Tag Archives: Henry Aaron

WS Game Three: No history, just a Braves win

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Ian Anderson

Ian Anderson—If you can’t do both, what’s your real choice . . . trying to make history, or trying to take a World Series advantage?

Let’s see. Yes, on a cool, mostly misty, on-and-off light rainy night in Truist Park, Ian Anderson took a no-hit bid through five innings of World Series Game Five.

He faced eighteen batters and threw eleven first pitch strikes. He also threw about as many balls as strikes; 39 strikes out of 76 pitches, meaning one more strike than ball Saturday night. While he was at it, he and his batters wrestled to seven full counts.

You still want to yell at Braves manager Brian Snitker for hooking Anderson after a measly five innings? You might actually have ended up yelling at Snitker for leaving Anderson in an inning too long if he waited until Anderson took that kind of balance into the sixth.

You might be flooding social media with demands for Snitker’s summary execution on the spot, instead of celebrating the Braves taking a 2-1 Series lead with a 2-0 combined two-hit shutout during which four innings separated the Braves’ only runs.

You might forget how much you were touched by that sweet pre-game ceremony doing the late Hall of Famer Henry Aaron honour, especially knowing that Astros manager Dusty Baker was mentored and befriended by Aaron when he first arose as a Braves outfielder over four cups of coffee before slotting in full in 1972.

You might forget what sad fun it was to hear the Truist Park audience serenading Astros second baseman Jose Altuve and third baseman Alex Bregman with chants of “cheater! cheater!” when they batted in the top of the first.

Fun because at least the crowd saved it strictly for two of the five remaining Astrogate team members. Sad because nobody’s really processed yet what Andy Martino isolated in Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing: Altuve actually spurned the illegally-stolen signs and even demanded whomever transmitted them with the trash can bangs to knock it the hell off when he was batting.

You might forget Anderson and Astros starter Luis Garcia having a fine pitching duel between them, until Braves third baseman Austin Riley—with Eddie Rosario (one-out walk) and Freddie Freeman (base hit lined over unoccupied shortstop defying a defensive overshift) aboard—ripped one inside the third base line, past a diving Bregman, and down the line further for an RBI double in the bottom of the third.

You might forget the Truist Park organist having a little cheerful troll when Garcia batted with one out in the top of the third . . . giving him “Rock-a-Bye Baby” for walkup music—a neat little salute to Garcia’s baby-rocking arms motion before he goes into that little back-and-forth salsa step to deliver to the plate. Garcia’s tiny little grin over the serenade? Priceless.

You might forget that the would-be no-no got broken up in the top of the eighth, with Tyler Matzek on the bump for the Braves, when Rosario scampering in from deep left field positioning and Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson scampering out managed to let pinch hitter Aledmys Diaz’s somewhat shallow pop fly hit the wet grass with a thunk! Most likely, because Swanson didn’t want to plow Rosario even if either one could have caught the ball clean, and Rosario didn’t want to plow Swanson thinking the shortstop couldn’t hear him call for it. Oops.

You might forget Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud with one out in the bottom of the eighth, turning on Astro reliever Kendall Graveman’s unsinking sinker and sinking it over the center field fence.

You might also forget the Astros living up exactly to one of now-retired Thomas Boswell’s best arguments on behalf of the universal designated hitter, with the Braves at the plate with two out in the bottom of the second, and the DH still unavailable to either side in the National League ballpark.

D’Arnaud smashed Garcia’s full-count fastball high off the right field wall for a double. With Anderson on deck, the Astros handed Swanson an intentional walk and—what do you know—struck Anderson out to end the inning. Now, what was that Boswell wrote in February 2019?

It’s fun to see Max Scherzer slap a single to right field and run it out as if he thinks he’s Ty Cobb. But I’ll sacrifice that pleasure to get rid of the thousands of rallies I’ve seen killed when an inning ends with one pitcher working around a competent No. 8 hitter so he can then strike out the other pitcher. When you get in a jam in the AL, you must pitch your way out of it, not ‘pitch around’ your way out of it.

Travis d'Arnaud

Travis d’Arnaud taking Astros reliever Kendall Graveman over the center field fence in the eighth Friday night.

Swanson’s not exactly tearing it up at the plate in the Series; his .417 Series on-base percentage is the product of three walks to go with his two hits in twelve plate appearances. Would someone care to explain why the Astros pitched around a comparative spaghetti bat with four strikeouts in the Series to get to that dangerous, .054-hitting pitcher looming in the on-deck circle?

You want to yell at either Game Three manager, you might want to bark at Baker. Garcia probably had a great shot at getting rid of Swanson and assuring himself of an easy inning-opening out if Anderson and his pool-noodle bat were due to lead off the bottom of the third.

See the fun you’d have forgotten about if you’d decided putting Snitker on trial for hooking Anderson after five no-hit innings that rank as some of the sloppiest no-hit innings you might ever have seen? That’s assuming you were actually watching the game and paying close attention to the pitches instead of thinking “no-hitter!” without taking your eye and mind deep.

“He walked down and said, ‘That’s it. Heck of a job’,” Anderson said postgame about his removal. “You feel a little bit of, I had more to give, but it’s something that you understand and move forward . . . I knew he wasn’t going to budge. We’re very fortunate to have him, and the way he treats us is phenomenal. He’ll shake your hand after every outing, good or bad, and that goes a long way.”

It’s not as though Snitker made the move purely driven by those pesky (to you) analytics, either. “He was throwing a lot of pitches in the top half of that lineup,” the manager said post-game. “I thought the fourth inning he really had to work hard to get through that. He had a really good fifth inning. And then I told him because he was like, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ But I was just like, ‘Ian, I’m going with my gut right here. Just my eyes, my gut’.”

Oho, but what about those upcoming bullpen games necessitated by the broken leg taking Charlie Morton down when he might have been available to start Game Four or Five without it?

“I just thought at that point in time, in a game of this magnitude and all, that [Anderson] had done his job,” Snitker said. “And we had a bullpen that all the guys we use had two days off, and they were only going to pitch an inning apiece, and that made them available for the next two games after if it went south.”

Four innings of shutout, three-strikeout, no-walk, two-hit relief by Matzek, AJ Minter and Luke Jackson preceding him, and Will Smith following with a three-lineout ninth shaking Bregman’s leadoff single to one side, kept things from going south.

So now Snitker has to crank the mental gears up a little further until he can have Max Fried back for Game Five? He’s probably had to crank them up further for more ticklish situations than this. Like his outfielder Joc Pederson, Snitker prefers to cast pearls before swine—or anyplace else he can think to cast them.

Go ahead. Rant your heads off about hooking Anderson with a freaking no-hitter going after (despite) five sloppy innings’ work. We’d all have loved to see it continue. We’d all have loved to see the Braves finish the combined no-no. Nobody would reject a clean shot at further history made—it would have been the third no-no in postseason history and the first such combined no-no at once.

Anderson made his history as it was. He was the first rook to throw five no-hit World Series innings in 99 years. He can dine out on that for the rest of his life.

But isn’t a Series advantage the better option?

Diminishing the one whose record you break?

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If Joe DiMaggio didn’t think Cal Ripken, Jr. diminished Lou Gehrig, neither should anyone else. Unfortunately . . .

You become accustomed to absurdity when loving, following and writing about a game. You see and hear it from those who love and follow it, those who play it, those who manage or administer it, and those who write about it. But then comes a remark that should win the ultimate Howitzer Prize for Extinguished Commentary.

I saw it in the context of late-spring observations on the health of certain Yankees, aboard a Facebook baseball group to which I belong, mindful that for almost three years The New England Journal of Medicine could be the Yankee yearbook. I saw concurrent references to Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripken, Jr., Hall of Famers both, one setting the consecutive games played streak the other broke.

Both Gehrig and Ripken played through assorted injuries to reach their milestones, perhaps foolishly. Gehrig ended his streak only under orders from the insidious disease that would kill him shy of two years after removing himself from the Yankee lineup. Ripken was able to play 501 consecutive games more following the night he passed Gehrig and 870 more games total before retiring with 3,001 major league games played.

Aboard that group, I couldn’t resist noting Gehrig’s plaque in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park still calls him “a great ball player whose amazing record of 2,130 consecutive games should stand for all time.” Just as it did when it was first erected in the old Yankee Stadium on the Fourth of July in 1941.

The night Ripken said “not quite,” one of Gehrig’s Yankee teammates was in Camden Yards to see it happen. “Well,” said Joe DiMaggio to Ripken and the crowd after the game ended, “that goes to prove even the greatest records are made to be broken. And . . . wherever my former teammate Lou Gehrig is today, I’m sure he’s tipping his cap to you, Cal Ripken.”

Another group member thought not. “I still wish Cal would have stopped at 2130,” he wrote. “He would have been even more of a media darling if he said something along the lines of the memory of the man and the streak is too great to be broken therefore I am content to tie it and to hopefully be mentioned in the same breath as he in future conversation.”

Have I finally seen everything?

Well, I know better. But for abject absurdity if not sheer foolishness, that gets as close as possible. It only begins with Ripken having been a media target as much as a media darling the closer he got to meeting and passing Gehrig. For every one that marveled at his endurance, there was another who marveled that the Orioles put up with his “selfishness,” with putting his potential place in baseball history ahead of the team’s good.

My first response in the space of the group itself was to suggest such thinking as wishing Ripken stopped equal to Gehrig made it a wonder that any record would be broken. I remembered Henry Aaron saying, “I don’t want people to forget Babe Ruth, I just want them to remember Henry Aaron.”

I also wondered whether Ruth himself would have said, in 1919, “Gee, I think I’ll stop at 27 [home runs] because I don’t want to ruin Ned Williamson’s memory.” (Ruth’s 29 homers that year broke Williamson’s 1884 single-season record.) I didn’t dare add that I was pretty sure Pete Rose in 1985 didn’t think for a single minute, “Jeez, I can’t do this to Ty Cobb, can I?” before slashing his Tying and passing career base hits.

“Guess I should have described myself as a hopeless romantic instead of an idealist but i really do wish that was the way it went down,” said the group member in question who thinks and wishes Ripken had stopped at 2,130. “Everyone would have known Cal could have easily surpassed Gehrig and I can’t foresee anybody breaking or even coming close to 2130 again. Your point though is certainly well taken.”

What manner of “hopeless romantic” goes ballistic at the mere idea of anyone challenging Ruth’s former single-season home run record in 1961? Which one has kittens over the likelihood of plainspoken, charisma-challenged Roger Maris and not glib, charisma-loaded Mickey Mantle breaking it?

Idealists don’t send aspiring record breakers hate mail. Hopeless romantics don’t write venomous newspaper columns or throw things at them. Then-commissioner Ford Frick wasn’t hopelessly romantic, he was cynically selfish—as a one-time Ruth ghostwriter and permanent Ruth acolyte—demanding separation between 154-game and 162-game seasons the better to be damn sure ruthsrecord (yes, they said it that way then) couldn’t really be erased.

(P.S. You asked for it. Maris needed five fewer plate appearances to hit 61 in ’61 than Ruth did to hit 60 in 1927. If you re-set Maris’s clock to start his season the game in which he hit his first homer of ’61, it took him 152 games to hit 61. Take that, Edsel Frick.)

I wondered further about such “idealists” as the brain-dead and the racists (who are their own kind of brain dead) threatening Aaron every step of the way as he approached, met, and passed Ruth on the career home run list.

I resisted the temptation to ask my fellow group member if he was one of those ready to wear black arm bands when Sandy Koufax smashed two of Bob Feller’s records in one 1965, Feller’s major league single-season strikeout record and his career record three no-hitters. (Koufax really hit Feller where it hurt, too: his fourth no-hitter proved that practise makes perfect.)

Then I reminded myself no milestone passer or record breaker could possibly erase the memory or the legacy of the one whose milestone he passed or record he broke. I learned that early from Ted Williams himself, a man who was nothing if not obsessed with his own legacy. “The other day,” Williams said at his own Hall of Fame induction, “Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second home run. He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘go get ‘em Willie’.”

Williams didn’t think Mays diminished him. Teddy Ballgame, of course, probably believed nobody could diminish him. While whacking balls during batting practise he was once heard to say, “Jesus H. Christ Himself couldn’t get me out!”

Was Ruth diminished by Maris and Aaron? Was Feller diminished by Koufax? Was Cobb diminished by Rose? Was Walter Johnson diminished by Nolan Ryan breaking his lifetime major league strikeout record? Was Gehrig really diminished by Ripken?

DiMaggio didn’t think so. “He’s a one in a million ballplayer, who came along to break [Gehrig’s] record,” the Yankee Clipper told that cheering Camden Yards throng, “and my congratulations to you, Cal, you certainly deserve this lasting tribute.”

On the silver anniversary of the night he passed Gehrig (and whacked a home run while he was at it), I reminded anyone who cared to read it that Ripken didn’t (and doesn’t) live by 2,131 alone. He’s the arguable greatest all-around shortstop who ever played the game. Says who? Says 3,000+ hits and 400+ home runs (the only such middle infielder to do both) and +181 fielding runs (third only behind Mark Belanger and Ozzie Smith), says who.

You should be half afraid to ask whether Casey Stengel managing five consecutive World Series winners diminished the John McGraw who’d once managed a mere four. Or whether Tom Seaver striking out a record ten straight to consummate a nineteen-strikeout game diminished the Steve Carlton who’d struck out nineteen in a game previously without ten straight punchouts to finish.

Carlton wasn’t accused of diminishing the Koufax who struck eighteen out in a game twice or the Feller who did it once.

Tomorrow is Opening Day. The Show will be back and with a full season to come, even. Last year’s pan-damn-ically shortened, irregular season will recede a little further into the ranks of the aberrations. There may be a few milestones reached and passed this year, if not exactly all-time records of all-time idols.

Miguel Cabrera needs a mere 134 hits and thirteen home runs to become the only player who ever reached 3,000 lifetime hits and 500 lifetime home runs in the same season. At least nobody—whether fan group member or professional writer—can accuse Cabrera diminishing someone else’s achievement if he makes both.

Nobody can predict, of course. The likelihood isn’t that great, either, but imagine if the aging Cabrera’s thirteenth home run this year becomes his 3,000th hit, somehow. He’d be only the third man in Show history to do it. Hands up to anyone foolish enough to think he shouldn’t even think about trying to go long for 3,000 because it might “diminish” the only two men whose 3,000th hits were bombs—Derek Jeter (who did it first, in 2011) and Alex Rodriguez (who did it in 2015).

At September 2019’s end, just about, Justin Verlander struck Kole Calhoun out twice in a game. The first time nailed Verlander’s 3,000th career strikeout, the second time his 300th strikeout of that season. No pitcher ever delivered that trick before. The only thing that diminished Verlander even slightly was what happened after he punched Calhoun out for 3,000: Andrelton Simmons hit the pitch immediately following the punchout over the center field fence.

Entering 2021 Max Scherzer, Zack Greinke, and Clayton Kershaw have over 2,500 lifetime strikeouts each. Suppose one of them endures long enough that his 3,000th strikeout-to-be might also become his 300th strikeout of the season in question. Would it really diminish Verlander if one of them pulls it off? Should he just try throwing grounders the rest of the way? Should his manager relieve him on the spot? The better not to soil Verlander’s glory?

God help Mike Trout, Ronald Acuna, Jr., Mookie Betts, Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis, Jr., or Christian Yelich if any of them should stand on the threshold of breaking Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Some bonehead somewhere is liable to suggest he should take a dive for game 57 on the grounds that it’s too great a record to be broken and, by the way, he shouldn’t ought to want to diminish DiMaggio’s memory.

Both Ripken and myself will probably be in the Elysian Fields before somebody else breaks Ripken’s streak, if somebody else actually does. But I’ll be there watching when Ripken and Gehrig holler down to the man, “Way to go, kiddo!” They won’t be screaming bloody murder with demands not to be diminished.

When Johnny Bench broke Yogi Berra’s record for lifetime home runs as a catcher, Berra wired him: “I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.” Funny how Bench didn’t exactly diminish Berra. Funny how Berra didn’t exactly feel diminished. Funny, too, how nobody who’s since passed Bench —for the record, they’re Carlton Fisk and Mike Piazza—diminished Yogi, either.

The only one diminished by suggesting that breaking venerated records diminishes the original record setter is the one making the suggestion in the first place.