’m still astonished, if not sickened to my stomach, from seeing assorted social media denizens speaking as one such baseball group member did after the Dodgers dropped more than a few jaws by signing Pujols as a bench and very occasional role player for the rest of the season.

“Where are they going to put him? There’s [sic] no [designated hitter] in the NL, and hopefully there never will be one,” said one in particular. “He can afford a rocking chair with all the money he stole from the Angels.”

Stole?

Bad enough the gentleman writing those words clings to one of baseball’s most nebulous and negative traditions. (Pitchers overall have hit .158/.207/.199 from the end of the 1910s until the end of 2020, for a big fat .406 OPS. As of this morning, they’re hitting .102/.136/.137 in 2021, for a whopping .273 OPS.)

But “all that money he stole from the Angels?” Rest assured, this gentleman probably isn’t even close to the only fan who feels that way. He just so happened to put it into cold print,  and I just so happened to catch it in cold print.

What he and anyone else thinking like that is really saying is that a player ground down as Pujols was because of injuries is nothing but a common thief. Well, I heard and saw Yankee fans and observers say similar things about now-retired Jacoby Ellsbury, too. As if they held their teams at gunpoint for x number of seasons.

If you thought Joe and Jane Fan believe losing is practically mortal sin, there are times that seems nothing compared to what they seem to think about being injured on the job.

When the Yankees gave up the ghost and elected to pay Ellsbury the $26 million left on his contract not to play for them any longer, I wondered aloud what it might have done to a man knowing he couldn’t do his job because his body kept him from doing it no matter what his heart and mind desired—and, because it made him a hate object among the witless.

“It’s as if being injured on the job at all equals a character flaw, especially if you happen to be paid a phenomenally handsome salary,” I wrote then. “On the flip side, it’s as if being paid a phenomenally handsome salary equals some sort of immunity to earthly harm. Here’s a bulletin for you: Handing Clark Kent a nine-figure payday doesn’t make him Superman.”

Ellsbury was talented and tenacious (and a two-time World Series champion) when he could play. He wasn’t a Pujols-level talent, but he could and often did break a game open with his own skill set, too. Yet one of the reasons Ellsbury wouldn’t even think about returning to the Red Sox when he hit free agency was because, appropriately, he was fed up over incessant clubhouse whispers that he took too much of his own sweet time recovering from injuries.

“It’s hell if you do and hell if you don’t for a professional athlete,” I wrote then, too. “Return too soon from an injury and you risk re-injury; return not soon enough (in whose sound medical opinion?) and you risk being dismissed as a fragile goldbrick.”

For Joe and Jane Fan, the paradox which is borderline hypocrisy is that they put on pedestals ballplayers who play through injuries regardless of whether that might lead to further injury, as it usually does—but then Joe and Jane Fan become the first to denounce the big jerks for playing through the earlier injuries only to incur bigger and more costly ones.

Pujols’s problems in Anaheim began when he developed plantar fasciitis in one of his heels during spring training 2013. He’d had a first season with the Angels in 2012 that resembled a down season on his terms but a career year for mere mortals.

Then, in late July 2013, he suffered a tear to that bothersome area during a game against the Athletics, while running out a ninth-inning base hit off Grant Balfour. He rehabbed the foot and heel as best he could until the Angels, out of contention by then, shut him down for the rest of that season.

It never got better for him. What nobody outside the Angels clubhouse really knew was that if his feet and legs could drain him, nothing and no one could drain Pujols’s iron will.

“He could easily have shut down a couple of these years. But just the toughness is off the charts,” said Mike Trout to The Athletic‘s Fabian Ardaya in 2019. “A lot of guys would have shut it down for good. He plays banged-up, doesn’t complain. I think that’s what people don’t see.”

“I’ll remember,” said ESPN writer Alden Gonzalez, after the Angels finally designated Pujols for assignment, “that even though his lower half was shot and he wasn’t quick enough to get around on the devastating stuff pitchers throw these days, he still showed up early, still spent hours in the training room to get ready for games, still took batting practice with intent, still crouched really low on defense and still looked for any opportunity to take an extra base. He might not have been productive, but it wasn’t for lack of effort.”

Trout was right. Showing up at the ballpark early and spending hours in the training room despite the physical sappings is what Joe and Jane Fan didn’t see. Maybe they didn’t want to see. Maybe they couldn’t believe the guy who’d played as off the charts as Pujols did as a Cardinal was forced into a far steeper decline phase to his career than he should have been.

Maybe they still clung to the illusion that a nine-figure payday in and of itself could keep a man Superman despite his body turning him into Clark Kent.

In only one way did Pujols have himself to blame for the outside perception that he was just going downhill at warp speed no matter how much money he was paid. He wasn’t the type to lament continuously over his lower body’s continuing betrayals. So much so that, when he finally did speak up about it, in the same 2019 Athletic piece, Joe and Jane Fan didn’t and wouldn’t listen.

“It’s made my move here so tough,” Pujols said to Ardaya then. “I don’t wish that anyone would have had those lower-half injuries, because I know that when I’m healthy, I know what I can do. To come over here and just be pounded by injury after injury, year after year . . . This game is tough when you’re at 100 percent with no injuries. Then imagine dealing with knee, heel, elbow, everything. It’s just tough, man.”

Pujols isn’t the only baseball player who ever kept believing to his soul that all he had to do was return to reasonable health to be what he once was. He isn’t the only player who’s learning the hardest way possible that there comes a time when the badly compromised body married to your age just wouldn’t let you be that anymore.

But not all such players get paid $255 million over ten years, whether they’re future Hall of Famers or future Hall of Shamers.

Nobody held the Angels at gunpoint, either, to offer Pujols that deal in the first place when nobody else was considering it, including the Cardinals (who didn’t until Pujols was practically taking measurements for his Angels uniform), or to keep him on the field when his body was clearly and cruelly draining him faster than a proper decline phase should have done.

Writing in The Inside Game last year, Keith Law came right out and said the Angels were foolish to keep suiting Pujols up even as a designated hitter, despite that iron will, because his body compromised him too deeply.

“If you have already paid for something,” Law wrote, nodding toward the guaranteed deal, “your choice of whether to use it should be a function of whether you want or need to use it, not a function of the money that is already gone regardless of what you do.” Don’t even go there about “eating money” if that’s what the Angels had elected to do. “Major league baseball player contracts are guaranteed,” Law wrote. “[T]here is no way to un-eat that meal.”

It’s one thing to argue against guaranteed long-term baseball contracts in all but the most unique circumstances. It’s something else entirely to argue against one retroactively because the player who signed one got hit unexpectedly with one of the worst injury bugs in baseball history a year after he finished his first season under such a deal.

The clumsiness with which the Angels parted with Pujols speaks only further ill of a team whose administrative culture makes a pratfalling putz resemble Joe DiMaggio roaming center field. The Dodgers’ willingness to bring him aboard even as a part-time bench player, perhaps an occasional first base fill-in, would look a lot better if there wasn’t even the momentary sense that it was a concurrent chance to stick it to their down-freeway rival.

It won’t cost the Dodgers a dollar beyond the pro-rated minimum major league salary to give Pujols one more chance at possible postseason triumph and a possible third World Series ring that the Angels couldn’t. (The Angels’ chronic inability to build a viable pitching staff has harmed them several years; if the Pujols deal tied their hands financially, the Angels haven’t been brilliant at drafting pitching or even acquiring low-cost/high-enough-performance arms, either.)

Personally, I’d hoped Pujols would surrender to his body’s betrayals and call it a career sooner, if only because he wasn’t really Albert Pujols anymore and hadn’t really been for too long through no fault of his own. I wanted him to be as close to Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt as possible, Schmidt having retired in May 1989 because, essentially, he didn’t believe he was Mike Schmidt anymore.

Such Hall of Famers as Willie Mays and Steve Carlton couldn’t do it, either; we saw their baseball ghosts a little too long. Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax did do it when he was still ten dimensions beyond the top of his game: “I don’t regret one minute of the past twelve seasons, but I might regret the season that was one too many.” Even more so than Schmidt, Koufax left the world wanting more, not less.

Whether mere mortal or Hall of Fame immortal, not every player is as self-aware as Koufax and Schmidt. But there’s another kind of self-awareness that imposes a cruelty of its own. It’s the kind Pujols has, the kind that kept him grinding his way back in search of the trans-dimensional greatness he once evoked. The kind that guaranteed him a berth in the Hall of Fame before his body left him nothing but his will.

Knowing what we should know now of that stubborn will no matter what Mother Health and Father Time declared otherwise, we should accept that Pujols earned the chance to leave the field with whatever remains of his professional dignity intact. Maybe he has one more game- or set-changing swing left in him. Maybe he doesn’t.

But calling him the thief who stole all that money from the Angels, however, is way out of line, Joe and Jane Fan. It exposes you as the couple too witless to comprehend just what Pujols put himself through to live up to that contract no matter how often his body told his heart and mind where to shove it.

Astrogate by the coming book

Posted on by
Reply
Astrogate Protest

If the Astros think (erroneously) that winning will fix everything, they ain’t seen nothing yet—one of the reporters who helped Mike Fiers blow the Astrogate whistle is about to publish a book about the plot.

The Astros can talk all they wish about winning fixing everything, including and especially Astrogate. They’re finding out the hard way that it doesn’t, and it probably won’t. Not until the last Astro standing from the Astrogate team isn’t in Astro fatigues anymore.

Like it or not, Astrogate isn’t going gently into that good gray night. Especially not when one of the two Athletic writers who took Mike Fiers’s whistleblowing and went excavating deep is on the threshold of publishing an Astrogate book.

Once an Astros beat writer himself, Evan Drellich is calling his book Winning Fixes Everything: The Rise and Fall of the Houston Astros. It comes forth from Harper Books on 17 August. Both the publisher and Amazon are taking pre-orders now.

Count on it: Drellich’s book is unlikely to resolve any serious question to the Astros’ overall liking. It remains to be seen whether he convinced any of the players who escaped formal Astrogate punishment to cop to even small avail of the infamous illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing Astro Intelligence Agency.

The ones upon whom you should really take pity are today’s Astros who had nothing whatsoever to do with Astrogate because they weren’t there, including manager Dusty Baker. And, Astro fans who’ve lived for over a year with the stings, arrows, and ramifications of the team they loved as the lords of the American League West being exposed as almost unapologetic cheaters.

Drellich’s book will arrive in the stores on and off-line at approximately the seventieth anniversary of the first act in baseball’s most notorious Astrogate precursor. There’s a splendid book still in print about that one, too, Joshua Prager’s 2006 book The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World.

It finished the job Prager began in The Wall Street Journal four years earlier. It affirmed what was mostly just whispered or spoken of back-door for decades—that the pennant race comeback against which all future arise-from-the-living-dead comebacks would be measured (the 1964 Cardinals, the 1973 Mets, the 1978 Yankees, the 1995 Mariners, the 2019 Nationals) was tainted.

For the final ten weeks of the 1951 season the New York Giants cheated their way back from thirteen games out of first place to a final-day tie with the Brooklyn Dodgers to force a three-game pennant playoff. And the Giants probably cheated their way through the playoff, right down to the moment Bobby Thomson awaited Ralph Branca’s 0-1 pitch with second and third and one out.

For decades to follow, Branca epitomised grace in defeat and Thomson modesty in triumph. The Giants went on to lose the World Series in six games to the imperial Yankees, but the two protagonists in the Shot Heard Round the World rose above the occasion. As Branca himself once put it, “I lost a ball game, but I gained a friend.”

The whispers turned to shouts and screams when Prager confirmed the decades-old speculation.

Giants manager Leo Durocher discovered his new utility infield acquisition Hank Schenz owned a hand-held Wollensak spy glass he’d acquired during his World War II military service. He also discovered Schenz wasn’t averse to using the spy glass to steal signs for the Cubs by perching himself up and inside the scoreboard behind the Wrigley Field bleachers.

So Leo the Lip, ever on the lookout for any and every edge he could find, fair, unfair, clean, dirty, or downright criminal, had an idea.

He dispatched catcher-turned-coach Herman Franks to the clubhouse high enough above and beyond the deepest Polo Grounds center field region. A buzzer would be wired from the clubhouse to the Giants’ bullpen in deep right field. Franks would see the enemy catchers’ signs through the Wollensak and signal the pen accordingly. The designated signaler in the pen, usually reserve catcher Sal Yvars, would relay the pilfered intelligence to the batters.

According to Prager, Yvars or others would do nothing if it was a fastball sign but do something, from tossing a ball to standing up or raising a hand or an arm, if the sign was breaking ball. All a Giants batter had to do was see past the opposing second baseman to see the signal or lack thereof.

Those who wanted such stolen intelligence, that is. According to Prager, Durocher asked his players who wanted it—but Hall of Famer Monte Irvin was one of those who rejected it. Prager has written that Irvin told him in 2001, when the outfielder was 81, “I told [Durocher] no. He said, ‘You mean to tell me, if a fat fastball is coming, you don’t want to know?’ ”

And if Irvin said no, so did fellow Hall of Famer Willie Mays, a rookie on the ’51 Giants. Don’t delude yourself. Irvin took to Mays as a kid brother and Mays took to Irvin as a big brother. He followed Irvin’s leads to the letter and the final syllable. No matter Mays’s actual or mythologised fealty to Mister Leo, he wasn’t that eager to let Mister Leo lead him into a life of crime.

Monte Irvin, Willie Mays

Monte Irvin (left) refused to accept stolen signs in 1951. His protege Willie Mays (right) surely followed Irvin’s lead to the letter no matter how much Mister Leo also meant to him.

The Dodgers themselves suspected Durocher was up to some sort of no good down that stretch. “In September ’51, Brooklyn coach Cookie Lavagetto took binoculars to the Dodgers’ bench to try to dope out the Giants’ system,” wrote Thomas Boswell in a column reviewing Prager’s original Journal essay. “Umpires took the binoculars away immediately. Why, it would be unfair for the victims to use binoculars to expose the telescopic cheaters!”

Branca may have learned for certain that the Giants were playing spy games when he was a short-term Detroit Tiger and heard a few whispers from pitcher Ted Gray, who was friendly with ’51 Giants reserve Hal Rapp—who told Gray about Durocher and Franks’s spy operation, enabling Gray to tell a Branca who didn’t know what to believe just yet, if at all.

When Associated Press sportswriter Joe Reichler published a 1962 story discussing the Giants’ 1951 sign-stealing, it came and went quickly enough, despite then-Commissioner Ford C. Frick’s threat to declare the Branca/Thomson game forfeit if he had absolute proof of the plot. Reichler was tipped off by utility infielder Danny O’Connell; Thomson himself called it “the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.”

“Over the years, when interviewing Thomson and Branca,” Boswell wrote, “I’ve been struck that Thomson seemed a bit ambivalent about his Moment while Branca never seemed the least ashamed. I took it that Thomson felt apologetic because he’d caused Branca a lifetime of nagging questions . . .

“Whether Thomson took the stolen sign, Branca has been a man of honor for fifty years. He has never raised the cheating issue without proof or tarnished the game’s most replayed moment. Even now, Branca says, ‘He still had to hit the pitch’.”

Prager’s first Journal missive and then The Echoing Green put paid to all speculation once and for all and stamped “case closed” that the Giants cheated their way back from oblivion to the pennant playoff—and even to the pennant. Interviewed by a Utah newspaper in the post-game bedlam, Franks said, “Maybe we caught the sign for a fastball.”

Nobody paid attention in ’51. They did now. Once and for all time, the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff should be known forever after as the Mugging at Coogan’s Bluff.

Thomson was cited in Prager’s book as telling New York Daily News writer Jim McCulley that Branca’s 0-1 fastball “was a pitch that [Hall of Famer Stan] Musial or any other good hitter would have taken. It was high and inside. I didn’t deserve to do a thing like that.” Prager also cited Branca telling New York Times writer Roscoe McGowen that the pitch “wasn’t a bad pitch . . .”

I didn’t think he hit it too well. It was sinking when it went into the stands. I guess we weren’t meant to win it. The ball was high and inside, not a good pitch [to hit], and it only cleared the wall by [a very few inches].

In fact, when Prager caught up to Franks shortly before the old catcher-coach-manager died in 2009, Franks described the spy glass spy—in the third person—as “tilt[ing] his scope up to the eyes of the batter.”

The spy did so to watch the batter glance toward right field, where a player in the bullpen relayed the stolen sign. The eyes of the batter also filled the scope’s field of view. And at 3:57 p.m. on October 3, 1951—with two on and one out in the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Giants down 4-2 in the third and final game of the playoff—Franks had just spied Brooklyn catcher Rube Walker call for an 0-1 fastball when he looked up at the eyes of Bobby Thomson.

“For 50 years,” wrote Boswell in 2001, “Thomson has been baseball’s ideal clutch hero and Branca the game’s most symbolic goat. Now it seems that Branca, the Dodger who gave up the homer that lost the pennant, may be a victim and Thomson less than a hero.”

Bums author Peter Golenbock cited a longtime Dodger fan leaving the Polo Grounds for pizza . . . and seeing the pizza joint displaying rolls of toilet paper marked “Dodger Crying Towels,” plus a rope tied into a noose and with the sign, “Dodger fans, hang yourself [sic] here.” You thought today’s road fans showing and banging inflatable trash cans when the Astros come to town is rough stuff?

But Golenbock also got Branca to re-tell a story once circulated well enough, Branca’s fiancee taking him to see her cousin—a Catholic priest, who told the stricken pitcher, “God chose you because He knew your faith would be strong enough to bear this cross.” Branca died in 2016, six years after Thomson. “He carried the cross of the Thomson home run,” said Vin Scully, “with dignity and grace.”

Neither the snarking Giants fans nor the stricken and suspicious Dodgers and their fans knew for dead last certain in that hour that the Giants got there in the first place with a plot as underhanded then as the Astro Intelligence Agency was in 2017-18.

The Astros weren’t baseball’s only electronic cheaters when they won the 2017 World Series, but they were the only ones known to have altered an existing camera off mandatory eight-second delay or to have installed a furtive new and illegal camera, either of which sent stolen real-time pitch signs to clubhouse monitors and a trash can banger.

The only thing left is to await Drellich’s book. (Try to imagine what Boswell snarked sadly—The Giants stole the pennant! The Giants stole the pennant!—happening in the Internet social media era.) Stay tuned. It could make the original Astrogate revelations resemble mere flickers through the spyglass darkly.