Whitey Herzog, RIP: The Rat that roared

Posted on April 17, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

The White Rat on the Cardinals’ bridge. Winning three pennants and a World Series before a later, lackluster edition prompted him to walk.

It’s forgotten often enough, but Whitey Herzog was supposed to be the man who succeeded Gil Hodges on the Mets’ bridge if that time should have come. It came when Hodges died of a heart attack during spring training 1972. But the White Rat ran afoul of the Mets’ patrician chairman of the board M. Donald Grant well before that.

Herzog, who died Monday at 92, ran the Mets’ player development after one season as the Mets’ rather animated third base coach (1966) and one managing in the Florida Instructional League (1967). He was part of bringing the Mets such talent as pitchers Gary Gentry and Jon Matlack, first baseman John Milner, third baseman Wayne Garrett, and outfielders Amos Otis and Ken Singleton.

But his role in the first try at bringing eventual Miracle Met outfield acrobat Tommie Agee to the Mets from the White Sox got Herzog in big trouble with Grant. Then-Mets general manager Bing Devine, who’d hired Herzog in the first place, led a Mets contingent to the 1967-68 winter meetings and cobbled a deal to get Agee in exchange for veteran outfielder Tommy Davis and a decent but not spectacular relief pitcher named Don Shaw.

Shaw posted a 2.98 ERA and a respectable 3.44 fielding-independent pitching rate in forty 1967 appearances. The Mets had a crowded bullpen then, and Shaw was attractive to other teams including the White Sox, though. The Mets wanted Agee in the proverbial worst way possible. For reasons lost to time, Shaw was also one of Grant’s particular pets.

“Gil Hodges wanted him,” Herzog would remember. “Bing, [personnel director] Bob Sheffing, and I all wanted him, and we had the deal set.”

But Bing said we’d have to wait until Grant flew in to approve it.

The deal leaked to the papers, and when Grant hit town, he was furious. “How could you think about trading my Donnie Shaw?” he asked.

And he killed the deal. We eventually got Agee anyway [for Davis, pitchers Jack Fisher and Billy Wynne, and catcher Buddy Booker], but Grant’s decision cost us a good man—Bing Devine. ‘I don’t really believe they need a general manager around here,’ he told me.

And he went back to the Cardinals.

It wasn’t the last time the White Rat dealt with the kind of team lord who meddled without knowledge aforethought. Snubbed by the Mets upon Hodges’ death (they named Hall of Famer Yogi Berra to succeed Hodges, instead), Herzog took his first managing gig with the Rangers for 1973.

Owner Bob Short promised Herzog that high school pitching phenom David Clyde would be allowed to go to the minors for proper further development after two major league starts to goose the hapless Rangers’ home gate. Clyde did pitch well in those first two starts. Then Short reneged on his promise.

“You could have renamed the owner Short Term for the way his mind worked,” Herzog remembered in his memoir, You’re Missin’ a Great Game. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Clyde a few years ago, I asked him whether Herzog was the only man in the Rangers’ organisation who wanted to do right by him.

“As far as I know,” replied Clyde, the lefthander who now fights for pension justice for over 500 pre-1980, short-career major leaguers frozen out of the 1980 pension realignment, “that’s the absolute truth.”

Herzog didn’t survive 1973 in Texas; he was cooked the moment Billy Martin was fired by the Tigers that August and Short could snap him up post haste. The White Rat was brought aboard in Kansas City in 1975, after managing the Angels a year, and he managed the Royals to three straight postseasons in a five-year tenure. In each one, the Yankees thwarted his Royals.

Then he ran afoul of Royals owner, Ewing Kauffman and GM Joe Burke, with whom he’d also tangled in Texas. He despaired of trying to build the kind of bullpen that would help him get past the American League Championship Series, and he despaired equally of trying to convince the Royals brass that he knew what he was talking about when he advised them several key players now had drug issues.

The Royals faced the problem by shooting the messenger. It cost them in nasty headlines and four players (outfielders Willie Mays Aikens, Jerry Martin, and Willie Wilson; pitcher Vida Blue) behind bars after the 1983 season.

Herzog with two of his Gold Glove-winning Royals, second baseman Frank White and outfielder Al Cowens. The Royals rewarded the Rat’s warnings of drug problems on the team with a firing squad and paid an embarrassing price a few years later.

In the interim, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch hired Herzog to manage them. Herzog told Busch bluntly his team needed a near-complete overhaul. So Busch put his money where Herzog’s mouth and mind were and named him the GM in addition to being the field skipper.

Herzog overhauled those Cardinals into three-time pennant winners with a 1982 World Series title in the bargain. He also savoured his relationship with Busch, who gave him free reign to visit any time to talk business. (“Draw me up a Michelob, Chief,” the White Rat often hailed Busch on the phone before his visits, “I’m coming up.”)

He rebuilt the Cardinals into a team suited ideally for old Busch Stadium’s canyon dimensions and pool table playing field, for fast grounders, line drivers, swift runners, defensive acrobats (especially Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith), and maybe one or two power swingers (a George Hendrick here, a Jack [the Ripper] Clark there) to drive them home. And, for control pitchers who knew how to pitch to the ballpark. Just the way he did in Kansas City.

His pitching management was especially effective with his bullpens. Unlike most managers, Herzog paid attention to what was done in the bullpen as well as on the game mound. He knew what others didn’t: relievers throw voluminously enough getting ready to come in. If he warmed a reliever up without bringing him into the game, he gave the man the rest of the day or night off.

The White Rat (so nicknamed because the Yankees thought his hair resembled that of a former Yankee pitcher with the same nickname, unlikely 1951-52 World Series hero Bob Kuzava) was a marriage of old-school tenacity and newer-school depth, though people often forgot the latter while worshipping the former. He told things the way he saw them, charming many and outraging about as many.

He disliked interleague play and the expanded postseason, believing (correctly) that the former was fraudulent and the latter penalised the best teams even if one of them should end up with the final triumph. He also stood well ahead of the pack when—after the Don Denkinger blown call on the play at first in the bottom of the ninth, Game Six, 1985 World Series—he began calling for postseason instant replay. Denkinger himself came out for replay as well, soon enough. Would Herzog have come out in favour of Robby the Umpbot?

“What they’re fighting about,” he wrote about the Missourians who could still see photos of the fateful play in bars and restaurants for years to follow, “is as old as the game: What’s more important, getting it correct, or following the idea that the ump’s always right, no matter how far his head’s gone up his ass?” (Angel Hernandez, call your office.)

Herzog eventually forgave Denkinger, sort of: at a dinner honouring the 1985 Cardinals, team members were presented new Seiko wristwatches . . . and Herzog himself presented Denkinger one in Braille.

A marginal player on the field, Herzog turned what he learned early from Yankee manager Casey Stengel into a Hall of Fame path that started as a Mets third base coach and, after a year, director of player development.

He didn’t flinch when handed players described most politely as “eccentric”; he embraced them. He treated one and all the same whether praising them or telling them off. He rejected officially what he called the “buddy-buddy” relationship between manager and player(s), but he’d still take a player or three out fishing to help them get their minds clear when struggling for spells.

“I tend to like my players,” he wrote in You’re Missin’ a Great Game. “As long as they knew who was boss, as long as they respected my knowledge of the game when I put the uniform on, I didn’t see any reason not to bring my personality into the situation. It’s one of my resources; why shouldn’t I use it?

“Herzog had only four rules,” wrote Thomas Boswell, when Herzog walked away from the Cardinals in July 1990. “Be on time. Bust your butt. Play smart. And have some laughs while you’re at it.”

Only when those Cardinals stopped half or more of the above did Herzog do the unthinkable. In the same piece, Boswell led with, “They say you can’t fire the whole team, so you have to fire the manager. Nobody told Whitey Herzog.”

On Friday, he fired his team.

Technically, Herzog resigned. But it amounted to the same thing.

The White Rat got sick and tired of watching the St. Louis Cardinals play baseball in a way that offended his sensibilities and injured his enormous pride, so he quit—with a flourish of dignified self-recimination worthy of a disgraced British prime minister.

“I’m totally embarrassed by the way we’ve played. We’ve underachieved. I just can’t get the team to play,” said Herzog. “Anybody can do a better job than me . . . I am the manager and I take full responsibility.”

Translation: They quit on me. So I’m quitting on them. Get me a new team.

Herzog would get a new team when the Angels hired him to examine their farm system up and down. Herzog discovered the Angel system had plenty of good and the parent club needed only a little pitching fortification while letting that good young talent make its way to Anaheim. Then, after winning a power struggle with another Angel exec, Herzog himself took a hike.

“He was the one who gave us a chance to do anything with guys like Tim Salmon and Jim Edmonds and Garret Anderson,” said successor Bill Bavasi. “The attitude before Whitey came in was that those guys weren’t good enough, that we didn’t have any good young players in the system, but Whitey said, ‘Yes you do, leave ’em alone.’ I’ll always be grateful for that and the fact he was willing to share everything he knows.”

When he turned 90, the White Rat talked to St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Rick Hummel and trained fire at commissioner Rob Manfred’s game-shortening lab experiments. He might have neglected the broadcast commercials that are at the core of baseball’s lengthening games, but he had most of everything else he mentioned right.

He keeps talking about the three-batter rule for [relief] pitchers. Stupid. And then the tenth inning rule [the free cookie on second to open each extra half-inning]. Stupid. Seven-inning doubleheaders. Stupid. None of that is going to shorten the games at all, until we can lower the amount of pitches that they throw.

Baseball has probably had enough prophets without honour to stock an entire organisation. Herzog’s a prophet with honour but it’s almost as though electing him to the Hall of Fame was a way of saying, “Congrats, Rat, now go back to your fishing boats and shut the hell up.”

He’ll enjoy the afterlife of the just in the Elysian Fields, fishing happily when never failing to miss a great game. It’s we remaining on this island earth who’ll miss the White Rat among us, watching our game, fuming over its self-destructions, but still loving its pleasures, its teachings, its remaining tamper-proof fineries.

Riding the pine tar

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

“I told [my kids] you better never make me this mad, and they never did.”—Hall of Fame third baseman George Brett.

The single most infamous moment in Hall of Famer George Brett’s career ended up becoming a tool in his fatherhood kit. “Showed it to my kids a whole bunch of times when they were young,” Brett told ESPN writer William Weinbaum in Cooperstown, where Brett spent the weekend including for the induction of Hall of Famers Fred McGriff and Scott Rolen.

“I wanted to see the look on their faces when I got mad,” Brett said of that day, forty years ago Monday, “and I told them you better never make me this mad, and they never did.”

One look at Dad’s face, bulging eyes and expanding mouth as he stormed from the dugout, seemingnly determined to amputate umpire Tim McClelland’s limbs if not his head, and the three children under Brett’s jurisdiction (he married in 1992, before his final season as a major league player) should have had no further doubt.

24 July 1983. Yankee Stadium. The Yankees and the Royals not exactly on friendly terms. Top of the ninth, two out, Brett’s Royals down a run, Royals infielder U.L. Washington on first, and Brett’s fellow Hall of Famer Goose Gossage on the mound in relief of Dale Murray. Knowing Gossage wouldn’t throw him anything but fastballs, Brett sat on one and drove it about seven or eight rows up the right field seats.

Brett barely finished rounding the bases when Yankee manager Billy Martin, a man who never missed an opportunity to deploy the rule book when it would work to his advantage above and beyond the actuality of a game, hustled out of the Yankee dugout demanding Brett’s bat be checked.

The Yankees noticed Brett’s bat had a visible excess of pine tar before the game, we learned in due course. Martin, typically, elected not to say or do something about it until or unless Brett did noticeably game-altering damage swinging it, as he did in the top of the ninth. After Martin asked rookie umpire McClelland to check the bat, McClelland and the umps confabbed, examined, confabbed more, laid the bat across the seventeen-inch width of the plate . . .

While talking to teammate Frank White in the dugout, awaiting the final call, Brett said he’d never before heard of too much pine tar, notwithstanding teammate John Mayberry checked for it in a 1975 game but ultimately surviving an Angels protest. But the usually jovial Brett knew just what he would do if McClelland and company ruled against his bat and thus his go-ahead home run. It wouldn’t be a parliamentary debate.

“I go, ‘Well, if they call me out for using too much pine tar, I’ll run out and kill one of those SOBs’,” he remembered telling White.

They called him out for using too much pine tar. Brett charged up from and out of the dugout like a bull who’d been shot with an amphetamine dart, resembling a man determined to part McClelland from his arms, legs, head, and any other extremity within reach. It took several teammates plus Royals manager Dick Howser and umpire Joe Brinkman to keep Brett from dismembering McClelland.

“I looked like a madman coming out,” Brett admitted to Weinbaum.

I think everything kind of got a little more dramatic than it should have. Because Joe Brinkman got behind me and started pulling me back, and I was trying to get away and he had a chokehold on me and just pulling me backwards and backwards and I was just trying to get free from him. I wasn’t going after Tim McClelland. I mean, as Timmy would always say, “George, what were you gonna do to me? I’m 6’5″, I’ve got shin guards on, I’ve got a bat in one hand, a mask in the other. What are you gonna do to me?” I said, “Timmy, I was just going to come out and yell at you, I wasn’t going to hit you. You would’ve kicked my ass.”

Fellow Hall of Famer Perry (right) advised Brett to stop using the infamous bat—because it was too valuable. It’s reposed in the Hall of Fame since 1987.

Brett’s Hall of Fame teammate, pitcher Gaylord Perry, a man who knew something about suspect substances (hee, hee), managed to get the bat away from the umps and into the Royals dugout striking for the clubhouse, until Yankee Stadium security retrieved the bat to submit to the American League offices. (This, children, was the time when the leagues weren’t yet placed under MLB’s direct, one-size-fits-all administration.)

Brett was ruled out over the bat. The Yankees won the game officially. Not so fast. AL president Lee MacPhail received the Royals’ appeal, ruled that the bat didn’t violate the pine tar rule’s actual intent (which was to keep baseballs from getting dirtier), and ordered the game continued in New York—on an off-day for both teams otherwise, 18 August. En route a Royals trip to Baltimore for a set against the Orioles.

“I was kicked out of the game,” Brett said, obviously over his raging bull charge and plunge after the nullified homer.

I was still gonna go to the [suspended] game, but [Howser] said don’t even go the stadium, it’ll be a circus. So me and the son of [actor] Don Ameche, Larry—he was a TWA rep, we always chartered TWA jets back then—we went to some restaurant in New Jersey, an Italian restaurant, and watched the game on a little ten-inch TV. And went back to the airport, the guys had to go there after finishing the game, and next thing you know we were flying to Baltimore.

The Royals and the Yankees re-convened from the point of Brett’s homer. Royals designated hitter Hal McRae faced Yankee pitcher George Frazier, himself familiar with actual or alleged foreign substances. (I don’t use foreign substances. Everything I use is made in the U.S. of A.) McRae struck out for the side. Then, the Royals’ often underrated closer, Dan Quisenberry, got two straight fly outs and a ground out to finish what was started almost a month earlier.

Brett continued using the bat until Perry advised him it was too valuable to risk damage. He sold the bat to fabled collector Barry Halper for $25,000—until he had a change of heart and refunded Halper’s money. The bat has reposed in the Hall of Fame since 1987. “Goose and I have had a lot of laughs over it since he got into the Hall of Fame,” Brett told Weinbaum.

Before a 2018 game celebrating their fiftieth season of life, the Royals handed out a Brett bobblehead showing him springing forth bent on manslaughter upon the home run nullification. Brett told Weinbaum a Royals A-level minor league affiliate saw and raised to make him, arguably, the first player depicted on a bobble-arm figurine—his arms waving as wildly as they did when he charged for McClelland.

Three years before the infamous pine tar homer, Brett was known concurrently as one of the American League’s great hitters (he nearly hit .400 that season) and, unfortunately, a man stricken by a pain in the ass after the Royals finally waxed the Yankees in an American League Championship Series: internal and external hemorrhoids.

Brett had to put up with crude jokes throughout that World Series, which the Royals lost to the Phillies (and his Hall of Fame third base contemporary, Mike Schmidt), but he tuned them out. The pine tar game knocked that onto its butt rather immortally.

“Seriously,” he told Weinbaum, “what would you rather be remembered for? Hitting a home run off Goose Gossage in the ninth inning to win a ballgame, or being the guy with hemorrhoids in the World Series?”

I think I’ll sit on that awhile.

Don Denkinger, RIP: Survival

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

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 two perfect games. (Denkinger also worked third base for Len Barker’s perfecto 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.

Vida Blue, RIP: “You deserve it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you.”

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

I’m talkin’ baseball—like Reggie, Quisenberry
Talkin’ baseball—Carew and Gaylord Perry
Seaver, Garvey, Schmidt, and Vida Blue
If Cooperstown is calling, it’s no fluke—
they’ll be with Willie, Mickey and the Duke.

—Terry Cashman, “Willie, Mickey and the Duke (Talkin’ Baseball),” 1981.

A Time cover star one season, Vida Blue became a poster child for Charlie Finley’s caprice and cruelty the next.

Out of 24 major league rookies to throw no-hitters, Vida Blue had the greatest sophomore season of the group—including the only Hall of Famer among them, Christy Mathewson. That sophomore season made him a national phenomenon, a Time cover star, a Cy Young Award winner, the American League’s Most Valuable Player . . . and a particular victim of then-Athletics owner Charlie Finley’s notorious caprice.

Blue died at 73 Sunday. He’d never again equal that surrealistic 1971, after his owner left him feeling worthless during offseason contract talks that took a turn called nasty even by Finley’s contradictory standards. He’d be a good pitcher who never again got anywhere near the greatness his 1971 promised.

On 21 September 1970, Blue struck nine Twins out (including Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew twice), walked one, and landed a 6-0 gem supported by a run-scoring double play in the first and a five-run eighth, finished when A’s shortstop Bert Campaneris—in the middle of a very unlikely 22-homer season (he averaged five per 162 games lifetime)—yanked a three-run bomb with two out off the Twins’ Jim Perry.

Slightly over a year later, Blue finished that Time season credited with his 24th win, before what looked like a certain American League Championship Series Game One triumph turned into disaster: leading the Orioles 3-1 entering the bottom of the seventh, Blue and the A’s were torn for four runs, two scored by Hall of Famers Frank and Brooks Robinson, en route a 5-3 loss that led to being swept out in three.

Still, Blue sat atop baseball’s mountain. No Show sophomore sat higher. As Time put it with a corner banner on his cover issue, the 21-year-old lefthander put “new zip in the old game.” He’d posted a staggering 1.82 earned run average, a 0.95 walks/hits per inning pitched rate, and a 2.20 fielding-independent pitching rate. On the mound he looked taller than his six feet with his knee-up, arm-whip delivery. And, with a fastball considered the hardest that didn’t belong to Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.

As would be said of another ill-fated child prodigy, Dwight Gooden, over a decade later, Blue was great before he’d even had much chance just to be good. He stood at 22 as the youngest man ever to win an MVP and the youngest (until Gooden over a decade later) to win a Cy Young Award. Analysts determined that one out of every twelve tickets to American League games were sold for his starts.

Even President Richard Nixon got into the act, when learning Blue’s 1971 salary ($14,500) was barely above rhe rookie minimum. Nixon called Blue “the most underpaid player in baseball.”

Then it came time to talk contract for 1972, in the days before Curt Flood lost his reserve clause challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court and well before Andy Messersmith pitched contract-less and prevailed to finish what Flood started. No player that offseason would better evoke the once-fabled malaprop of radio comedy legend Jane Ace: “You’ve got to take the bitter with the better.”

Audaciously, Blue engaged an agent and asked for a $100,000 salary for 1972. It happened, according to Jason Turbow’s Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, when Blue’s veteran teammate Tommy Davis—seeing him drowning in endorsement offers—introduced him to a California attorney named Bob Gerst, who agreed to represent Blue for a flat fee instead of percentages per.

You can only imagine how little Finley loved that idea. The same Finley who’d crowed during Blue’s sensational season, “Don’t you worry about him making money. He is going to make money. He is going to get more than money. He is going to get great things from this game. I’m going to see that he gets great things. I’m going to protect him.”

Come 8 January 1972, Finley proved just how much he’d protect Blue. Aghast as it was that Blue had Gerst in tow, Finley simply couldn’t resist talking down to the earnest lefthander.

Well, I know you won twenty-four games. I know you led the league in earned-run average. I know you had three hundred strikeouts. [Actually, 301, but let’s not get technical.—JK.] I know you made the All-Star team. I know you were the youngest to win the Cy Young Award and the MVP. I know all that. And if I was you, I would ask for the same thing. And you deserve it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you.

“He said it with a smirk,” Blue would say later, “and, man, it made me want to slide under the table.” This was the kid who’d gone on a USO tour of Vietnam with comedy legend Bob Hope and, when Hope asked how come he didn’t get more money from Finley, cracked, “Well, Mr. Finley claimed I was only using one arm.” Who knows how much of a strand of truth that crack contained?

The talks became contentious enough that Finley took them public while Gerst helped swing a profitable non-baseball job for Blue to prove he wasn’t kidding around. A’s players were torn between believing Blue should get every dollar he thought he was worth and wishing he’d sign for Finley’s proffered $50,000 just to be among them.

Vida Blue (right) with catcher/first baseman Gene Tenace, at a 40th anniversary celebration of Oakland’s first of three straight World Series championships.

Blue even announced he would leave baseball for that job with a successful bathroom fixtures manufacturer. (Wags suggested Blue was going down the toilet.) Finley’s pressures included making Davis—maybe the team’s most valuable bench player in 1971—a scapegoat for introducing Blue to Gerst, and rather nastily. He ordered a very unwilling manager Dick Williams to wait until the A’s arrived at the ballpark, for a spring exhibition game three hours from home, before telling Davis he was released—and leaving Davis to find his own way home. (Turbow recorded that the A’s traveling seceretary loaned Davis his car.)

Blue got some relief from baseball’s first-ever players strike, over a 17 percent pension hike, the players finally agreeing to settle for a little over half that. Finley kept the pressure up, acquiring once-glittering but shoulder-ruined righthander Denny McLain and trading popular outfielder Rick Monday to the Cubs for pitcher Ken Holtzman. Finally, commissioner Bowie Kuhn interceded.

“It wasn’t that Finley’s $50,000 offer was outrageous, the Commissioner said,” Turbow wrote, “but that ‘Finley had a way of making it seem so’.” Blue finally came away with a $63,000 1972 salary. “He treated me like a damn coloured boy,” the lefthander told two California newspapermen when the deal was done. “Charlie Finley has soured my stomach for baseball. Tonight isn’t tell it like it is. Tonight is tell it like I feel.”

After being part of three straight A’s World Series titles, after being one of the players whose sales post-Messersmith Finley tried but Kuhn foolishly blocked*, and after a trade to the Giants that saw him become the first pitcher to start All-Star Games for each league, Blue would move on to the Royals—and become one of five teammates sent to the slammer on drug charges after the 1983 season.

Blue struggled with cocaine addiction until he retired before the 1987 season. He became a pre- and postgame television analyst for Giants games; he became known for philanthropy in the Bay Area and as a role model for children he worked with through a Giants’ outreach program. His marriage (the couple walked under a an arc of bats held by Giants players as they walked to the Candlestick Park mound) ended in divorce; he may have beaten cocaine but struggled further with drinking.

Maybe the Finley contract contretemps roots it. He became “bitter and withdrawn,” noted John Helyar in The Lords of the Realm, “eventually developing a drug problem that landed him in court.” Except that, somehow, away from the field, Blue remained likeable and magnetic.

“Vida’s such a wonderful guy,” said Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda to the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea in 2005, after Blue was dinged for driving under the influence. “He’s been through a lot, but he likes to keep things inside. I went through some tough times myself, and sometimes you’ve got to open up and accept help from your friends.”

And, your children. Blue had a son and two daughters; the son, Derrick, told Shea, “He’s got great people skills, and I think that’s been a downfall. People have let him get away with more. People come to me and say, ‘He’s a great guy. He took us out drinking and partying.’ I cringe. That’s what’s wrong with being professional athletes, my dad included.”

A one-time A’s teammate, ill-fated pitcher Mike Norris—one of the early 1980s “Five Aces” said to be ruined by temperamental manager Billy Martin’s callousness toward pitchers and their workloads and by his own issues with drugs—wondered to Shea just how much substance abuse ruined Blue when Finley hadn’t.

I wanted to be the best black pitcher in the history of baseball, the first to win thirty games, but I screwed it up. So you kick yourself in the ass about it. Maybe I could’ve been in the Hall of Fame. It sounds cocky, but winning twenty games wasn’t hard for me. [Substance abuse] led to my arm injury. Being addicted, you’re not going to eat or sleep. You can’t play this game without eating or sleeping. Vida had the best fastball I’ve ever seen, and that includes [Hall of Famer] Nolan Ryan or anyone else. It was inevitable he’d go to the Hall of Fame. I believe . . . Finley turned him off to baseball. If he left him alone, there’s no telling what would have happened to this beautiful person.

Most recently, Blue took part in an A’s celebration marking the half-centenary of their 1973 World Series winners. Who knows what went through Blue’s mind and heart, riding in a classic, antique Thunderbird convertible, around a ballpark left gone to seed, hosting an A’s team left in ruins by an owner who might, maybe, make Finley resemble a kindly grandfather by comparison?

“I know he hung on for that last anniversary celebration like the absolute gamer he was,” tweeted Dallas Braden, another ill-fated A’s pitcher, whose Mother’s Day perfect game was the highlight of a career rendered brief by a shredded shoulder, and who’s since been an A’s game analyst for NBC Sports Bay Area. “Rest easy, Mr. Blue.”

We wish Blue’s family comfort in knowing the man will be remembered for what he was, for what his boss did to him, and for how he tried every time his addiction demons flattened him to flatten them right back. And we wish Blue nothing less than a deserved rest in the Elysian Fields, with the Lord’s embrace, forgiveness, and love.

———————————————————————————-

* In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James probably said it best about Bowie Kuhn’s quash of the notorious Charlie Finley fire sale bid of 1976:

[It] was an ignorant, bone-headed, destructive policy which had no foundation in anything except that Kuhn hated Charlie Finley and saw that he could drive Finley out of the game by denying him the right to sell his [star] players.

What Kuhn should have done, if he had been thinking about the best interests of the game, is adopt the Landis policy: rule that players could be sold for whatever they would bring, but 30% of the money had to go to the players. Had he done that, the effect would have been to allow the rich teams to acquire more of the best players, as they do now. But this policy would have allowed the rich teams to strengthen themselves without inflating the salary structure, and would have allowed the weaker teams, the Montreal-type teams, to remain financially competitive by profiting from developing young players.

“The Landis policy” refers to longtime commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s suggestion—un-acted upon, of course—after Pacific Coast League star Earl Averill refused to report to the Cleveland Indians unless he got a percentage of the sale price the Indians paid the San Francisco Seals to buy him. It may have been the single smartest idea Landis ever had, and it fell on the proverbial deaf ears.

The players on Finley’s fire-sale market were Blue, Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, and outfielder Joe Rudi.

The former Dark Knight, retiring with grace

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

Matt Harvey, young, a Met, and a Dark Knight.

Few baseball surges of the 2010s were as electrifying as Matt Harvey’s. Few baseball shrinkages were almost that electrifying. And, after a few years of trying and getting not even close to back to where he once belonged, Harvey elected to call it a career Friday.

The former Dark Knight, who’d provoked Mets fans to declare “Happy Harvey Day!” on the days he started, announced his retirement on Instagram. “With all the amazing memories came a lot of injuries and tough times,” the 34-year-old righthander wrote.

The realization that those amazingly powerful moments that make me thrive as a pitcher and help my teammates and city win are no longer possible. Believe me I wish I could have done more and brought more of those amazing moments back to life. I have to say this is my time to say thank you, and goodbye.

Asking Harvey to retire with no regrets would be asking him to be superhuman. That’s an ask he can’t possibly satisfy. He’d tried that earlier and too often in his career, on the mound and off it, and he nearly fried himself alive trying.

In the Show, Harvey was last seen trying a comeback with the Orioles two years ago. He started with three shutout innings followed by a dicey fourth in his first Oriole start. He went on to post for the season a modest 4.60 fielding-independent pitching (FIP) rate, a ghastly 6.27 earned run average, a 2.57 strikeout-to-walk rate, a 1.54 walks/hits-per-inning pitched rate (WHIP), and was hittable for 11.3 hits per nine innings.

That was double the transcontinental distance from his staggering second Mets season, 2013, when he led the Show with a 2.01 FIP, posting an 0.97 WHIP and a 6.16 K/BB rate, good enough to finish fourth in the National League’s Cy Young Award voting.

Those were the days when Harvey embraced New York and its white-hot heat as ardently as the city embraced him. “To the fans, most importantly the NY Mets fans: you made a dream come true for me,” he wrote in his retirement post. “A dream I never could have thought to be true. Who would have thought a kid from Mystic, [Connecticut] would be able to play in the greatest city in the world, his hometown. You are forever embedded in my heart.”

He’s had worse than that embedded in his heart. Harvey’s early ability to pitch like an executioner on the mound was equaled only by his ability to find and dwell among the demimonde as though it had his name on it.

He electrified the country when he started the 2013 All-Star Game and—having to shake off a leadoff double from future Hall of Famer Mike Trout followed by hitting Robinson Canó with a pitch—struck three out in two innings’ work and surrendering not a single run. (The American League went on to win, 3-0.)

He missed 2014 recovering from Tommy John surgery, but he electrified the country further when he all but ordered his manager Terry Collins to leave him in to pitch the ninth in Game Five of the 2015 World Series.

Uh-oh. Collins went with Harvey’s heart while misreading his fuel tank. He walked Kansas City’s Lorenzo Cain to open, then surrendered Eric Hosmer’s RBI double. Then Collins lifted him for Jeurys Familia. Two ground outs, one of which provoked Hosmer’s daring dash home while Mets first baseman Lucas Duda threw what should have been an easy double play ball offline to the plate (Hosmer would have been dead on arrival if the throw was accurate), tied a game the Royals won with a five-run twelfth as the rest of the Mets bullpen lost its wheels.

The Royals had bypassed Harvey in the 2010 draft. The guy they took instead, infielder Christian Colón, sent what proved the Series-winning run home. “I still have nightmares over that,” Harvey would tell the New York Post about the game. “One thing I’m most angry about is not getting it done.”

He’d have better reason to be angry the following season: he was hit with thoracic outlet syndrome in July 2016 and gone for the season. And, never again the same pitcher. TOS occurs when blood vessels and/or nerves between your collarbone and your first rib compress. That causes shoulder and neck pain and finger numbness.

“I had TOS,” Harvey’s former fellow Mets pitcher Dillon Gee once said. “I know how much that sucks. It definitely changes you. You start trying to tinker with things. It’s not natural anymore. You start being robot-ish. You start not trying to hurt one area and totally hurt another area. Your whole body is out of whack.”

Harvey’s body wasn’t the only thing going out of whack. Between TOS and a 2017 season interrupted nastily by another shoulder injury, Harvey melted down almost completely. The mound no longer elevated him; the city’s bright lights and demimonde no longer seemed to comfort him entirely.

Very publicly, he found himself dropped by a Brazilian supermodel with whom he thought a real romance was seeded—until she elected to return to her former beau, an NFL wide receiver, leaving a glittering party with the man. That was the night before he showed up late for a game against the Marlins claiming a migraine that was translated to mean a hangover.

Harvry had had such a big-timing attitude prior that now, when he needed empathy, aid, and comfort most, he had none. A year later, after refusing to try it out of the bullpen, perhaps out of stubborn lingering pride, Harvey’s days as a Met ended in a trade to the Reds. “Besides life on his fastball and bite on his slider, you know what was missing with Matt Harvey?” asked Joel Sherman of the New York Post after the deal. The answer:

Compassion. There was no empathy from a teammate or member of management for Harvey’s plight. They wanted him to rebound and do well, but that was about the team and their own selfish desire for success.

Humbled, Harvey pitched respectably for the Reds following his trade from the Mets. But he couldn’t reimagine his form successfully in stops at Anaheim, the Oakland system, Kansas City and Baltimore (above).

Tom Verducci, the Sports Illustrated writer who first handed Harvey the Dark Knight nickname (picking up on Harvey’s boyhood love of Batman), advised one and all that Harvey’s taste for New York’s night life wasn’t the reason he’d collapsed on the mound. “The truth is, for all the times he wound up in the tabloids other than the sports section, Harvey failed because his arm failed him,” Verducci began.

. . . His arm likely failed him because of how he threw a baseball. And when his arm failed him, he knew no other way. He couldn’t pitch without an A-plus fastball, he couldn’t embrace using a bullpen role as a way back, and he couldn’t believe in himself again.

. . . The Mets cut Harvey because his once-fearsome fastball became the almost exact definition of a mediocre fastball (MLB averages: 92.7 mph, 2,261 rpm). Because he couldn’t find another way to get hitters out, because he could not change his mechanics and because he could not buy into the bullpen, the Mets could not keep sending [him] out to the mound as a starter.

The decline in his stuff was obvious. And there was no way his fastball was coming back with the way he throws.

As a Red, Harvey finished his walk year into free agency with a respectable if unspectacular enough performance that the Angels were willing to take an $11 million flyer on him for 2019. He lasted long enough to be designated for assignment that July. The Athletics signed him but he never saw Show action. The Royals took a chance on him for pan-damn-ically shortened 2020.

A free agent again, the Orioles took a chance on Harvey for 2021. He re-signed with the organisation for 2022 but he spent the season at three minor league levels around a sixty-day suspension after testifying in the Eric Kay trial that he’d used painkillers provided by Kay while with the Angels.

Kay was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 22 years in federal prison, having been the man who provided the drugs that killed popular Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs. On the stand, Harvey admitted he’d given Skaggs (who was likely addicted to painkillers following early-career Tommy John surgery and subsequent other injuries), a few Percocets, perhaps unaware of the depth of Skaggs’s addiction. He didn’t shrink from it, he didn’t try to excuse it.

Harvey pitched in this year’s World Baseball Classic—for Italy, posting a 1.29 ERA in two starts before Team Italy lost to Japan and eventual WBC most valuable player Shohei Ohtani in the quarterfinals. It tempted him to try one more major league comeback. But it was just a temptation. Maybe the most important temptation Harvey resisted. He got to leave the mound permanently on a very high plane, at any level.

(For the record, his Team Italy manager, Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, saluted Harvey upon his retirement announcement: “Look forward to teeing it up with you man..I want to Thank You for your awesome effort in the @WBCBaseball, You’re a warrior on the bump.”)

Back in 2020, he offered the Post something few who knew him as a Met might have accused him of having: introspection. “There are a lot of things I’d do differently,” he began, “but I don’t like to live with regret.”

There were just things I didn’t know at the time. Now, obviously, I’ve struggled the last few years. And what I know now is how much time and effort it takes to stay at the top of your game. I wouldn’t say my work ethic was bad whatsoever, but when you’re young, it’s not like you feel invincible, but when everything is going so well, you don’t know what it takes to stay on the field. It’s definitely more time consuming and takes more concentration.

Too many sports party boys don’t learn until their sports say goodbye to them first. Harvey learned soon enough, if sadly enough, that the party doesn’t always end on your terms. The Dark Knight who crashed and burned off the mound while his body betrayed him on it became something far more important before he retired: a man.

Throneberry Fields Forever

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