Tag Archives: Don Denkinger

Don Denkinger, RIP: Survival

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Don Denkinger

Don Denkinger, dusting home plate clean during a game. He owned his grave 1985 World Series mistake—you know, the one that really didn’t cost the Cardinals a Series championship.

Now-retired umpire Ted Barrett blew a call the first time he worked on a crew with Don Denkinger, in July 1995. Brewers pitcher Scott Karl threw to first looking to bag Mariners outfielder Rich Amaral. Amaral eluded the tag as he scrambled back to first and made it safely, except that Barrett called him out.

Reviewing video after the game, Barrett saw clearly enough he’d blown the call and felt as low as a man could feel. As he walked out of the Kingdome to his car, Denkinger caught up to him and asked what was wrong. Barrett said he felt terrible for having blown the call.

“[H]e looks at me with a grin,” said Barrett to ESPN about Denkinger, who died at 86 Friday, “and says, ‘Try (messing) one up in the World Series.’ I was like, whoa, respect this guy.”

Exactly. Denkinger’s moment of infamy in Game Six of the 1985 World Series made him public enemy number one in St. Louis and elsewhere. (In Kansas City, of course, Denkinger might have been seen as a blessing from the gods.) But once he got past the tumult, the screaming, the humiliation, and the worst of the foulness that followed him, he proved a man who not only learned from his worst mistake but knew how to get behind the proper answer for future such mistakes.

With the Cardinals up 1-0 going to the top of the ninth, calling Royals leadoff pinch hitter Jorge Orta safe on a slow bouncer off first base was a horror known at once to everyone in Kauffmann Stadium and viewing on ABC television. “Nobody wants to have the call that I did in the World Series,” Denkinger told a reporter nine years ago. “But I did. And now it’s part of history.”

Cardinals first baseman Jack Clark fielded the ball cleanly and tossed to covering relief pitcher Todd Worrell, who caught the toss with his foot on the pad well ahead of Orta. The Cardinals and their Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog fumed. The call stood, alas. Then a base hit, a bunt, a passed ball, an intentional walk, and a bloop two-run single later, the Royals stood having tied the Series.

Thanks to the normal Series umpire rotating, Denkinger was due to call balls and strikes for Game Seven. The Cardinals seemed more concerned with having been robbed the night before than playing the here and now, and their wheels came off early enough and often enough.

The fury got filthy enough that a regional radio host gave out Denkinger’s home address on the air. More than a few nasty death threats against the ump and his family prompted the FBI itself to investigate. Some way, some how, Denkinger managed to pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over again to finish a career that shook out as far more distinguished than extinguished.

When Herzog himself started banging the drum none too slowly on behalf of bringing replay review at least to the postseason, Denkinger became an easy ally. Until the day baseball finally decided getting it right was imperative, especially when championship advance or finality was on the line, Denkinger was one of replay’s staunchest supporters.

“I’m not tired of talking about it,” he said in the aforementioned interview. “I mean, it happened. I just know that if the same thing happened now, they’d get it right on replay and it’d be over with.”

This wasn’t a C.B. Bucknor or a Laz Diaz or an Angel Hernandez or a Joe West type who was liable to harrumph “Tough you-know-whatties” whenever someone called him on a horrifically bad call. This was an earnest fellow who’d made the biggest mistake of his career and refused to let it define him or soil him. He blew it. He knew it. He owned it. He went back to finish an almost entirely honourable career.

He probably knew, too, that the Cardinals didn’t exactly have the Royals down to their final out; that they could still have found a way to get three outs before any Royal got anywhere near scoring; or, having failed to do that, come to Game Seven ready to play.

Instead, they saw Denkinger behind the plate and imploded while Royals righthander Bret Saberhagen manhandled them and the Royals manhandled Cardinal pitching for eleven unanswered runs. Anyone on earth, no matter how Game Six ended, would have been justified telling the Cardinals nobody trained artillery upon them and told them to fall flat on their own faces.

Even Denkinger. The closest he came was in the fifth inning, when Joaquin Andujar—normally a starter but now pressed into desperation relief—erupted over a close pitch and Herzog had to hustle out to keep Andujar from being run, while Cardinals third baseman Terry Pendleton and Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith kept Andujar from trying to tear Denkinger (who’d been a wrestler in high school) into strips.

“If you’d done your damn job last night, we wouldn’t be here!” thundered the White Rat.

“If your team were hitting better than .120 [in the Series],” Denkinger shot back, “we wouldn’t be here, either.” (The Cardinals finished that Series batting .185 as a team.)

Then he ran Herzog over an obscenity and Andujar a pitch or two later over another fury. The Cardinal implosion continued apace, and the upstart Royals finished what they started, an 11-0 Game Seven spanking to win their first of only two World Series championships.

Denkinger had good humour enough to accept Herzog’s own demonstration of good humour a couple of decades after the Hour of Infamy—mutual laughter when, at a dinner honouring the 1985 Cardinals, members of the team were presented spanking new Seiko wristwatches and Denkinger was presented a spanking new watch . . . in Braille.

How well did Denkinger survive otherwise?

When he ran into Dane Iorg the following spring, Iorg having been the Royal who blooped the Game Six-winning runs home, Denkinger joked, “You know, I just had the worst offseason of my life thanks to you.”

He survived well enough to work behind the plate for Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan’s sixth no-hitter, Hall of Famer Jack Morris’s ten-inning 1991 World Series shutout, and Kenny Rogers’s perfect game in 1994—making him one of seven arbiters to work the plate for two perfect games. (Denkinger also called the balls and strikes for Len Barker in 1981.)

Well enough to retire after the 1998 season because a balky knee was no longer tolerable for standing nine innings a day for six months a year. (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch headlined a story about his retirement thus: “Don Denkinger won’t miss any more calls at first base.” Put that headline writer into the Hall of Shame.)

“I’ll put on there whatever you want,” Denkinger told Sports Illustrated in 2015, when noting some autograph seekers asked him to sign “Oops” next to his name. “It doesn’t make any difference. Life’s too short to do that to yourself, let this dictate your life. I just took the other avenue. Life goes on. Enjoy it.”

“If anything,” his daughter, Denise, told the magazine, “it’s made me even more proud that he’s my dad. He didn’t hide from it. He didn’t say it was someone else’s fault. He took ownership of it.” Said his wife, Gayle, “He made one mistake, but that didn’t define him. Aren’t we all entitled to a second chance?”

The jerk contingencies among sports fans that proclaim human error to be moral degeneracy worthy of the death of ten thousand cuts (and threats) won’t like it, but the answer is yes. Especially if you own your mistake at once and continue by showing you learned everything you needed to learn from it and perform accordingly.

Come to think of it, the jerk contingency among umpires who think fans pay their hard-earned money to come to the ballpark to see them wield power could do to learn a lesson or three from Denkinger. Surely the Lord is reminding him of that, too, over a couple of tall ones in the Elysian Fields. May he get to call a perfect game or three there during his hard-earned eternal peace.

Death threats be not proud, continued

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Don Denkinger

MLB umpire Don Denkinger needed FBI protection after threats on his life over his 1985 World Series mishap. In the social media era, it wouldn’t take just radio people blasting his address and phone number around the world for further such threats.

What does it tell you, when almost the first thing on the mind of a professional athlete who loses a contest isn’t what a tough loss it was but how many death wishes or death threats are liable to show up in his or her direction on social media? It ought to tell you how brain damaged too many sports fans are.

Shelby Rogers got waxed in straight sets by Britain’s Emma Raducanu in round four of tennis’s U.S. Open Monday afternoon. The 28-year-old told a press conference after the match she expected “nine million” social media death threats afterward. That’d teach her to draw the spotlight after she flattened number one-ranked Ashleigh Barry in the third round.

“Obviously we appreciate the spotlight in those moments,” Rogers told the conference, “but then you have [losing to Raducanu] today and I’m going to have nine million death threats and whatnot. It’s very much polarizing, one extreme to the other very quickly.”

She wasn’t alone. Former Open winner Sloane Stephens lost this time, Angelique Kerber beating her in three sets after she took the first set. Stephens says her Instagram account was flooded with a few thousand abusive messages some of which went from mere swearing and racial insults (she is black) to downright threats of death and sexual abuse.

“This isn’t talked about enough,” Stephens posted, “but it really freaking sucks.”

It really freaking should be talked about more than enough. I’ve done it. I don’t want to minimise what Rogers and Stephens now deal with, but baseball and other sports people have put up with that kind of vile nonsense for decades. Just not so instantly as today.

Long before there was such a thing as social media, hapless umpire Don Denkinger found himself on the wrong end of a harassment campaign after his blown call in the ninth inning of 1985 World Series Game Six helped cost the Cardinals a win they should have been two, not three outs from consummating.

Back then, about the worst that could happen beyond snarky newspaper columns was a radio disc jockey obtaining and airing your home address and telephone number. Two St. Louis disc jockeys did just that to Denkinger. He received death threats by mail for a couple of years to follow and, at one point, needed MLB to ask the FBI for help.

The fact that the Cardinals still had three defensive outs to play to nail that Series, or still had a seventh game to play if they lost Game Six, escaped the slime contingent. Denkinger being rotated to calling balls and strikes for Game Seven didn’t mean the Cardinals should implode in that game escaped them, too.

At least Denkinger waited until after that Series for the full brunt of his mishap to happen. Phillies reliever Mitch Williams had no such fortune in the 1993 Series. Thanks to a few death threats from enough indignant Phillies fans, the hyperactive lefthander spent a sleepless night or two with a shotgun in his lap after blowing a Series save . . . in Game Four.

Williams went on to throw the pitch Joe Carter belted to win that Series in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six, of course. His stand-up post-game performance may have saved his life otherwise. But he shouldn’t have had to spend a night cradling his weapon instead of his wife.

I’ve said it until I’m blue in the keyboard. Don’t ask what would have happened if Denkinger, Williams, and members of the long, sad roll of sports “goats”—the Bill Buckners, Ralph Brancas, Gary Andersons, Roberto Baggios, Wrong-Way Marshalls, Fred Merkles, and Andres Escobars—had had their moments of horror in the social media era.

Horror, or death: Colombia’s goalkeeper Escobars inadvertently put the ball into his own net in soccer’s 1994 World Cup tournament. That night, he was out with friends when a car pulled up, an argument broke out, and he was shot to death.

Denkinger at least had FBI help until the idiocy passed. What defense or protection do you have against social media, even if you leave it? Rogers says she doesn’t like social media but she’s forced to make a presence there because of her sport’s marketing. Maybe her sport and all sports need to re-think that a little.

Mets relief pitcher Edwin Diaz walked himself into trouble and a Mets loss in Washington Monday. All that did was throttle the Mets’ pennant race recovery a little. It didn’t blow up the subway during rush hour.

Diaz is known as much for his mound struggles as his mound triumphs. Maybe that protects him from death threats. Or maybe we don’t know that he’s received them, or how many he’s received. The Mets’ administration seems to care more about their players replying to the boo birds than whether the boo birds might graduate to threatening their players’ lives.

Remember Indians reliever Nick Wittgren—battered for five runs in the ninth, his wife and family subject to social media death threats. Wittgren said it was said that such is now the pro sports norm—and that 90 percent of players he knows personally have received them. If you need me to tell you what’s wrong with that picture, you have problems I’m not qualified to solve.

Social media contends with the shouting-“fire”-in-the-movie-house dilemna. It thrives on free speech, but it also has to draw certain lines that, often as not, refuse to be drawn organically. The sports goat business stopped being funny a long time ago. The sports death threat business needs to be put out of business even faster, if possible.

The law says you can’t threaten the lives of the president of the United States or any public official. The law also says you can’t send threatening snail or e-mail to someone. A professional gambler faces five years in federal prison for Instagram threats he sent the lives of players in a 2019 game the Rays lost to the White Sox in extra innings.

It shouldn’t stop there. Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms should think seriously about not just banning such scum contingent from their platforms but arranging such charges against as many of them as possible regardless of whether or not they have money on the table.

Games are not life and death. The fate of what’s left of the free world doesn’t hang in their balance. Mortal men and women in an entertainment try their best and fail. It doesn’t make them cowards, chokers, or moral degenerates when someone on the other side is just that hair’s breadth better in the biggest of the big moments.

Yet people are prepared to perform massacres upon the defeated in sports while letting far more grave misbehaviour die on the proverbial vine. This is above and beyond mere fan passions. It shouldn’t be enabled.

You wish for openers that people were at least as outraged over New York’s mishandlings of the pan-damn-ic (it took a sexual harassment scandal to do what that malfeasance didn’t and rid the statehouse of Andrew Cuomo) as they might be over Shelby Rogers losing a shot at winning the U.S. Open, or the Mets losing a shot at the postseason.

Suffer Merkle’s children no more

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2019-05-28 FredMerkle

Fred Merkle, the patron saint of unwarranted baseball goats.

“Sports, especially pro sports,” Thomas Boswell wrote in 1989, “is not a morality play, much as it suits our national appetite to act as if it were. Even some athletes, perhaps including [Donnie] Moore, seem to crush themselves under a burden of self-imposed guilt in areas of life where no cause for guilt exists.”

Moore, the former Angels relief pitcher, surrendered a shocking home run to Dave Henderson of the Red Sox when the Angels were a strike away from nailing the 1986 American League pennant. Three seasons later, he shocked baseball and the world by shooting his wife before turning the gun on himself and killing himself.

A haunted man as it was before the pitch, Moore apparently couldn’t bear the weight of that pitch. It wasn’t a mistake pitch, either. He threw Henderson a forkball that snapped down and away and was as shocked as anyone else in old Anaheim Stadium when Henderson sent it over the left field fence. The game went to extra innings and the Angels lost the game and, two games later, the pennant.

To the Red Sox. Who suffered even worse miseries when they were a strike away from winning that World Series. Their bullpen melted down in the bottom of the tenth against those tenacious Mets, right down to allowing the tying run home on a wild pitch that should have been ruled a passed ball.

Then Mets outfielder Mookie Wilson shot a ground ball that skipped impossibly between the feet of stout but ailing Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner, allowing the winning run home to Buckner’s and his team’s horror. A Red Sox Nation that already suffered from too many decades of surrealistic calamity on the threshold of triumph could bear no more.

Buckner, who died on Memorial Day, turned out to be made of stronger stuff than Donnie Moore, and Buckner endured far worse than Moore did. And just as Moore’s Angels had two more chances to win that American League Championship Series but failed, Buckner’s Red Sox had a Game Seven yet to play in that World Series—and were defeated.

Boswell was hardly the only one to say after Moore’s suicide that the goat business wasn’t funny anymore. And it didn’t stop those inclined to look for goats wherever they could be found, and try making their lives a nightmare forever after.

A well-syndicated Washington Post sports columnist for eons now, author of several best-selling anthologies of his work especially about baseball, Boswell was probably roundly ignored when he pleaded to put the goat business out of business by addressing the “goats” with forgiveness they shouldn’t have had to beg in the first place:

Many of us wish that, just once, we could be in your shoes and have a chance to fail so grandly. Although, if we really had to live the experience and its aftermath, which sometimes lasts a lifetime, maybe we would not. 

Boswell opened the essay with a small roll of “goats,” but—perhaps unwittingly—he omitted their equally unwitting progenitor. Baseball’s goats have long since been Fred Merkle’s children.

That hapless New York Giants rookie was blamed for costing his team a pennant, after he ran toward the clubhouse before touching second after a key game-winning run scored down the stretch of that contentious pennant race. When Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers called for the ball, got it, and touched second. When Merkle was thus ruled out, and the run was ruled null, forcing a single-game playoff if the Giants and the Cubs tied for the pennant, which they ultimately did.

What everyone denouncing Merkle as a bonehead from the moment the game ended didn’t know and wouldn’t have cared about was Evers—whose Cubs were burned on a similar play earlier in the season, a play on which the out then was almost never called—taking the ball first taken by a fan, who threw it to Cubs pitcher Rube Kroh, who threw it to Evers. A ball touched by a fan is supposed to be ruled dead.

Not even Merkle’s own manager John McGraw absolving him mattered to those who saw only what they wanted to see. Never let the facts get in the way of outraged fans and outraged writers looking for one man to blame for blowing a game the team absolutely, without question, should have won. Including, as McGraw himself pointed out, there may have been at least twelve other losses the Giants could and should have won that could and would have made the difference.

Never tell people like that that two laws are inviolable: No game can be won by both sides, and Berra’s Law (It ain’t over until it’s over) has yet to be ruled inoperative or unconstitutional.

Merkle’s children were made to suffer under the ridiculous belief Boswell outlined, that losing a game or making a mistake in a game isn’t just a question of a mistake or a defeat but, rather, a question of sin. “The unspoken assumption,” Boswell wrote, “is that those who lose must do so because of some moral flaw.”

Babe Ruth wasn’t exactly the epitome of morality off the field, but in Game Seven of the 1926 World Series—with Bob Meusel at the plate, Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig on deck, and two out in the ninth—Ruth bolted for second. Everyone on earth knew a one-armed man could throw him out stealing. Amoral? Not a chance. Self-involved? Surely. But . . . he was The Babe.

Hall of Fame catcher Ernie Lombardi didn’t have Ruth’s kind of cred in Game Four of the 1939 World Series. The gentle giant was clearly morally flawed when Yankee outfielder Charlie (King Kong) Keller blasted into him at the plate, knocking him out cold, as Keller and Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio behind him scored the game and Series-winning runs in the tenth.

It couldn’t possibly have been Keller being built like a tank and nailing the otherwise likewise-built Lombardi’s cupless groin in the crash—to finish a World Series sweep.  “Lombardi,” Bill James wrote in The New Historical Baseball Abstract,” was now the Bill Buckner of the 1930s, even more innocent than Buckner, and Buckner has plenty of people who should be holding up their hands to share his disgrace.”

So should have had Johnny Pesky, the Red Sox shortstop who held the ball while Enos Slaughter made his fabled mad dash in Game Seven of the 1946 World Series. The fact that Pesky had to take a too-high throw in from late-game center field insertion Leon Culberson before turning to try throwing home proved entirely beside the point, to those who insisted that Pesky was obviously the devil’s spawn.

Too many Brooklyn fans thought Ralph Branca was on the wrong side of morality when he surrendered the maybe-it-is-/maybe-it-isn’t tainted Shot Heard Round the World ending the 1951 National League pennant playoff. Branca’s own priest thought otherwise and got to him fast enough.

The priest told Branca God chose him because He knew he’d be strong enough to bear the burden. Branca proved stronger than those who wanted him drawn, quartered, and hung in the public square.

Was it moral lacking that caught 1964 Phillies pitcher Art Mahaffey by as much surprise as it caught anyone else in late September, in Connie Mack Stadium, when Red rookie Chico Ruiz stole home for the game’s only run—starting the infamous Phillie Phlop?

Was Willie Davis prosecutable for terpitude when he lost a pair of fly balls in a too bright sun, and committed a third error off one of them, in Game Two of the 1966 World Series? (Which just so happened to be Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax’s final major league game as things turned out.) Did sunblindness mean its victim required an exorcism?

When B.F. Dent hit the three-run homer over the Green Monster to overthrow a Red Sox lead for what turned out keeps in the 1978 American League East playoff game, did it expose Red Sox pitcher Mike Torrez as a moral idiot? (Come to think of it, was Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski morally suspect when, with two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth, he popped out to end the game?)

I guess Tom Niedenfeuer was morally suspect when his manager Tommy Lasorda, that devilish apostate, decided it was safe for him to pitch to Jack Clark with two on, first base open and the Dodgers one little out from forcing a seventh 1985 National League Championship Series game. Guess that made Jack the Ripper the epitome of morality when he hit a home run that may have traveled to Pasadena, and those Dodgers couldn’t score a lick in the bottom of the ninth.

Maybe Don Denkinger was really degenerate when—in the bottom of the ninth, with Clark’s Cardinals themselves three outs from a World Series championship—he mistakenly called Jorge Orta leading off safe at first when every camera angle showed him out by a step and a half.

Never mind that the Cardinals still had the chance to keep the Royals from overthrowing their lead. And, that nobody put a gun to their heads and told them to implode entirely in Game Seven, with or without Denkinger himself rotated behind the plate. In St. Louis and elsewhere, Denkinger became Beelzebub incarnate.

Time healed a few of Merkle’s children, of course. Sometimes it was a short volume of time; other times, it took a generation or two. Sometimes one or two of Merkle’s children shook it off almost immediately.

Maybe it was easy for Babe Ruth to go on with his Hall of Fame career because, well, he was The Babe, the Big Fella, and could get away with blunders that harry mere mortals to the rack of their regrets. Maybe it was easy for Tommy Lasorda to shake off one mistake because he’d already won three pennants and a World Series.

Maybe Tim Wakefield being to four previous postseasons built up a survival mechanism to work after he saw his first pitch to Aaron Boone in Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series sail into the left field seats with the pennant attached.

From whence the perennially star-crossed, snake-bitten Red Sox picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, started all over again in 2004, and delivered four straight wins against their eternal tormentors from the south Bronx after being down to the final three outs of what would have been a sweep . . . and swept the Cardinals—Enos Slaughter’s descendants—in the World Series.

Every so often those who get ruined as spectacularly as the ’03 Red Sox get a chance at immediate redemption and pounce on it. But maybe we don’t really know what goes through the minds of human men playing human games who come up short in the worst possible moments of such games.

Sometimes they heal in unexpected ways. Branca and Bobby Thomson forged a sweet friendship in the years that followed, soiled only by the revelation and final proof that the 1951 Giants made their staggering pennant comeback the (then) high-tech cheating way. Buckner and Wilson forged a comparable friendship in the years following their rendezvous with baseball’s often cruel destiny.

So have Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams and Joe Carter. Already having a blown save in Game Four of the 1993 World Series, Williams pitched into infamy in the bottom of the ninth, Game Six, when Carter hit a Series-ending three-run homer that turned what was still called the SkyDome into bedlam.

Known now to have taken the ball after a sleepless night following death threats, Williams never flinched post-game, answering even the most ridiculous questions without once trying to pass responsibility on. In the worst defeat in the Phillies’ own tortured history to that point, Williams proved a better man than his critics including a teammate or two who wanted him run out of town. He also accepted a near-immediate reaching-out from Carter himself.

“Really, since the home run, we’ve been tied at the hip,” Carter once told the Toronto Star, when he and Williams hooked up for an event to help Canadian at-risk children. “Over the years I’ve seen him at MLB Network, but I’ve always known what type of guy Mitch is. He’s a great guy and the great thing about baseball is not just the sport itself, but the people you meet. Lives are going to be crossed, paths are going to be crossed a lot. It just so happens we’re kind of intertwined now and I thought it would be a great gesture to bring him back here because he is a fun guy to have around . . . he really is.”

What pounds the minds of fans who can’t resist smoking out goats when their heroes lose, or doing their level best to make life miserable for those poor souls? Ask cautiously. You might be afraid of the answers.

“The right to a raspberry comes with the price of a ticket,” Boswell wrote, “and the right to an opinion goes with the First Amendment. Still, before we boo or use words like ‘choke’ and ‘goat,’ perhaps we should think sometimes of Donnie Moore.” Don’t be afraid to say it’s well past time to stop letting single failures define entire careers. Game failure isn’t crime.

Joe and Jane Fan would both give their left ventricles to have the chance those players had in those moments. And they’d be lying through their teeth if they say they’d have done no questions asked what Merkle’s children couldn’t do in those moments.

Suffer Merkle’s children no more.