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Vin Scully, RIP: We did need him more

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Vin Scully

Vin Scully waving to the crowd as his wife, Sandra, stood by him in the Dodgers broadcast booth at the end of his final season on the job.

Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theatre, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers.

—Vin Scully, 1976.

When Bryce Harper grew up in Las Vegas, where he could watch the Dodgers on television and listen to Vin Scully, he noticed readily what most of the world knew for decades. It wasn’t just about the game to Scully. “It was about the beauty of the game, the beauty of the fans, how much he could bring the fans together and the Dodgers together, things like that,” Harper told the New York Times once. “When you think of the Dodgers, you don’t just think about all the greats that played for the Dodgers, you think of Vin Scully, as well.”

There was a time when that was said about the man who brought Scully to the Dodgers in the first place, Red Barber. How long ago was that? Put it this way: On April 1, 1950 (this is no joke, folks), future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was born in New Jersey; surgeon Charles Drew, who invented the concept of the blood bank, died; the number one song in the country (Billboard) was Teresa Brewer’s “Music, Music, Music.” (That was from my ootsy-poo period she said years later, when she transformed into a respected jazz singer.) Milton Berle was numero uno on television, Jack Benny was radio’s king (nobody out-rated him in 1950 except for the rotating ensembles anthologised by Lux Radio Theater), and the Dodgers prepared to break spring camp and get a season going.

The faithful in Brooklyn were as likely to talk about and think about Barber as they were about Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine, or Roy Campanella. Little did Barber know that his protege would eclipse even him in recognizability, prestige, and affection after the Dodgers went west.

In Barber’s day and for well enough after, the thought of a farewell tour wasn’t even a topic. Joe DiMaggio didn’t take one with the Yankees; he simply retired, feeling he and especially his bothersome back no longer had it, after the 1951 season. Robinson — despite a hilarious bid to trade him to the New York Giants — simply made his quiet promise of retirement permanent in 1956, standing by an article in Look explaining why.

Ted Williams asked nothing more than a chance to go out like a champion — and punctuated his Comeback Player of the Year season with a poetic home run at the end of 1960. Stan Musial didn’t exactly take the tour, though he was saluted in a few cities in 1963. In 1966, Sandy Koufax—who once told Scully it was almost as much fun listening to him calling a game as it was to pitch a game—confided in one reporter that it would be his final season, then went out, pitched above and beyond even his own extraterrestrial level, and retired formally after the season.

And, in 1973, Willie Mays—by then a further aging Met—simply made you weep for your own mortality when he told a packed Shea Stadium on Willie Mays night, “I look at these kids over there, the way they are playing, and the way they are fighting for themselves, and it tells me one thing: Willie, say goodbye to America. Thank you very much.”

These days, some farewell tours by baseball’s greats have been sublime. Some have been ridiculous. But when was the last time you heard of a team’s announcer getting the farewell tour? For that matter, name any baseball broadcaster who stayed in the booths for a single team from April Fool’s Day to the day 67 years later that British violinist/conductor Neville Marriner died.

Not that Scully was feted in person in some cities in 2016. As the Times observed wryly, the farewell tour came to him all season. Players and staffers from teams visiting Dodger Stadium made the pilgrimage to the stadium press box, long since named for him, to visit and salute Scully. And he cherished every such visit. Even the umpires. “They look up to the booth and they see me,” said Scully’s Dodger radio broadcast partner, Charley Steiner. “They kind of doff their caps, but they hold their palms upward as if to say, ‘Where is he?’ I’ll say, That’s the best I can do!”

Near the end of August 2016 the Dodgers gave their longtime voice an amusing tribute. When players, coaches, manager, and front office staffers joined up for a team photograph, they hoisted Scully face masks in front of their own mugs. The lone holdout? Scully himself, seated front and center, grinning appreciatively, appropriately, and perhaps just a little mischieviously, before shrugging in mock fatalism.

When ESPN conducted its 2007 polling to determine the face of each major league franchise, with each team’s fans voting, Dodger fans voted Scully in a walk. That sweet man of sonorous voice, impeccable diction, insurmountable knowledge, impeccable wit, and inviolably calm strength, was the only non-player/non-coach/non-manager/non-executive so voted.

It’s rare for a man or a woman to excel at something for the normal career span. Scully excelled at it for almost seven decades. Even his old employer Barber, who was legendary for his understatement and his anecdotal style, seems now to have been an amateur by comparison. Barber gave you a profile of a player while he batted. Scully told stories. Barber was the pleasant horticulturist next door who didn’t mind if you eavesdropped. Scully opened the door, invited you in to pull up a chair (he said it often enough opening his broadcasts, anyway), and poured you a cold, tall one, right before the first pitch.

He meant it when he spoke as though talking to friends, just as his listeners meant it when they told anyone who’d listen that they felt him a friend. Numerous stories about him noted that when people met him for the first time and address him as “Mr. Scully,” he’s quick to offer a handshake and say, “Forget the Mister. I’m Vin.” A few years ago, doing a game that coincided with the anniversary of D-Day, he started a mid-game talk about it thus: “I don’t want this to be an intrusion, but I think we’ve been friends long enough, you’ll understand.”

Vin’s genuine warmth cooled down the most boiling baseball hotheads while inviting viewers to smile with him as he ordered a camera pan to capture a very young child in the park and spoke about that child with a truly fatherly affection. “Hello, sunshine,” he said at one such pan of a baby in her father’s arms. “Sleeping the sleep of the good child.” A man who survived the accidental death of his first wife and (in a helicopter crash) his oldest son, but remarried happily (and remained so) and extended his own family, appreciated and celebrated the ties that bind families, to baseball and otherwise.

Vin Scully, Sandy Koufax

Scully with Hall of Famer Koufax on Vin Scully Night.

On the rare occasion did he editorialise, understated, while observing and discussing less commendable acts on the field. As often as not he was unafraid to keep the microphone unoccupied and let the moment deliver its own message, preceding the silence with something such as, “You really ought to see it and hear it for yourself, so I’m just going to keep my mouth shut.”

But you still require a facility the size of a university video archive to line up the absolute best of Scully because nearly everything he delivered qualifies for the distinction. Which doesn’t mean there weren’t a single wall full of Scully moments that transcended even that actuality. Moments such as 1 May 1959, before an exhibition game between the Dodgers and the Yankees in the Los Angeles Coliseum, as Los Angeles did honour to the Hall of Fame catcher whom an off-season automobile accident left quadriplegic before he could play even one game on the west coast:

Friends, right now the Yankees have been asked to leave the field, and the Dodgers are not out on the field. For right now, the Coliseum, all of the lights will be turned out, as Pee Wee Reese wheels the chair that holds Roy Campanella across the first base foul line, and heads him toward the pitcher’s mound. The lights are going out, this final tribute to Roy Campanella, the lights will be lowered, and everyone at the ballpark, 93,000 people, are asked in silent tribute to light a match to Roy Campanella.

And we would like to think that, as 93,000 people light the match, it would be 93,000 prayers for a great man. The lights now are starting to come out, like thousands and thousands of fireflies, starting deep in center field, slithering around to left, and slowly the entire ballpark lighting up with individual lights. And Roy Campanella, as the years go back, standing off to the right is Pee Wee Reese. A sea of lights at the Coliseum. Perhaps the most beautiful and dramatic moment in the history of sports.

Let there be a prayer for every light. And wherever you are, maybe you in silent tribute to Campanella can also say a prayer for his well being. Roy Campanella, who thousands of times made a trip to the mound, to help somebody out, a tired pitcher, a disgusted young pitcher, a boy who’s perhaps had his heart broken in a game of baseball. And tonight, on his last trip to the mound, the city of Los Angeles says hello to him. Listen . . .

Moments such as the ninth inning of the game in which another Hall of Famer, Sandy Koufax, proved that when it came to an annual no-hit, no-run game, practise makes perfect:

There are 29,000 people in the ballpark and a million butterflies . . . He is one out away from the promised land, and Harvey Kuenn is coming up. So Harvey Kuenn is batting for Bob Hendley. The time on the scoreboard is 9:44. The date September the ninth, 1965. And Koufax working on veteran Harvey Kuenn.

Sandy into his windup, and the pitch—fastball for a strike. He has struck out, by the way, five consecutive batters, and this has gone unnoticed. Sandy ready, and the strike one pitch—very high, and he lost his hat. He really forced that one. That was only the second time tonight where I have had the feeling that Sandy threw instead of pitched, trying to get that little extra, and that time he tried so hard his hat fell off . . . One and one to Harvey Kuenn. Now he’s ready—ball two.

You can’t blame the man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while, Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in, into his windup, and the 2-1 pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike two. It is 9:46 p.m. Two-and-two to Harvey Kuenn—one strike away.

Sandy into his windup. Here’s the pitch—swung on and missed! A perfect game! [Long pause for the crowd noise.] . . .

And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So, when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record book, the K stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.

Moments such as the bottom of the fourth, Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, 8 April 1974:

He means the tying run at the plate now, so we’ll see what Downing does . . . Al at the belt now, and he delivers, low, ball one. And that just adds to the pressure, the crowd booing. Downing has to ignore the sound effects and stay a professional and pitch his game . . . One ball, no strikes, Aaron waiting, the outfield deep and straight away. Fastball — and a high drive into deep left center field, Buckner goes back, to the fence, it is gone!!! . . . [long pause during crowd noise and fireworks] . . .

What a marvelous moment for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron, who was met at home plate not only by every member of the Braves, but by his father and mother . . . It is over, at 10 minutes after nine in Atlanta, Georgia, Henry Aaron has eclipsed the mark set by Babe Ruth.

There were Games Six and Seven of the 1986 World Series, when Scully worked concurrently for NBC. There was Fernando Valenzuela’s no-hitter (If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!), Kirk Gibson’s pinch homer winning Game One of the 1988 Series. (In a season full of improbables, the impossible has happened!) And, his hilarious 2012 interpretation of Dodger-turned-Rockies manager Jim Tracy’s expletive fuming after a shallow sinking line out—or was it?—married on the spot to an argument for instant replay, which finally arrived long overdue two years later.

Uh-oh. Uhhh-oh. The [umpires] meeting looks like they’re going to call it a trap, and Jim Tracy . . . [crowd noise] . . . He caught the ball, Jim says. He caught the ball. He caught the blinkin’ ball. He caught the darn ball . . . [crowd noise, as Tracy pulls his hat off and slams it to the ground two-handed] . . . oh, oh, you’re gone. Heeee’s gone . . . [crowd noise] . . . That is blinkin’ fertlizer! I’m doing the best to translate . . . you’ve gotta be blinkin’ me! . . . The ball, he caught the ball! . . . It’s unbelievable! Blinkin’ unbelievable! . . . No way! No blinkin’ way! No bloody way!

Jim’s gone, so he’s spending house money now . . . [crowd noise] . . . [brief, slow-motion replay of the outfielder’s original attempted off-the-grass catch] . . . take another look, looks like it’s in the glove . . . what’s a shame, really, we have this [replay] equipment, and no one takes avail of it. I mean, they say it would slow up the game, what did that do? They could have had someone upstairs, or an umpire go and look at the tapes. Instead, big argument, the manager’s kicked out of the game, the umpires have to reverse.

I’m not second guessing the reversal, they’re doing the best they think, but I’m just saying here we are, with all that equipment to show it. Want to show it again, Brad? Dustin? Take another look. How do you call it? [The play is shown again, semi-slow motion.] There’s the glove, there’s the ball, it’s in the glove, isn’t it? Didn’t it hit the webbing?

And there was future World Series-winning Red Sox manager Alex Cora, at the plate for the Dodgers against the Cubs’ Matt Clement, 12 May 2004, with future World Series-winning Dodger manager Dave Roberts then a teammate, and Dusty Baker managing the Cubs:

. . . The crowd now is really into the pitches . . . and still two and two. Nobody out. Big foul . . . wow! . . . It’s a sixteen-pitch at-bat, and the crowd loves it, and look at Dave Roberts. They’re all enjoying this battle. Matt Clement and Alex Cora. Coming into the game, Cora was hitting .400 against Clement, he is oh for two tonight. So the game within the game here.

So here’s the sixteenth pitch. What an at-bat! . . . [foul ball] . . .  Seventeen pitches . . . it is the rare time that you can be in the ballpark and everyone is counting the pitches, and it’s gonna be a seventeen-pitch at-bat, now, at least. We, I don’t know, you know, they don’t keep records of pitches in at-bats, but it’s kind of special. This will be the seventeenth pitch. Grabowski’s exhausted, and Mike Ireland reminds me how about if Grabowski had been running on every pitch? Time . . . ohhh, the crowd is loving it . . . Ever see so much excitement? And nothing’s happened, that’s what’s really funny about it.

All right, here’s the seventeenth pitch—and, it’s foul. Foul ball by a hair! So that means that it will be at least an eighteen-pitch at-bat . . . Clement has made more pitches to Alex Cora right now than he has made in any inning but the third . . . the eighteenth pitch—high fly ball into right field, back goes Sosa, way back to the gate, it’s gone!! Home run, Alex Cora, on the eighteenth pitch, and the Dodgers lead, four to nothing.

What a moment! 9:23 on the scoreboard if you want to write it down for history . . . what an at-bat! And Dusty Baker says, “We’re gonna stop the fight.” And Dusty’s going to bring in a fresh horse. That’s one of the finest at-bats I’ve ever seen. And, then, to top it off with a home run, that is really shocking. Yeah, take a bow, Alex, you deserve it and then some. Oh, by the way, that also means the Dodgers have homered in six straight, but it took a whale of a job to do it. Stay where you are, four-nothing Dodgers, and look at the ball club.

Somehow the writers and director of the 1999 film For Love of the Game captured the Scully style when casting him as himself, with Kevin Costner cast as a veteran Tigers pitcher in Yankee Stadium threatening a season-ending perfect game while his backstory was told adjacent to the game: the career, the star-crossed romance seeming to end before he arrived at the ballpark, the autograph on a ball telling the Tigers owner he would retire after all.

When Costner’s Billy Chapel consummated the perfecto, with his estranged love watching in an airport bar, Scully crooned, “The cathedral that is Yankee Stadium belongs to a Chapel.” On script, unless—considering his Koufax, Aaron, Valenzuela, Gibson, and Cora calls among thousands—the director crossed out any written comment and substituted, “Let Vin Scully be Vin Scully.”

“I mean, how do you come up with that? It’s completely off the top,” said Gary Thorne, a longtime baseball broadcaster who’s been the lead for the Orioles since 2007 .” It’s completely because you have the talent and ability to do it.”

Vin Scully, Barack Obama

Scully receiving the Medal of Freedom from then-President Barack Obama.

Scully also had a flair for overcoming his extremely rare mistakes with self deprecating wit and grace. In June of his final season’s work, Scully inadveretently described a Dodgers-Nationals pitching matchup as Clayton Kershaw versus Stephen Spielberg. Nat-for-life Stephen Strasburg’s reaction is unavailable, assuming someone made him aware of it, but a couple of days later Scully owned the mistake: “The other night, I think I said Stephen Spielberg. But I regret to say he is unable to pitch.”

Vin’s ability to put those who met him at immediate ease was equaled perhaps by his parallel ability to put the pompous in their immediate place, my absolute favourite such incident being described by Keith Olbermann, a man about whom much has been written and said that’s not exclusively flattering (including “pompous” as one of his least self-immolating attributes) among those who’ve concurred with his positions, writing in GQ in 2016:

Legendary is the story of the blustery political commentator who years ago had ‘his people’ advise the Dodgers he wanted to meet Scully because Scully was “number one” in his field. “Everywhere I go, Mr. Scully, I try to meet whoever is Number One because I’m Number One in what I do and it’s important to recognize and salute those of my own stature, and you’re Number One here!” The man bellowed on like this for several moments as the crew in the Dodger booth squirmed. When he finally paused, too impressed with himself to sense Scully’s anger, Scully quietly, politely, and efficiently cut the blowhard into little pieces. “Well then, you’ll want to meet Arthur here, who is our Number One stage manager.” The commentator found himself unwillingly shaking hands. “And of course, you’ll want to meet Debbie, she’s our Number One makeup artist.” Another unhappy handshake. “And Don, our Number One cameraman—who, coincidentally is on Camera Number One.” Again with the handshake. “And in the row behind you, that’s Antonio, our Number One intern . . .” Witnesses disagree as to how many Numbers One Scully introduced before the man angrily muttered “I gotta go”—but all agreed he was several feet shorter when he went.

In his final decade’s work, Scully often wavered about returning for the following season and without wavering his fans all but begged him to say it wasn’t so. “The people have responded so well—so touchingly—that it will be very difficult for me to just suddenly walk away,” he said in 2014. “It’s the human relationships I will miss when the time comes. Like everyone in life, I’ve had my tragic moments, and the crowd has always got me through those moments. That’s why I’ve said ‘I needed you far more than you needed me.’ I rarely use the word ‘fans.’ I realize the origin is ‘fanatics,’ but I always use the word ‘friends’.”

“If my math is correct, I’ve known Vin Scully now for sixty years,” said Sandy Koufax to a Dodger Stadium throng on Vin Scully Night in 2016.

More than sixty years. Growing up in Brooklyn, the Dodgers had a redheaded announcer by the name of Red Barber. And he was good. Then, a few years later, another redhead showed up. And I thought he was very good. I’m not sure I realised how good he was until 1958, when the Dodgers from Brooklyn became the L.A. Dodgers, and moved into the Coliseum. It was a very strange phenomenon, to be on the field and hear the broadcast coming out of the stands. The people of Los Angeles, even though they were at the game, didn’t enjoy it without listening to Vin tell them about it. He entertained and he educated.

I knew before that night how right Koufax was. I saw it for myself the first time I took my then-young son to Dodger Stadium. By then, Scully would do all nine innings solo on television and be heard on radio in a simulcast for the first three innings. I’d been to several major league ballparks and a few minor league parks in my life to that point, but I’d never seen so many people in those parks holding small portable television sets in their laps, the pictures turned off and the sound turned up. And it struck me that, whatever they saw on the field, they still wouldn’t believe it actually happened until they heard it from Scully.

But they also heard a man who respected the whole game and didn’t allow himself to become just a home team shill. “For all the years that I heard him,” Koufax continued, “he used the Dodgers as a word. Never the word ‘we’.” Scully’s respect for the game and those who played and managed it extended to the World Series in a way you can’t imagine many other broadcasters bearing.

“Before the World Series, Vin would go to church and pray,” Koufax said. “Not for a win, but there would be only heroes in the World Series, no goats. He didn’t want anybody in the future to be tarnished with the fact that they lost the World Series for their team.” Maybe the Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award, honouring the game’s greatest broadcasters (Scully himself was so honoured in 1982), should be renamed the Vin Scully Award.

No volume of clips preserved and stocked aboard YouTube or archive.org atones for knowing that we were without Vin since 2017. But we knew he was still among us, savouring his life, his family, the fans he made friends, and even doing what he could to reassure us when the coronavirus pan-damn-ic struck in earnest in early 2020.

I never had the honour of meeting the man and spending even two minutes in his company, and it feels as though I’ve shirked my duty to remember that once, as a boy myself, I queued up with fellow day campers on a trip to Shea Stadium to get the autograph of . . . Mets broadcaster Lindsey Nelson, affable in his own right and yet to make the habit of wearing his once-well-remarked multicoloured blazers. Now, I wonder: Knowing Scully’s from-boyhood love of baseball and dream to become one of the men who called the games on the air, did he ever queue up for autographs from such radio voices of his formerly beloved Giants as Arch McDonald, Garnet Marks, Mel Allen, Connie Desmond, Don Dunphy, Jack Brickhouse, or Russ Hodges?

The last words Scully ever delivered through the mike and the set as a broadcaster, including the affectionate Irish prayer he offered, passed by soon enough and too damn soon.

Many years ago, a little redheaded boy was walking home from school, passing a Chinese laundry, and stopped to see the score of a World Series game posted in the window. The Yankees beat the Giants, 18 to 4, on October the second, 1936. Well, the boy’s reaction was pity for the Giants, and he became a rabid Giants fan from that day forward, until the joyous moment when he was hired to broadcast Brooklyn Dodger games in 1950. Ironically, October the second, 2016, will mark my final broadcast of a Giants-Dodger game. And, it will be exactly eighty years to the day since that little boy fell in love with baseball.

God has been very generous to that little boy, allowing him to fulfill a dream of becoming a broadcaster, and to live it for sixty-seven years.

Since 1958, you and I have really grown up together, through the good times and the bad. The transistor radio is what bound us together. By the way, were you at the Coliseum when we sang “Happy Birthday” to an umpire? Were you among the crowd that groaned at one of my puns? Or, did you kindly laugh at one of my little jokes? Did I put you to sleep with a transistor radio tucked under your pillow? You know, you were simply always there for me. I’ve always felt that I needed you more than you needed me, and that holds true to this very day. I’ve been privileged to share in your passion and love for this great game.

My family means everything to me, and I’ll now be able to share life’s experiences with them. My wife, Sandy; our children, Kevin, Todd, Erin, Kelly, and Katherine; along with our entire family, will join me in sharing God’s blessings of that precious gift of time. You folks have truly been the wind beneath my wings, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me on this incredible journey of sixty-seven years of broadcasting Dodger baseball.

You know friends, so many people have wished me congratulations on a sixty-seven-year career in baseball, and they’ve wished me a wonderful retirement with my family. And now, all I can do is tell you what I wish for you:

May God give you for every storm, a rainbow,
For every tear, a smile,
For every care, a promise,
And a blessing in each trial.
For every problem life sends,
A faithful friend to share,
For every sigh, a sweet song,
And an answer for each prayer.

You and I have been friends for a long time, but I know in my heart that I’ve always needed you more than you’ve ever needed me, and I’ll miss our time together more I can say. But you know what—there will be a new day, and eventually a new year. And when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, rest assured, once again it will be time for Dodger baseball. So this is Vin Scully, wishing you a very pleasant good afternoon, wherever you may be.

Forget the Dodgers; forget Los Angeles; forget baseball, for a moment. Knowing Vin Scully wasn’t at the mike, calling a game, telling the stories within the stories around the stories behind the stories, just like knowing Yogi Berra no longer lives among us on this island earth, America sometimes wasn’t America anymore.

Now he’s gone to the Elysian Fields. Reunited serene and happy with his beloved Sandra, his beloved son Michael, with numerous players who had the honour of their highest triumphs immortalised and their lowest shortfalls given empathy and respect, not opprobrium. From God’s Little Acre in Brooklyn to God’s big ballpark. As was said by one world leader to a fallen other, Shalom, chaver—peace, friend.

Joe Pignatano, RIP: The vegetable man

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Joe Pignatano

As a player, Joe Pignatano was a reserve whose career ended with an unlucky three. As a coach, Pignatano grew bullpen vegetables while keeping the nuts from going completely squirrely.

According to outfielder Art Shamsky, Miracle Mets bullpen coach Joe Pignatano had one job: “to keep control of the pitchers out in the bullpen who were out of control.” According to starting pitcher Jerry Koosman, “Piggy was [manager Gil] Hodges’ spy.”

According to Mets history, Pignatano—who died this morning at 92 following a battle with dementia, the last living member of the Miracle Mets coaching staff—was once a reserve catcher who made an indelible impression in what proved his final major league plate appearance on 30 September 1962.

Piggy took over the catching from Choo-Choo Coleman in the bottom of the sixth in Wrigley Field against the Cubs. After the Cubs scored a pair of unearned runs off Mets reliever Craig Anderson in the bottom of the seventh, Pignatano came up to the plate in the top of the eighth with nobody out and back-to-back base hits from Sammy Drake and Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn setting a lovely table for him.

The man who eventually became fabled for growing a vegetable garden in the Shea Stadium bullpen couldn’t eat the meat that might have left the Mets as close as a single run behind. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either.

Pignatano ripped a bullet to the right side and right at the Cubs’ Rookie of the Year-in-waiting second baseman, Ken Hubbs. Hubbs went to first at once to nail the once-fleet Ashburn before Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, the big bully, whipped one to shortstop Andre Rodgers to bag Drake. The Cubs held on to win.

“It mattered not that the New York Mets won or lost, or even how they played the game today before 3,960 fans at Wrigley Field,” said the New York Times‘s lead. “For the record, though, the season’s final, for which Casey Stengel asked and obtained volunteers, went to the Cubs, 5-1.” Volunteers, indeed.

The Original Mets may have been baseball’s precursor to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but even they couldn’t have made this up. In the final game of that surrealistic 40-120 season, Pignatano became the only major league player ever to end his playing career by hitting into a triple play.

He became one of Hodges’ coaches when Hodges ended his own playing career to become the manager of the Washington Senators’ second edition. He had the pleasure there of giving Hodges one of the best laughs of his early life as a manager, even if it was serious business to the serious skipper.

“In spring training one year,” Hodges remembered to Times writer Joseph Durso (for Amazing: The Miracle of the Mets), “I was standing across the street from the hotel when I saw four of my players leave.”

It was about ten minutes before curfew. I hung around for a half hour, and they didn’t come back. The next day in the clubhouse, I made a little speech. I told the club that I knew some of the players had broken curfew, and I was going to give them an opportunity to save some money. If they wanted to pay fifty dollar fines right now, the case would be closed. If the money wasn’t in by the end of the day, I’d hold another meeting and name names. The only thing was that the fines would then be one hundred dollars apiece.

I told them to leave their checks on the desk in my office. About an hour later, Joe Pignatano, one of my coaches, walked over to where I was hitting fungoes. He had a great big grin on his face and said, “You made a smart move. You offered four guys a chance to admit they broke curfew. Seven guys have paid the fines already.”

As the Mets’ bullpen coach, Pignatano did have to preside over a kind of psych ward. “[Ron] Taylor could be very funny,” he remembered to Maury Allen for After the Miracle: The Amazin’ Mets Twenty Years Later, while back in uniform at a Mets dream camp. “Just a lot of one-liners for the moment, getting on a guy about something.” Which was nothing compared to known flake Tug McGraw:

The day McGraw got that waiter in a white suit to bring trays of ribs and chicken and hamburgers to the bullpen and started heating everything over a sterno can really was something. It wasn’t the food that annoyed me. It was that the guy said I had to pay the bill.

Go ahead, say it. Piggy and the Stooges.

Pignatano enjoyed the Miracle Mets ride as much as anyone. He also suffered more than most when Hodges suffered his fatal heart attack in April 1972, after a round of golf in West Palm Beach. “We finished playing on a real fine day,” Pignatano told Allen.

Then we sat down with Jack Sanford, the old Giants pitcher, who was the club pro, and had a couple of beers at the nineteenth hole. We began walking back to the hotel, maybe fifty yards away. We were talking about the golf as we walked across the grass to the concrete path leading to the hotel rooms. [Third base coach Eddie] Yost and [pitching coach] Rube [Walker] were off to the left, and Gil and I had rooms to the right. Just as we reached the walk where the paths split, I turned slightly to Gil and asked, “What time do you want to meet for dinner?” He never answered. He just fell over backwards on that path and landed on his head. You could hear the crack as his head hit the sidewalk.

“Pignatano got up from his chair in that Florida dream camp clubhouse,” Allen wrote. “He shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. The interview was over.”

Hodges and Pignatano went back to Piggy’s first season as a Brooklyn Dodgers player and remained besties even after the team moved to Los Angeles and Pignatano moved on to the Kansas City Athletics, the Giants, and finally the Original Mets. As a catcher, Pignatano caught the final Dodger game at Ebbets Field, 29 September 1957, including eighth inning relief from Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax against the Phillies.

He remained the Mets’ bullpen coach until 1981, then coached for Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre in Atlanta a spell before leaving the game but returning with the Braves’ organisation as a minor league pitching coach in 1988. Much later in life, Pignatano enjoyed associating with the Mets again, particularly relief pitcher John Franco, who rooted for the Miracle Mets as a boy in Brooklyn.

He also remained friendly with other old Dodger teammates such as Koufax, with whom he once roomed on the road. According to Koufax biographer Jane Leavy, the pair attended a Baseball Assitance Team dinner in New York and Pignatano found an empty seat next to Koufax. “Hey,” Leavy recorded a voice asking almost demandingly, “how come he gets to sit there?” Koufax smiled. “Roomie seat,” he replied.

“On the surface,” Leavy wrote, “Pignatano is everything Koufax is not—paunchy and balding, indifferently dressed in the manner of baseball men who never had to decide what to wear when they got up in the morning, his accent Brooklyn thick. In fact, they are not so  different. Piggy is who Koufax aspires to be—just another guy happy to be on this side of the grass.”

“And all the lot is what I got/It’s what I wear, it’s what you see/It must be me, it’s what I am/vegetable man,” went a lyric by Pink Floyd’s ill-fated founding guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett.

That haunted soul self-shorn from the heights couldn’t know his words fit a guy happy to be on his own side of the grass, whether keeping the nuts from cracking in the bullpen, mourning the loss of his best friend after a time check on dinner, growing vegetables in the pen, relaxing with a Hall of Fame teammate.

Pignatano had two great loves in his life, baseball and his wife, Nancy, who died two years ago. His sons and grandchildren’s mourning may be cushioned only by knowing that he and she are reunited serene and happy in the Elysian Fields.

Don Larsen, RIP: Elevated

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2020-01-01 DonLarsen

Don Larsen, captured mid-delivery during his World Series perfect game.

The new year wasn’t a day old, and the million-to-one shot expired. The month of Sundays turned Mondays. The imperfect (unperfect) man who pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series lost his battle with esophegeal cancer at 90 on New Year’s Day. And Hall of Famer Yogi Berra got to take a flying leap into Don Larsen’s arms one more time, this time in the Elysian Fields.

From Joe Borden (of the pre-historic National Association) in 1875 through Justin Verlander at the near-last minute of the 2019 season, major league baseball pitchers including 35 Hall of Famers have thrown 303 no-hitters. That’s eleven percent of all no-hitters, including perfect games, thrown by Hall of Famers from John Montgomery Ward through Roy Halladay.

Baseball being a game that enables the modest or the miscast to become the immortal even for one day, Larsen was of a perfect piece on 8 October 1956. As his career shook out he was more and better of a relief pitcher than starting pitcher. He was tall, threw hard enough, but as Joe Posnanski described memorably, “[his] wildness on the mound fairly well represented his wildness off the field.”

“Larsen was the greatest drinker I’ve known,” said Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle once upon a time, Mantle being a man who knew great drinkers when he saw them having been one himself for too long. Larsen lived enough in the wild before he married in 1960 that his teammates nicknamed him Gooney Bird.

But the greatest drinker Mantle ever knew went to a no-windup delivery for Game Five and wound up flying into Series history singularly, remaining there to this day. The nearest anyone’s gotten to Larsen for postseason pitching perfection was Halladay, pitching a no-hitter in his first ever postseason assignment to open a division series in 2011—the same year in which Halladay pitched a regular-season perfect game.

Larsen hadn’t previewed his World Series grandeur quite so grandly: he was lifted from Game Two of the ’56 Series in the second inning, despite still being ahead five runs, and his relief Johnny Kucks surrendered all five tying runs—four unearned—on a bases-loaded single (Hall of Famer Pee Wee Reese) and a grand slam. (Hall of Famer Duke Snider.)

He steamed over the early hook regardless. Publicly, he told reporters he had “not a thing” to say after the early hook and the Yankee bullpen surrendering what turned into a 13-8 loss. But he was otherwise recorded as thinking oh, would he never again pitch for Casey Stengel even if the Ol’ Perfesser begged him. He kept that vow right up until the moment he saw the old traditional manner in which a pitcher was informed of his day’s starting assignment, a baseball resting comfortably enough in his shoe.

So the legend went. The reality may have been a little different. For one thing, Larsen himself admitted years later that if he’d been his manager he wouldn’t hand him the ball again any too soon, either. And Stengel told the press the day before Game Five that Larsen would be his man to get the ball rolling. Whether Larsen himself saw it is open to conjecture: he’d gone out on the town and tied on a big one the night before Game Five.

Stengel held no grudge against Larsen for his post-Game Two fuming, obviously, Larsen having two qualities the old man admired: 1) He’d beaten the Yankees twice in a 1954 during which he earned credit for only three pitching wins. 2) Stengel recognised a champion booze hawk when he, too, saw one.

“It was between Larsen and (Bob) Turley,” said the Perfesser. “We decided it would be better to have Turley in the bullpen today and tomorrow.” Turley, of course, ended up having one of the best seats in the house for what was to come. Larsen decided to go back to what he’d abandoned in Game Two, the no-windup delivery Stengel loved to encourage in those among his pitchers who experienced control issues.

As Posnanski puts it, the Dodgers entered Game Five with the same plan they had for Game Two: “Be patient and let Larsen blow himself up the way he had in Game 2. It was a reasonable strategy; indeed, it seemed nearly foolproof. Larsen, over his career, walked about as many batters he struck out. He lost more than he won. He did not let the rigors of baseball interfere much with his thirst for living.”

You know the ancient saying about the best-laid plans, right?

With absolutely no reason to think it was entirely possible, Larsen prior to Game Five had told a friend, who turned out to have been sportswriter Arthur Richman, that he had “one of those crazy feelings that I’m gonna pitch a no-hitter tomorrow.” Richman suggested a four-hitter would be plenty enough. “Nope,” Larsen’s said to have replied. “It’s gonna be a no-hitter, and I’m gonna use my ghoul ball to do it.”

Don’t ask. Larsen never explained it. Any more than anyone could explain how Game Five began in Yankee Stadium, with both Junior Gilliam and Reese looking at called strike threes to open before Snider lined out for the side. Or, how Larsen, always prone to the walk (his walks per nine lifetime: 4.2; his strikeouts per nine lifetime: 4.9; his strikeout-to-walk ratio lifetime: 1.17), surrendered not a one while striking out seven on the day, with only Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson plus outfielders Sandy Amoros and Carl Furillo avoiding the strikeout.

Larsen would have been the first to credit a couple of fielding jewels that kept the perfecto alive. Including but not limited to Robinson slashing a line drive off third baseman Andy Carey’s glove that deflected to shortstop Gil McDougald, who threw Robinson out by a fragment at first in the second inning. Or Mantle running Gil Hodges’s long fly down to the rear latitudes of left center field for a catch he later admitted to thinking he had an easier play on it than he turned out to have.

The Hodges fly, on a hanging slider, was “his one bad pitch” of the afternoon, Berra would remember. And Larsen had one more bullet to dodge immediately afterward. More like a rocket. Amoros hit one into the right field seats that sailed foul by anywhere from two to four to six inches, depending upon who told you the story. Otherwise, Larsen was so in command that he ran a three-ball count to only one hitter (Reese) all afternoon.

He was also calmly aware of what he’d done, more sanguine about it as the years went passing by. If you found his home phone number and wanted to talk a little baseball, he’d likely needle you the way he once needled New York Post writer Mike Vaccaro: “You want to talk about my year with the Orioles, right?”

Larsen’s career began with the Orioles, when they were still the St. Louis Browns. He became a Yankee in one of the strangest trades in baseball history—a seventeen-player swap in November 1954, that made Yankees out of Larsen, Turley, and future major league manager Darrell Johnson, among others. And, that made Orioles out of reliable platoon outfielder Gene Woodling and infielder Don Leppert, among others. He became an ex-Yankee in the 1959 trade with the Kansas City Athletics that made a Yankee out of Roger Maris and ex-Yankees out of Larsen, Hank Bauer, Norm Siebern, and the future Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

New York Daily News baseball writer Joe Trimble, Vaccaro records, was paralysed after Dodger pinch hitter Dale Mitchell struck out to send Yankee Stadium berserk and Berra leaping famously into Larsen’s arms in front of the mound when the perfecto was finished. Trimble couldn’t think of a single line to open his story. His eventual Spink Award-winning colleague Dick Young, himself bristling to finish a pair of stores related to the game, did it for him: “The unperfect man pitched a perfect game.”

“Mortal men get crushed by immortal deeds,” Thomas Boswell wrote about Roger Maris, who suffered unconscionable abuse for daring to break ruthsrecord in 1961, upon Maris’s death in 1985. Larsen was a mortal man who felt elevated by his immortal deed. “Sometimes, a week might go by when I don’t think about that game,” he once said. “But I don’t remember when it happened last.”

After his long enough pitching career ended, Larsen tried major league front office work and then liquor selling, neither of which agreed with him in the end, before going to work for a California paper company successfully. He even carried a little mojo from the game at assorted old-timers’ gatherings one of which turned rather explosive in its own right.

After Yogi Berra ended his longtime rift with George Steinbrenner, the Yankees gave him Yogi Berra Day in 1999—forty years after he’d gotten one as a player. Larsen and Berra remained lifelong friends, and on the second Yogi Day Larsen was invited to throw a ceremonial first pitch to his old battery mate. Then the interleague game against the Montreal Expos began. And David Cone, the former Met, beat the Expos with . . . a perfect game.

Larsen said later it was the only perfect game for which he’d been present from beginning to end since the one he threw in the ’56 World Series.

The wild Yankee settled himself in due course, of course. He and his wife, Corinne, were married six decades when he died; he found a pleasant life in Hayden Lake, Idaho; he never lost his zest for life despite the emptiness he experienced now and then after realising he was the last man standing from both the starting lineups of his perfect game and his last pre-Baltimore team of Browns.

“That carries a little weight by itself, but I’m just not sure how much,” he told an Idaho reporter two years ago. “The last one to go was Yogi in 2015. It’s lonesome when you get to the top.”

We may presume that once Yogi took that welcome-home flying leap into his arms on New Year’s Day, Larsen in the Elysian Fields won’t be entirely lonesome at the top anymore. But our island earth may be a little more lonesome for missing the million to one shot, the nice guy who lived fast enough, settled well enough, and for once in his otherwise ordinary baseball life did what couldn’t be done. And hasn’t been done since.

Rickey don’t lose those numbers

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2019-08-26 RickeyRoth

Hiring Allan Roth (right) as MLB’s first full-time (and then some) team statistician in 1947 may remain Branch Rickey’s least appreciated baseball innovation.

The good news: I looked forward to appearing on a Sunday podcast for which the subject was to be Branch Rickey. The bad news: I didn’t get a chance to discuss the one thing about Rickey that nobody, seemingly, thinks about whenever his name arises in most baseball discourse. The mere mention of it inspires a sub-topic change faster than you’d try to elude a visible virus; the nostalgist wishes merely to hasten back to reminiscence, the troglodyte contingent wishes you quartered without drawing first.

Understood: Say “Branch Rickey” and the usual first response is “Jackie Robinson,” and that’s exactly the way it should be. After decades of hoping to do so, but lacking the opportunity so long as Kenesaw Mountain Landis dictated baseball, Rickey ended a wrong with an irrevocable right and chose the absolute right player to do it. If “Jackie Robinson” isn’t your first response to “Branch Rickey,” the lacking is yours, not theirs.

Understood further: If “the farm system” isn’t your second response to “Branch Rickey,” take a remedial crash course in elementary baseball history. Even the most free agency-conscious teams in baseball today still believe in their farm systems, even if not all of them operate them as acutely or with foresight as they should. Both the rich talent pool mined since Robinson plus the farm system’s continued if oft-compromised operation are Rickey legacies not to be dismissed.

If “sabermetrics” or “analytics” isn’t your third response . . . Aw, jeez, not that you-know-what again! I hear you shuddering. Hear me out.

Like it or not, however shallow or deep anyone looks, statistics are the life blood of baseball. Long before anyone spoke of sabermetrics, baseball fans obsessed over baseball numbers as much as over Hall of Fame prospects. Simple (and often misleading or short on vision) though they were, baseball cards did not live by handsome face pictures alone.

For better or worse, Rickey was as obsessed with numbers and their meanings as with anything else about the game he loved and changed. And, like almost anything upon which he cast his bushy-browed eyes, Rickey dove right into the deep end of the pool, when a Canadian-born, thirty-year-old number cruncher with a passion for tabulating sports statistics, baseball in particular, convinced the Mahatma (only one of Rickey’s nicknames) to hire him.

The hire was Allan Roth, who’d grown up loving baseball, hockey, and figuring out stats for both, before he was forced to forget his college plans when family issues compelled him to hire as a salesman. After trying but failing to get then-Dodgers president Larry MacPhail to hire him, Roth met then-National Hockey League president Frank Calder and got a job with that league. Enter World War II and a stint in Canada’s Army to interrupt Roth’s statistical career.

The Canadian Army leaned on his statistical analyses before discharging him in 1944, upon his diagnosis of epilepsy. Roth cast his eye upon the Dodgers again, with MacPhail long gone and Rickey running the Bums since. When a first meeting between the two went like “a disaster,” according to Tom Cronin of  Statliners, Roth managed to tell Rickey he wanted “only ten minutes of your undivided attention.”

Told to give Rickey’s assistant a detailed paper, Roth obeyed. As Roth’s Society for American Baseball Research biographer Andy McCue wrote, “Some of these were standard, but others, such as where the ball was hit and the count it was hit on, hadn’t been compiled regularly.”

Roth also proposed to break the statistics down into various categories that would reveal tendencies which the front office and the manager could use to win ballgames. Breakdowns such as performance against left-handers and right-handers, in day games versus night games, in the various ballparks, in situations with runners in scoring position, are all mundane to us now. But in Roth’s time, they were rarely compiled or used, and never part of the public discussion. The letter was intriguing enough to get a meeting with a still-skeptical Rickey.

It got Roth a second direct shot with the Mahatma: “The second meeting was the opposite of the first. Roth later stated that Rickey was intrigued with some of his ideas during the meeting, especially on how RBI’s are overrated.” This time, Rickey was more than intrigued. Once Roth solved his visa problems, and on the same day Jackie Robinson premiered with the Dodgers, Rickey finally hired Roth to be the Dodgers’ statistician, the first full-time such man in major league baseball.

Roth would do the job for eighteen years, recording every pitch the Dodgers threw, every swing they took, every base they reached or advanced, every ball they fielded. He was once somewhat renowned (and often mocked) for tabulating those on copious sheets of graph paper, apparently his favourite charting device.

Taking as long as five hours after each game to break down the game and the players, Roth also spent copious off-season time digging deeper into what we know long since as matchups, best- and worst-count performances, at home and on the road. He also developed a fine sense of humor about it; The Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn once credited Roth with inventing the game Silly Records. Except that some of those silly records weren’t as silly or meaningless as they probably sounded then.

Until he was pressured into selling his percentage of the Dodgers to Walter O’Malley in 1950, Rickey paid close enough attention to Roth’s charts and graphs to draw plenty of conclusions of his own in addition to what Roth himself enunciated. And in 1954, as if hiring Roth at all hadn’t been heresy enough, Rickey wrote and Life published “Goodbye to Some Old Baseball Ideas,” much of which was mulcted from Roth’s work. Including:

Batting average is only a partial means of determining a man’s effectiveness on offense.

The ability to get on base, or On-Base Average, is both vital and measurable.

The correlation shows that OBA went hand in glove with runs scored.

The next measurable quantity is Extra base power . . . My own formula computing power . . . is called isolated power, is the number of extra bases over and above singles in relation to total number of hits.

Runs batted in? A misleading statistic.

Fielding averages? Useless as a yard stick.

As Brian Kenny wrote, in Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution, Rickey “didn’t just say, ‘Hey, ever wonder why the Dodgers have been kicking your ass for the last eight years? Would you like to know the best way of quantifying talent and production? Oh, shoot, here ya go!'” Today’s sabermetricians were children when Rickey (and Roth) wrote the Life piece; baseball’s lords and princelings were all too ready to take it with a pillar of salt when not laughing hysterically over the Mahatma’s impudence.

The Dodgers kicked the National League’s ass for most of the rest of their Brooklyn life (the Boys of Summer were, after all, Rickey teams), and the Pirates finished in 1960 what Rickey began from 1951-55. (The nucleus of that world champion was Rickey’s nucleus: Vernon Law, Elroy Face, Bill Mazeroski, Dick Groat, and a talented minor leaguer he drafted from the Dodgers in the Rule 5 minor league draft: Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente.)

Which was rather splendid for a number cruncher who didn’t consider himself a pure numbers man. Roth “didn’t do his own taxes. He couldn’t remember his phone number,” McCue wrote. “What he would do is record the numbers in myriad detail and then use his true talent, recognizing what the numbers meant, to provide value to his employers. He summed up his philosophy: ‘Baseball is a game of percentages—I try to find the actual percentage, which is constantly shifting, and apply it to the situation where it will do the most good’.”

(Was Casey Stengel eavesdropping a little on Rickey and Roth near the beginning? Baseball, the Ol’ Perfesser told anyone within earshot, is percentage plus execution. You thought the Dodgers kicked the National League’s ass? Stengel’s Yankees only had ten pennants and seven World Series rings in twelve seasons to show for his willingness to put old thinking, even old “traditional” Yankee thinking aside.)

Though such crustily visceral managers as Leo Durocher and Charlie Dressen spurned Roth’s analyses, Walter Alston accepted them. It took Alston one full season to get his sea legs managing the Dodgers after he was hired to succeed Dressen for 1954, and there were a few growing pains as he asserted his authority and learned his players, but in Alston’s second season? Dem Bums finally won the World Series.

Walter O’Malley could challenge you until you and he were the proverbial blue in the face, but the core of the Dodgers who finally made next year this year were still Rickey’s boys: Hall of Famers Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine, and Clem Labine. We won’t suggest what we now know as analytics put World Series rings on the 1955 Dodgers’ fingers, but it didn’t hurt them to have the data, either.

Then they almost won the ’56 Series while they were at it. It wasn’t Alston’s fault that the Dodgers began showing their age in their final Brooklyn season. (The average age of the regular lineup: 32.) And even their 1959 pennant winner was still a team transitioning from the further-aging Brooklyn veterans.

During the Dodgers’ first serious pennant race in Los Angeles, facing a critical late-season doubleheader against the Giants, Roth convinced Alston, based on his tabulations, that Hall of Famer Don Drysdale pitched far better at night than during the day, while another Dodger righthander, Roger Craig, was almost the same pitcher day or night. Alston switched his planned doubleheader rotation, starting Craig in the day game and Drysdale for the night game.

The result? The Dodgers swept the Giants, helping them force the three-game playoff against the Braves that meant the pennant. By then even Dodger players received regularly updated Roth tabulations on their own performances and worked accordingly.

Seriously? You really thought that started in this century? Anyone who knew the Dodgers well in those years knew Allan Roth’s role with the team, and that it wasn’t just rehashing or writing out their baseball cards. They could have told you the Dodgers had a lot more going for them than balls and strikes, runs and hits, and Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s latest beyond-belief performance, right up to the day the Dodgers let Roth go in 1964.

And they really had Branch Rickey to thank.

“Rickey and Roth’s fundamental contribution to the advancement of baseball statistics,” wrote John Thorn and Pete Palmer in The Hidden Game of Baseball, “comes from their conceptual revisionism, their willingness to strip the game down to its basic unit, the run, and reconstruct its statistics accordingly.”

A man who evaluated character in hand with performance but wasn’t always the most astute judge of the former when all was said and done, Rickey died a year after the Dodgers lost Roth. He was foresighted and devious, compassionate and penurious, all at once. He was maybe baseball’s deepest thinker and one of its most pompous. “A man of strange complexities,” the New York Times‘s John Drebinger once wrote, “not to mention downright contradictions.”

For every one who canonises Rickey for elevating and supporting Jackie Robinson as a player and a man, appropriately, there’s another who broils him just as appropriately for the shifty penury that prompted his Hall of Fame Pirate Ralph Kiner to credit him with doing the most to seed the Major League Baseball Players’ Association.

“Rickey believes in economy in everything,” the New York Daily Mirror‘s Dan Daniel once wrote, “except his own salary.”

Roth’s Dodger days ended, McCue wrote, after O’Malley discovered his statistician, whose marriage was collapsing, had a romantic relationship with a black woman at a time when too many Americans, O’Malley included, yet quaked over the very idea of such interracial romance, never mind the scandal quotient still attached to it. That romance ended in a shouting match and Roth’s marriage itself ended, but so did his Dodger career.

He returned to free-lance work until ABC, then NBC, hired him to give announcers (including two former players he’d once analysed, Koufax and Pee Wee Reese) the same deeper analyses he’d previously provided the Dodgers and Scully, until his health failed in the 1980s. (He died in 1992.)

“Roth was a firm believer that you do not have to be an expert mathematician to record baseball stats,” Cronin wrote. “You just had to be an innovative thinker and have a passion for the game. He also realized that human element of baseball and numbers could only help aid the game, not run it.”

So did Branch Rickey. Sabermetricians aren’t the only ones who should thank him for his patronage of and further education from Roth, no matter how dearly baseball’s paleozoics would like to spank him for it.