Tag Archives: Chicago Cubs

Robby the Umpbot wasn’t the end of the world

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Robby the Umpbot

The first MLB deployment of Robby the Umpbot–Cubs pitcher Cody Poteet getting a ball call turned to a strike against the Dodgers’ Max Muncy.

Cody Poteet. Remember the name of this Cubs righthanded pitcher. No, he didn’t surrender three World Series home runs to Babe Ruth in the same game, he didn’t try to start a World Series game the day after pitching four innings in relief, and he didn’t pitch a no-hitter in which he got credit for such a performance despite his defense recording every last out in the game.*

No, Poteet was first on the mound to call for—and win—a ball/strike challenge with aid and comfort from Robby the Umpbot. Even if it was in a spring training exhibition game.

Poteet had Mookie Betts aboard and nobody out in the bottom of the first when he threw Max Muncy a fastball at the knees on 0-1. Home plate umpire Tony Randazzo called it ball one. Poteet said, “Not so fast” . . . and called immediately for Robby the Umpbot’s help. Well, now. The videoboard showed the pitch most certainly did hit the strike zone by the rule book. 0-1 went to 1-1. Muncy ended up looking at strike three not far from the same knee-high location.

Know what happened after that? How about what didn’t happen?

The sky didn’t fall. The earth didn’t move, under their feet or anyone else’s. There were no known tidal waves reported on any world coastline. Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden didn’t suddenly become men of reason and wisdom. The flora and the fauna didn’t make mass entries on the endangered species lists.

About the only unlikely thing to happen from that overturned ball call was the Cubs going forth to batter the world champion Dodgers, 12-4, to open spring exhibition season. They turned a 3-0 Dodger lead after two into a six-run third, added two in the fifth, one in the seventh, and three in the eighth. The only Dodger response was an eighth-inning RBI double.

You might be happy to know that Poteet had an ally on his call for Robby’s review: Muncy himself. “When that ball crossed, I thought it was a strike right away and he balled it,” the Dodger third baseman said postgame. “I look out there and he’s tapping his head and I went, ‘Well, I’m going to be the first one’.”

And, just as with the advent of replay elsewhere, guess what else didn’t happen? The game itself wasn’t delayed unconscionably. Muncy certainly didn’t think so. In fact, he doesn’t mind Robby at all. Neither did Randazzo, seemingly.

“It’s a cool idea,” Muncy said. “It doesn’t slow the game down at all. It moves fast. The longest part was Tony trying to get the microphone to work in the stadium.” Meaning, Randazzo announcing the ruling to the Camelback Ranch crowd.

Come the eighth inning, the Cubs called for another challenge. This time, catcher Pablo Aliendo thought Frankie Scalzo, Jr.’s sweeper nicked the top edge of the zone for strike three with Sean McClain at the plate. Not quite, Robby ruled this time. Ball four.

The rule for deploying the automated ball/strike system (ABS), as it’s called officially, is that only three on the field (pitcher, catcher, or batter) can call for Robby’s opinion and each team gets only two challenges thus far. If the challenging team wins, as the Cubs did, they keep the challenge. When the system was brought online in the minors, the estimates became that the average such challenge was (wait for it!) seventeen seconds.

Neither Poteet nor Muncy were new to Robby, according to The Athletic‘s Fabian Ardaya. Poteet started ten times in the Yankee organisation last year, at Scranton-Wilkes Barre; Muncy saw it while on a rehab assignment off a wrist injury. Muncy’s only issue then was, as he put it to Ardaya, “the technology wasn’t entirely there.”

There’d be certain pitches that you would see and you’d look up on the board and it’d have it in a completely different spot . . . Even the catcher would come back and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s not where that ball was.’ The technology isn’t 100 percent there, but the idea of it’s really cool.

Critics (they were legion) feared Robby the Umpbot would penalise too many solid umpires while punishing not enough errant ones. One conclusion Robby’s early works has stirred is a revelation that might be just as jarring, as The Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond puts it: the players themselves, from the mound to the plate, don’t know the strike zone as well as they think.

“Unlike the replay rules already in place, where managers initiate appeals from the dugout after having time to deliberate,” Diamond writes, “ball-strike challenges have two key differences: They can only come from the pitcher, catcher or batter—and they must happen immediately.

“The result is a format that inserts elements of both strategy and personality into the game even while adding automation. That’s because ultracompetitive, often emotional professional athletes aren’t always particularly good at knowing the right time to ask for a challenge.”

On-field embarrassment comes in infinite forms. Dodgers pitcher Landon Knack, who got knuked by the Mets in last fall’s National League Championship Series, told Diamond of times during his AAA-level days when he challenged pitches from frustration and regretted them at once. “All Knack could do,” Diamond writes, “was stand on the mound and watch the scoreboard animation showing the location of the ball, as everybody in the stadium saw that he was embarrassingly wrong.”

It’s something along the line of the store manager calling la policía after showing up at the bank without the bag full of the day’s cash proceeds, only to double back and realise he or she dropped the bank bag in the parking lot on the way to the car—with the whole thing caught on the store’s security cameras.

Other kinks in the system may well include the choice of players who get to call Robby for help. Diamond says AAA-level managers and players agree on the one who shouldn’t: the pitchers. Knack himself admits, “Pitchers are horrible at it.” Said a Dodgers AAA catcher, Hunter Feduccia, “We probably had a 90 percent miss rate with all the pitchers last year.” Admitted a Royals AAA pitcher, Chandler Champlain, “Being biased as a pitcher, I think anything close is a strike.”

Advises Jayson Stark, The Athletic‘s Hall of Fame writer, “Don’t be That Guy whose heat-of-the-moment challenge decisions leave your teammates shaking their heads and calling you names you won’t want to see displayed above your locker. Be smart. Be cool. Be thoughtful. And control those emotions!”

(Some hitters have been known to have dubious strike zone sense, too. Once upon a time, Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra had an impeccable strike zone sense behind the plate . . . and a notorious lack of it at the plate. Maybe the best bad-ball hitter of his time, Berra was questioned postgame about a pitch nowhere near the strike zone or even Yankee Stadium’s postal code that he’d smashed for a home run regardless. Bless his heart, Yogi insisted the pitch was a letter-high strike.)

Relax. Robby’s getting a spring training Show tryout only for now. He’s not expected to spread his wings over the regular season Show until 2026 at minimum.

But if the only kinks in the system other than coordinated calibrations thus far are figuring out who should make the challenges and who shouldn’t, you’d have to say Robby’s going to be in good shape and the umpires are going to be in better shape. (They’ll get immediate reminders of the rule book, as opposed to the “individual” strike zone.) And, the game is going to be in the best shape.

* For the record, the Cub pitchers who delivered those non-feats were, in order, Charlie Root (1932), Hank Borowy (1945), and Ken Holtzman (1969).

This essay was written for and first published by Sports Central.

Ken Holtzman, RIP: The no-no-no song and other things

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Ken Holtzman

Ken Holtzman, one of the prime contributors to the Athletics’ legendary (some also say notorious) three straight World Series titles in 1972-74.

Ken Holtzman was a good pitcher with two distinctions above and beyond being credited with more wins than any Jewish pitcher including Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax. He may have been the last major league player to talk to Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson before Robinson’s death. And, he’s the answer to this trivia question: “Name the only two pitchers in major league history to pitch no-hit, no-run games in which they struck nobody out.”

According to Jason Turnbow’s Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic, his history of the 1970s “Swingin’ A’s,” Robinson was at Riverfront Stadium for a pre-Game One World Series ceremony in 1972, commemorating 25 years since he broke the disgraceful old colour barrier. Robinson threw a ceremonial first pitch, then departed through the A’s clubhouse, where he happened upon Holtzman finishing his pre-game preparation.

“Nervous?” Robinson asked the lefthander. “Yes, sir, a little bit,” Holtzman admitted. After some small talk, Turnbow recorded, Robinson handed Holtzman an instruction: “Keep your hopes up and the ball down.” Nine days later, the A’s continued celebrating a World Series title but Robinson died of a second heart attack.

“I was probably the last major leaguer to talk to Jackie Robinson,” Holtzman would remember. Robinson’s advice probably did Holtzman a huge favour; he started Game One and, with help from Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers plus Vida Blue in relief, he and the A’s beat the Reds, 3-2.

A good pitcher who brushed against greatness often enough and became something of a rubber-armed workhorse, Holtzman—who died at 78 Sunday after a battle against heart problems—had two no-hitters on his resume from his earlier years with the Cubs. The first one, in 1969, made him that trivia answer. Four years to the day after Cincinnati’s Jim Maloney pitched a no-hitter that’s the arguable sloppiest no-hitter of all time (Maloney struck twelve out but walked ten), Holtzman joined the No-No-No Chorus.

19 August 1969, the Cubs vs. the Atlanta Braves in Wrigley Field, Holtzman vs. Hall of Famer Phil Niekro. While the Cubs got all the runs they’d need when Hall of Famer Ron Santo smashed a three-run homer off Knucksie, Holtzman performed the almost-impossible. He got fifteen air outs (including liners and popouts), thanks in large part to the notorious Wrigley winds blowing in from the outfield. (Hall of Famer Henry Aaron made three of his four outs on the day in the air.) He got twelve ground outs. And he couldn’t ring up a strikeout if he’d bribed home plate umpire Dick Stello begging for even one little break.

It joined Holtzman to Sad Sam Jones of the 1923 Yankees. Jones faced and beat the Philadelphia Athletics in Shibe Park, with both Yankee runs scoring on a two-run single by former Athletic Whitey Witt in the third inning. Jones got fourteen ground outs and thirteen air outs, living only slightly less dangerously than Holtzman did.*

Holtzman took a little more responsibility throwing his second no-hitter, against the Reds on 3 June 1971, the first no-no to be pitched in Riverfront Stadium. This time, he struck six out while walking four, getting ten ground outs and ten air outs each. Clearly he’d learned some things before his Cub days ended.

Ken Holtzman

Holtzman, as a young Cub.

He had no trouble learning off the mound, either, graduating with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and mastering French well enough to have read Proust in the language. When he moved from the Cubs to the A’s, he even found a unique way to funnel his competitive side when he didn’t have to be on the mound.

Holtzman drew a few teammates toward his passion for playing bridge, including Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, infielder Dick Green, and relief pitcher Darold Knowles, according to Turnbow. In time, the Oakland Tribune‘s A’s beat writer Ron Bergman would join Holtzman and Fingers in scouting and finding bridge clubs on the road.

“We’d be the only three guys there,” Holtzman once cracked, “three major leaguers playing against 85-year-old women.”

“It was all gray-haired old ladies,” Fingers said. “We’d beat them during the afternoon, and then we’d go to the ballpark and beat a baseball team.”

On the mound, Holtzman arrived with immediate comparisons to Koufax. Being Jewish and lefthanded and arriving in Koufax’s final season made that possible, and impossible. Nobody could live up to a Koufax comparison at all, never mind by way of sharing the same pitching side and religious heritage.

Holtzman didn’t help relieve himself of those when he faced Koufax himself in Wrigley Field, the day after Yom Kippur 1966, and outlasted Koufax, 2-0, taking a no-hitter into the ninth before veterans Dick Schofield and Maury Wills singled off him. Or, when he pitched 1967 as a 21-year-old phenom with a 9-0 won-lost record around the military reserve obligations many players had in his time.

His Cub career wasn’t always apples and honey, alas. Other than the unrealistic Koufax comparisons, there were the military reserve interruptions (he pitched on weekend passes in 1967) and there was his tendency to speak his mind, which didn’t always sit well no matter how much his teammates liked him personally.

There was also dealing with Leo Durocher managing those Cubs, and especially becoming a Durocher target, burning when Durocher accused him of lack of effort. The Cubs’ Durocher-triggered self-immolation of 1969 didn’t make for better times ahead, for either Holtzman or the team. In fact, Durocher’s Cubs author David Claerbaut recorded a conversation Hall of Famer Ernie Banks had with Holtzman as the collapse approached:

Banks had a few drinks with the young southpaw after a game in Pittsburgh. “Kenny,” he said, “we have a nine-game lead, and we’re not going to win it becsuse we’ve got a manager and three or four players who are out there waiting to get beat.”

For the then 23-year-old hurler, the conversation with Banks was chilling. “He told me right to my face, I’ll never forget it. It was the most serious and sober statement I’d ever heard from Ernie Banks—and he was right.” Holtzman’s take was similar to that of Mr. Cub. “I think that team simply wasn’t ready to win. I’m telling you, there is a feeling about winning. There’s a certain amount of intimidation. It existed between the A’s and the rest of the league . . . In Oakland, when we took the field, we knew we would find a way to win. The Cubs never found that way.

After a struggling 1970 and 1971, Holtzman asked for and got a trade . . . to the Swingin’ A’s, for outfielder Rick Monday. A’s manager Dick Williams took to Holtzman at once. So did pitching coach Wes Stock: “I’ve never seen a pitcher throw as fast as he does who has his control.”

Holtzman learned soon enough how the contradictory ways of A’s owner Charlie Finley would make the A’s baseball’s greatest circus—even while they won three straight World Series in which Holtzman had prominent enough roles (and made his only two All-Star teams) and missed a fourth thanks to being swept by the Red Sox in 1975.

His first Oakland season in 1972 didn’t exclude heartache, alas. With the A’s in Chicago for a set with the White Sox, the Munich Olympic Village massacre happened. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were held hostage and killed by the Palestinian group Black September.

Proud but not ostentious about his Jewishness, Holtzman and Jewish teammate Mike Epstein took a long, pensive walk before electing to have the A’s clubhouse manager sew a black armband onto one of their uniform sleeves. The two players were stunned to see Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson wearing such an armband as well.

Epstein objected (he’d had previous tangles with Jackson), but Holtzman accepted. Jackson “had contact with Jewish people growing up and was not entirely unaware of Jewish cultural characteristics,” Holtzman said. “So when I saw Reggie with that armband, I felt that he was understanding what me and Mike were going through. He . . . felt it appropriate to show solidarity not only with his own teammates but with the fact that athletes were getting killed.”

In the wake of the Messersmith decision enabling free agency at last (Holtzman faced Andy Messersmith twice in the 1974 World Series and the A’s won both games), owners and players agreed to suspend arbitration while negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. Oops. Finley offered nine A’s including Holtzman contracts with the maximum-allowed twenty percent pay cuts. What a guy.

Annoyed increasingly by Finley’s duplicities, Holtzman began 1976 as an unsigned pitcher but was traded to the Orioles on 2 April—in the same blockbuster that made Orioles out of Jackson plus minor league pitcher Bill Von Bommel and A’s out of pitchers Mike Torrez and Paul Mitchell plus outfielder Don Baylor.

Holtzman took a 2.86 ERA for the Orioles into mid-June 1976, then found himself a Yankee. He was part of the ten-player swap that made Yankees out of catcher Elrod Hendricks and pitchers Doyle Alexander, Jimmy Freeman, and Grant Jackson, while making Orioles of catcher Rick Dempsey and pitchers Tippy Martinez, Rudy May, Scott McGregor, and Dave Pagan.

As a Yankee, Holtzman landed a comfy five-year deal but picked the wrong time to begin struggling in 1977. A May outing in which he couldn’t get out of the first inning put him in manager Billy Martin’s somewhat crowded bad books. (He didn’t pitch in that postseason, just as he wasn’t called upon in 1976.) Active in the Major League Baseball Players Association as well, that side of Holtzman may have made Yankee owner George Steinbrenner less than accommodating as well.

In 1978, Holtzman again struggled to reclaim his former form and was dealt back to the Cubs. After struggling further to finish 1978 and for all 1979, Holtzman retired. He returned to his native St. Louis, worked in insurance and stock brokerage (the latter had been his off-season job for much of his pitching career), and did some baseball coaching for the St. Louis Jewish Community Center. He even managed the Petach Tivka Pioneers in the Israel Baseball League briefly, walking away when he disagreed with how the league was administered.

Holtzman might not have been the next Koufax, but the father of three and grandfather of four knew how to build unusual bridges toward triumphs on the field. May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have brought Holtzman home to the Elysian Fields for an eternity living in peace.

* St. Louis Browns pitcher Earl Hamilton also threw a no-hit/no-strikeout game, against the Tigers in 1912 . . . but a one-out, third-inning walk preceded an infield error that enabled Hall of Famer Ty Cobb to score in a 4-1 Browns win. Hamilton did as Jones did otherwise: fourteen ground outs, thirteen air outs (including liners and popouts).

The Hawk wants to flip his lid

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Andre Dawson

If Andre Dawson has his way, his Hall of Fame plaque will change from showing him as an Expo to showing him as a Cub.

Even before any new Hall of Famers are elected, the question (and controversy?) about hat logos on the plaque portraits has arisen. You can thank Hall of Famer Andre Dawson for that, now that his letter on the subject to the Hall’s chairman of the board Jane Forbes Clark was publicised by the Chicago Tribune.

Dawson asked Clark to compel her board to review his plaque and its hat logo. When he was elected to the Hall’s Class of 2010, the Hall elected to adorn him in a Montreal Expos hat. Dawson wasn’t exactly amused, since his own preference was to be shown in a Cubs hat.

“It’s hard for stuff to bother me, to a degree,” the Hawk told Tribune columnist Paul Sullivan. “But this has toyed with me over the years for the simple reason that I was approached with the (announcement) that was going to be released to the press that I was going to wear an Expos emblem.

“I didn’t agree with it at the time,” he continued. “But for me, getting into the Hall was the most important thing. Over time, I’ve thought about it more and came to the (conclusion) I should have had some say-so.”

No one should be surprised that Dawson would prefer being seen as a Cub. He was a victim of the first 1980s owners’ collusion, the Expos offering him a two-year deal that amounted to an annual pay cut from his 1986 salary of $1.2 million. That’s when his agent, Dick Moss, sold him on the blank-contract idea that drew the Cubs to him.

He went from the blank-contract fill-in of $500,000 from the Cubs for 1987 to win that year’s National League Most Valuable Player award, after leading the league with 49 home runs and 353 total bases. That was despite several players having arguable better seasons, including Hall of Famers Tony Gwynn, Tim Raines (Dawson’s longtime Montreal teammate), and Ozzie Smith, plus Cardinals bomber Jack (The Ripper) Clark.

Dawson parlayed that gambit into five years and $10.6 million, not to mention shaking out as a particular Wrigley Field fan favourite. After finishing his career with two seasons in Boston and two in Miami, Dawson needed nine tries to reach Cooperstown but reach it he did. It came with a price. The artificial turf in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium turned the Hawk’s knees into science experiments; he’d had as many as a reputed ten knee surgeries.

Even the president of Expos Fest, Terry Giannias, whose group celebrates the Expos’ history, gets it. “I’m not going to lie,” Giannias told MSN.com, “it sort of was like a shot in the gut.” But neither would Giannias lie about why he gets Dawson’s feelings:

I just know what everybody else knows, is the way he left the Expos. When you talk about the stars of the Montreal Expos, especially in the ’80s . . . and in the 35 years (of their existence) in general, it’s Andre Dawson, Tim Raines and Gary Carter, right? So, when Carter moved on, when they got rid of him, the prodigal son should have been Andre and the way they treated him during the collusion thing . . . that was really dirty. I don’t know if somebody forgets that. Obviously, that plays a role in it. But I don’t believe it’s got much to do about that anymore, but just his love for Chicago, because Chicago embraced him, like right away and he’s had a great relationship with the city ever since. So I think it’s less of a grudge and more of an appreciation for his adopted city, he’s an ambassador there.

Carter was vocal about his preference to enter the Hall of Fame as a Met; he’d often withstood unjust criticism in Montreal before being traded to the Mets in 1985 and becoming a key to their 1986 triumph while having his last great seasons there. The Hall said, no soap, you’re going in as an Expo.

When did the Hall become that picayune about cap logos on Hall of Famers’ plaques? Hark back to 1999, when then-future Hall of Famer Wade Boggs was winding up his career with the embryonic (Devil) Rays.

Boggs was going to get to Cooperstown on his first try, in 2005. Nobody but a cynic argued otherwise. But some time in 1999, there came reports that the Rays offered to compensate Boggs handsomely if he’d consent to enter the Hall with their logo on his plaque hat. Two years later, the Hall said, well, we’ll just see about that crap. Long since, with exceptions you may be able to count on one hand, the Hall has exercised the final say on who wears which hat on his plaque, even after “consulting” with the player.

Boggs, of course, reposes in bronze in Cooperstown with a Red Sox hat on his head. Appropriately, since he posted the bulk of his credentials with the Olde Towne Team. But he also debunked the reports about the Rays’ compensation offer six years ago. “I think it came from when Jose Canseco said, ‘If I get in the Hall of Fame, I’m going in as a Devil Ray’,” Boggs told WFAN. “And someone probably misconstrued that I said that and that [original Rays owner Vincent] Naimoli offered me a million dollars to be the first Devil Ray to go into the Hall of Fame, and that conversation never took place.”

Last year, the Hall “consulted” with Scott Rolen, then assented to his request to be shown as a Cardinal. Understandably, Rolen preferred to be shown as a member of the team that made him feel both at home and like the World Series champion he became with them in 2006. Not as a member of the Phillies, who’d too often let him become an undeserved fall guy for their organisational failures prior to his departure.

Last year, too, the Hall “consulted” with Fred McGriff, who elected with their blessing to have his hat left blank. He was a frequent-enough traveler, often for reasons not of his own making, and his longest single-team tenures were a dead heat between the Blue Jays (five years) and the Braves (five years). The Crime Dog decided that a man who played for six teams (seven if you include the Yankees who discovered but unloaded him in the first place) simply shouldn’t choose one above the other in the circumstances.

When Mike Mussina was elected at last, he had a pretty pickle to ponder: his career split almost dead even between the Orioles (ten seasons) and the Yankees (eight seasons). Perhaps diplomatically, Mussina, too, elected to be blank on his plaque.

Roy Halladay’s career split twelve seasons in Toronto and four in Philadelphia. He’d posted most of his Hall case with the Blue Jays, but he did win a second Cy Young Award with the Phillies (the fifth pitcher to win one in each league), not to mention pitching that no-hitter in Game One of the 2010 National League division series. The Hall talked to his widow. Brandy Halladay elected to leave her late husband’s hat blank, not wishing to offend either team or its fans.

The rare single-team players have never had an issue, of course. (How rare? 23 percent of 270 players elected to Cooperstown as of this writing have been single-team players.) It was no issue for such men as Luke (Old Aches and Pains) Appling, Jeff Bagwell, Johnny Bench, Craig Biggio, Roberto Clemente, George Brett, Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella, Lou Gehrig, Bob Gibson, Tony Gwynn, Derek Jeter, Walter Johnson, Chipper Jones, Al Kaline, Barry Larkin, Mickey Mantle, Edgar Martínez, Stan Musial, Pee Wee Reese, Mariano Rivera, Jackie Robinson, Jim Rice, Mike Schmidt, Ted Williams, and Carl Yastrzemski, among the Hall’s 54 single-team men.

If elected as they should be, Todd Helton and Joe Mauer are also single-team men who would go in as a Rockie and a Twin, respectively. The blank hat makes sense for players with multiple franchises on their resumés if they didn’t spend, say, 65 percent or more of their career with just one. Andruw Jones should go in as a Brave; Chase Utley, a Phillie; Billy Wagner, an Astro.

Adrián Beltré is trickier. He played seven season with the Dodgers and his final eight with the Rangers. (In between, there were five in Seattle and one in Boston.) Under Frank McCourt’s heavily mortgaged and controversial ownership, the Dodgers let him walk as a free agent in 2004, after he led the entire Show with 48 home runs. Considering his relationship with and in Texas, if he doesn’t enter Cooperstown with a Rangers hat on his plaque head there will (should) be protests up and down the Lone Star State.

A player who posted the bulk of his Hall case with one team has a better case to be shown with that team’s hat. Unless, of course, he went from mere Hall of Famer to triple superstar elsewhere. (Think, for example, of Vladimir Guerrero, Sr. as an Angel, Reggie Jackson as a Yankee, and Randy Johnson as a Diamondback.) But then there was Greg Maddux. Born and raised a Cub, but going from mere greatness to off-the-charts as a Brave. He put two more teams on his resumé and elected to be inducted with a blank lid.

The blank might have worked for Dawson, too, until you consider his actual feeling about it. He might have been a star in Montreal, but after the Expos colluded his way out of town he became more than than that in Wrigleyville. That daring blank-contract MVP season turned not just into further riches but a love affair. The North Side embraced him and he returned the embraces.

Even after leaving as a free agent, even though he participates occasionally in Expos-related events, Dawson’s heart probably never truly left Chicago. If the Hall reconsiders and gives the Hawk his heart’s desire here, it would be the first time the Hall ever flipped an inductee’s lid at his request. That assent would not come without complications.

Underhanded Counselling?

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Craig Counsell

No, the Cubs did not poach Counsell from the Brewers. What they did to David Ross, however . . .

Would you blame David Ross if you discover he feels like the husband who was thrown over with little to no warning because the wife decided something better was available? OK, that’s not really a fair analogy. Grandpa Rossy is seven years younger than Craig Counsell. But considering the Cubs’ treatment, he might as well be seven years older.

But something isn’t passing the proverbial smell test about Counsell’s hiring and Ross’s firing.

First, let’s clear this one at once. The Cubs didn’t poach Counsell. Not from the Brewers or from anyone else. Counsell’s contract expired first. He didn’t exactly lack for interest once it became known he intended to test his own managerial market. But test it he did, as a proper free agent.

Now, that said, the manner in which the Ross firing and Counsell hiring were done was a weak look. Team president Jed Hoyer had a deal done with Counsell before flying to Ross’s Florida home to meet and execute Ross, the guy from whom Hoyer said he wasn’t really looking to move on. The headline on The Athletic‘s Patrick Mooney’s take said it with jarring simplicity: “David Ross’s downfall as Cubs manager? He isn’t Craig Counsell.”

Just like Rick Renteria wasn’t Joe Maddon. Just like, as things turned out, Maddon—on whom the Cubs “soured” almost too swiftly when they faded from World Series drought busters to also rans—wasn’t Ross, who’d been one of his more valuable role players for that almost surrealistic 2016 World Series run but received a front-office grooming for the bridge to follow after his retirement.

Maddon also proved not to be Counsell. It was Counsell’s Brewers who chased Maddon’s Cubs down in 2018, possibly putting Maddon onto a very warm seat the heat from which swelled a year later—when the Cubs fell from contention, had a chance to knock the Cardinals out of the races, but got swept by the Cardinals in Wrigley Field in their final home set of the year.

Hopefully, someone in the Cubs’ orbit has tipped Counsell to watch his back in case the Cubs’ administration decides, somewhere along the road, no matter what success that administration allows him to have, that he’s not whomever they’d like to romance and marry in due course.

Especially if, as they did with Ross, the Cubs announce he’s their guy in public only to romance a purported upgrade behind closed doors. Especially if they announce Counsell’s their guy despite a season being ended at the hands of Counsell’s now-former team. With the way the Cubs are administered, nothing’s impossible, including infamy.

This isn’t the single most suspicious fire-and-hire I’ve seen in a lifetime of baseball watching. Nothing compares to the shameful Yankee double switch of 1964. They canned an undermined Yogi Berra the day after the Cardinals beat his Yankees in the World Series. Then, they hired Johnny Keane, the skipper who’d just beaten him in that Series.

We learned only later that then-Yankee GM Ralph Houk had every intention of dumping Yogi after the season, no matter what, even backchanneling during the season to gauge Keane’s interest in the Yankee job, if the Cardinals were ready to let him go before their own pennant race comeback and triumph.

At least Ross didn’t get it the way the Mets once dumped an embattled Willie Randolph, either. Feeling fire under his hindquarters over the Mets’ blowing a seven-game National League East lead in September 2007, Randolph and his Mets opened 2008 34-35 and he was fired—after managing a doubleheader split in New York, then flying coast-to-coast to Anaheim to manage a win over the Angels, and getting fired . . . at 3:11 a.m.

As a manager, Ross was better than some, perhaps not as good as others. He earned his players’ trust even as the Cubs administration allowed a championship team to dissipate and a seeming team of also-rans to replace it. Yet he steered them deftly through the 2020 pan-damn-ic and into that surrealistic postseason. And his Cubs played hard in 2022, especially after the All-Star break, and despite the front office fire-selling at that year’s trade deadline.

In 2023, a Cubs team not supposed to compete competed. They pulled themselves to .500 by 27 July, then to 78-67 on 11 September. But from there they collapsed to going 5-12 to finish the season. They’d ended August taking two of three from Counsell’s Brewers but ended the season losing two of three to them.

Counsell’s NL Central-winning Brewers returned to first in the NL Central to stay on 3 August and probably secured it with a nine-game winning streak during that month’s second half, though going 8-4 to finish the regular season didn’t hurt. Then they got swept right out of the wild card series by the eventual NL pennant-winning Diamondbacks.

Except for pan-damn-ically short 2020, Counsell had only one losing season on the Brewers’ bridge. They reached nine postseasons and one National League Championship Series under his command. And Counsell earned respect for managing those runs despite the Brewers not exactly being or behaving like more than a small-market team.

When his contract with the Brewers expired, many were the speculative stories sending Counsell to a very different Mets organisation, under still-new ownership and now administered by the man who hired him in Milwaukee in the first place, David Stearns. Counsell built a reputation as a communicative players’ manager in tune with the game’s analytic side and in synch with the human side.

David Ross

So much for being “their guy” . . .

I saw some speculation that Counsell leveraged the apparent Mets interest in him to carve a large contract out of whomever might win his favour at all. But I also saw smarter observations that the Wisconsin-reared and rooted Counsell—the winningest manager in Brewers history—didn’t want to stray far from home in any job change.

He got what he wanted and more, the Cubs signing him for five years and $40 million to steer their Ricketty ship. That alone may do wonders on future markets for steadily successful managers who are usually expected to work for comparative peanuts and be bosses to players who could buy and sell them for the equivalent of a year’s worth of sales taxes.

The Cubs may not fall into big bidding wars for this winter’s free agency class, but they’re expected to be active enough to fortify a team that looked like a rising team often enough in 2023. Cub fans know only too well how swiftly expectations can turn, of course, but let’s leave it be for now.

I would repeat my earlier counsel to Counsell: watch your back—and not just from Brewers crowds ready to hammer you the first time you lead the Cubs to Milwaukee for a series. The next rising managerial star might turn Cub eyes toward him at the first sign of availability, too. And it may not matter whether or not you continue building a resume that might include managing the Cubs to another World Series title, either.

It took Ross—a World Series hero as a role player on the 2016 Cubs, who hit his final major league home run during that staggering Game Seven—several days to speak out about his execution. Telling Talahassee Democrat writer Jim Henry that anger is poison to him, Ross preferred gratitude:

There was a lot of people who worked really hard alongside me. … I am really thankful for the four years I got, coming from zero coaching experience to getting the chance to manage such a great organization that has impacted my life in a great way. There’s great people there. I really don’t have a whole lot negative to say, to be honest.

I get mad from time to time but I have a lot to be thankful for.

Few men and women pick up and dust off from their unexpected purgings with that kind of grace. The Cubs should consider themselves fortunate that Grandpa Rossy didn’t elect to stay away from future team commemorations as long as the incumbent ownership and administration is in place. As with the case of a certain Yankee legend, nobody might blame him if he did.

Grand opening of the 40/70 Club

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Ronald Acuña, Jr.

Ronald Acuña, Jr. channeled his inner Rickey Henderson after stealing the base that opened the 40/70 club Wednesday night. Some social media scolds plus a Cub broadcaster or two were not amused.

When A. Bartlett Giamatti died unexpectedly in 1989, eight days after pronouncing Pete Rose persona non grata from baseball, the New York Times columnist George Vecsey observed that investigating the Rose case kept the commissioner—a lifelong baseball fan—from sitting in the stands too often.

But Giamatti was there when Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan nailed career strikeout five thousand, Vecsey remembered in his sweet, sad elegy, “ticking off least one Oakland player who thought he detected Giamatti rooting for Ryan.”

Giamatti knew that baseball is about rooting, about caring. Let us envision him on the edge of his seat, a smile softening his gray beard and somber eyes, his fists itching to pump the air as Ryan blew his heater past Rickey Henderson.

The milestone strikeout happened 22 August 1989, in the top of the fifth, during a stretch drive game in Arlington. The Express was already the first man to strike four thousand batters out in his career, never mind even thinking of five thousand, before he opened the inning dispatching the Man of Steal after a full count.

Surely Giamatti appreciated that he was seeing two sides of baseball history in that moment, one Hall of Famer-to-be going where no pitcher had ever gone before, and doing it at the expense of another Hall of Famer-to-be while he was at it. In a pennant race, yet.

Henderson’s Athletics beat Ryan’s Rangers, 2-0, that day, keeping the Rangers ten back in the American League West while keeping a two-game lead over the Angels. But the ovation in Arlington Stadium for Ryan’s milestone drowned out the Rangers’ broadcasters on television and the stadium’s P.A. announcer.

There may have been an A’s player ticked to think Giamatti was rooting for Ryan to land the milestone, but I don’t recall anyone else complaining about the broken flow of the game while Rangers fans cheered Ryan loudly enough to be heard across the Rio Grande.

There was also no social media as we know it today to allow such complaints then. Thus did Ronald Acuña, Jr. break a precedent Wednesday night in his home ballpark in Atlanta and incur some social media heat the following day over the on-the-spot celebration breaking the flow of the Braves’ contest against the Cubs.

Just as Ryan was the first man to strike five thousand batters out, Acuña became the first Showman to hit forty home runs or more in a season and steal seventy bases in the same season. The founding father of the 40/70 club, who’d also founded the 40/50 and 40/60 clubs.

With Ozzie Albies at the plate for the Braves, after Acuña opened the bottom of the tenth with a base hit to send free inning-opening second base cookie Kevin Pillar home with the re-tying fifth Braves run. Acuña took off on Daniel Palencia’s first pitch and dove into second under catcher Yan Gomes’s throw.

Acuña raised his arms acknowledging the Truist Park crowd going berserk in celebration. Then, Acuña wrested the base out of the dirt and hoisted it above his head. Just the way Henderson did in his 1991 moment when he passed fellow Hall of Famer Lou Brock, stealing third as baseball’s all-time theft champion.

“That’s about as good as it gets,” said Braves manager Brian Snitker, ejected from the game in the second when he argued that the Cubs’ Jeimer Candelario fouled a pitch that was ruled a checked swing. (Television replays showed Snitker had the blown call right.) “I thought it was great when he picked up the bag. The fans had to love that. We all did because it was a special moment.”

Maybe the fact that Acuña opened the 40/70 club in the bottom of an extra inning, instead of midway through a game, as Ryan and Henderson had done previously, had an impact on the social media scolds wanting to spank the Braves’ center fielder for taking time to bask in smashing another precedent. (He’s already gone where no leadoff man has gone before, hitting 41 home runs in the number one lineup slot, eight of which were hit when he was the first batter of a game, and eighteen of which were hit when he opened an inning.)

But the Braves, already the NL East champions, had something significant to play for as well, the top seed in the coming postseason, giving them home field advantage through the entire National League Championship Series if they make it there. Once the theft celebration ended, Albies rapped the next pitch down the right field line to send Acuña home with the winning Braves run.

Had Acuña not stolen second in the first place, he wouldn’t have been likely to get past third since the ball was hit sharply enough and fielded swiftly enough.

“It’s crazy what he’s done,” said Albies post-game. “I told myself I need to come through right here. Whatever it takes. I’m happy I came through in that spot and we won that game.”

“It’s one of those numbers that wasn’t impossible but seemed impossible,” said Acuña, referencing that a player could hit forty bombs or steal seventy bases but good luck finding the one man who could do both. Until Wednesday night.

Maybe some of the scolds were Cub fans anxious that the game proceed apace, knowing the Cubs hung by the thinnest thread in the NL wild card race. It would be neither impossible nor incomprehensible. Cubs broadcasters Boog Sciambi and Jim Deshaies were unamused at both Acuña removing the base and the Truist Park scoreboard people showing a quick montage of Acuña’s run to the milestone. Which, in turn, incurred some social media heat sent Sciambi’s way.

Somehow, one couldn’t shake the thought that, if it was a Cub swiping a base in Wrigley Field to establish a new club, that Cub would have given in and done precisely as Acuña did to celebrate the milestone. And no Cub broadcaster would have dared to scold him for breaking the game flow, regardless of inning.

Baseball is indeed about rooting and caring. That includes individual milestones regardless of the hour, day, week, or month. From wherever he happened to be in the Elysian Fields, rest assured A. Bartlett Giamatti gave in and pumped his fist the moment Acuña arrived safe at second. Good for him. Good for baseball.