A trio grand for Cooperstown

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

L to R: Newly-elected Hall of Famers Beltré, Helton, Mauer—They’ll join Contemporary Baseball Era Committee choice and longtime manager Jim Leyland on the Cooperstown stage come July.

The third baseman whose surname begins with “belt” and was way more than just a great belter. The first baseman who wasn’t just a Coors Canaveral product at the plate. The catcher forced to first base by concussion but who forged his case as the game’s number seven catcher all-time, defying his haters who still call him a thief.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your newest Hall of Famers—Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer. Beltré and Mauer deserved to be the first-ballot Hall of Famers they are now. Helton should have been, too, if only the voters his first time around on the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot had taken the dive that went deeper and deeper the longer Helton stayed on the ballot.

Beltré is probably in the most unique position of the trio. The number four third baseman of all (I’d rank him a touch higher for his combination of power hitting and off-the-charts defense) has something none of his peers can claim. Quick: name the only third baseman, ever, with 1) 3,000+ hits and 2) five or more Gold Gloves.

Hall of Famer Wade Boggs has two Gloves. Hall of Famer George Brett has one. Hall of Famer Paul Molitor (who probably got in more as a designated hitter than a third baseman) has none. Beltré, of course, has five. Now you can argue that a lot of Gold Glove award voting has been suspect over the years. You can’t argue with only two of the quartet being in the top twelve for run prevention at third base: Beltre (+168 total zone runs; 2nd) and Boggs (+95; 12th).

There’s only one other third baseman in the top twelve for run prevention who had anything like Beltré’s power in hand with it: Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt. Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews (512 home runs) was worth 40 defensive runs saved but that doesn’t get him quite to the levels of Beltré and Schmidt among the biggest bopping third basemen.

Here’s Beltré, among post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era Hall of Fame third basemen, according to my Real Batting Average metric (RBA): total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances:

HOF 3B	PA	TB	BB	IBB	SF	HBP	RBA
Mike Schmidt	10062	4404	1507	201	108	79	.626
Chipper Jones	10614	4755	1512	177	97	18	.618
Eddie Mathews	10100	4349	1444	142	58	26	.596
Scott Rolen	8518	3628	899	57	93	127	.564
George Brett	11625	5044	1096	229	120	33	.561
Ron Santo	9397	3779	1108	94	94	38	.544
Wade Boggs	10740	4064	1412	180	96	23	.538
Adrián Beltré	12130	5309	848	112	103	97	.533
Paul Molitor	12167	4854	1094	100	109	47	.510
Brooks Robinson	11782	4270	860	120	114	53	.458
HOF AVG							.555

You see he was hurt most at the plate by taking a lot less unintentional walks than everyone else on the list. But he’s the number two most run-preventive third baseman ever behind Brooks Robinson. His combination of power and defense should nudge him up to the number three all-around third baseman who ever played. WARriors, take note: Beltré’s 93.5 is bested among Hall third basemen by two, in ascending order: Mathews (96.0) and Schmidt (106.8).

Among his group of Hall of Famers, Beltré was also the most fun Fun Guy of the game. Even if his career was an ascending trajectory to genuine greatness (people still wonder how the Dodgers could have let him take a hike into free agency), there was always a sense about him that he really did play more for the fun of it than the riches of it.

I’ve asked elsewhere: how often do you get to send one of the real Fun Guys to Cooperstown? Too many playing or managing greats were about as fun as open-heart surgery. Too many of the game’s Fun Guys weren’t all that much fun when they were actually on the field or at the plate. (Dick Stuart, for example, was one of the funnest of his time’s Fun Guys—but he earned his nickname Dr. Strangeglove at first base. He only got to play major league baseball because he could hit baseballs across city limits.)

Ernie Banks, Yogi Berra, Bert Blyleven, Roy Campanella, Dizzy Dean, Whitey Ford, Lefty Gomez, Rickey Henderson, Minnie Miñoso, David Ortíz, Satchel Paige, Babe Ruth, and Warren Spahn were bona-fide Hall of Famers and Fun Guys in the bargain as players. (And several of them had to do it through unconscionable bigotry.) Casey Stengel was both as a manager. Beltré will grace their company.

I did notice someone aboard social media ask aloud if someone could arrange for his old Texas teammate Elvis Andrus to come rub his head at his induction. Not a half bad idea. Barring that, maybe the Hall could arrange for Beltré head-touching bobbleheads to pass out come induction day? Barring that, maybe the Hall staff would let him drag the on-deck circle mat lonce more?

Helton may have finished what Hall of Famer Larry Walker started and fractured the idea that a career spent half or more with Coors Field as your home ballpark will kill or at least cast abundant doubt on your Hall credentials. Helton lacked what Walker had, enough time in another uniform to show that he was Hall of Fame good without the Coors factor. But Helton has this distinction: the first Rockie-for-life to go to Cooperstown.

Now, look deeper, once again, please. The Toddfather posted an .855 OPS on the road to his 1.048 at home. An .855 OPS across the board might mean a spot in the Hall of Fame for a lot of players. Helton’s road OPS is higher than the across-the-board OPSes of (in ascending order) live ball-era Hall of Famers Eddie Murray, Gil Hodges (who played most of his career in a bandbox home park), Orlando Cepeda, Ben Taylor (Negro Leagues), Sunny Jim Bottomley, Harmon Killebrew; and, one point below Fred McGriff. His across-the-board .953 is better than all but nine Hall of Fame first basemen.

Let me apply my RBA to Helton among post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era Hall of Fame first basemen:

First Base	PA	TB	BB	IBB	SF	HBP	RBA
Jim Thome	10313	4667	1747	173	74	69	.653
Jeff Bagwell	9431	4213	1401	155	102	128	.636
Todd Helton	9453	4292	1335	185	93	57	.631
Willie McCovey	9692	4219	1345	260	70	69	.615
Harmon Killebrew	9833	4143	1559	160	77	48	.609
Fred McGriff	10174	4458	1305	171	71	39	.594
Gil Hodges	8104	3422	943	109	82	25	.565
Orlando Cepeda	8698	3959	588	154	74	102	.561
Eddie Murray	12817	5397	1333	222	128	18	.554
Tony Pérez	10861	4532	925	150	106	43	.526
HOF AVG							.594

Helton has the number three RBA among those Hall of Fame first basemen, he’s 37 points above the average RBA for those Hall first basemen, and it wasn’t all or purely a product of Coors Field. He also had a 144 OPS+ over his ten-year peak of 1997-2007. OPS+, of course, adjusts for ballpark factors. That peak OPS+ alone should disabuse you once and for all about whether the Toddfather was pure Coors.

By the way, for those of you obsessed with swinging strikeouts at the plate and the metastasis thereof, be reminded that Helton lifetime walked more than he struck out, especially as the leverage situation rose. He averaged eleven more walks (96) than strikeouts (85) per 162 games, and he walked 160 times more than he struck out. Would you like to know how many of the other aforelisted Hall of Fame first basemen walked more than they fanned? Z-e-r-o.

Mauer joins a unique Cooperstown group—one of the three field positions (catcher) that have resulted in only three first-ballot Hall of Famers. (It’s still impossible to believe that Yogi Berra wasn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer.) Thus does Mauer join Johnny Bench and Ivan Rodríguez in the Cooperstown Trinity of the Tools of Ignorance. (The other two positions with only three first-time Hall of Famers: first base and second base.)

He also has a .569 RBA that puts him third among post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball Hall catchers. (Only Mike Piazza and Roy Campanella—who played in the same bandbox as Hodges when he made the Show in 1948—are ahead of him.) He wasn’t all bat as a backstop despite his gaudy batting averages, either; the pitchers who threw to Mauer posted an ERA almost a full run below his league average, he was worth +65 total zone runs behind the dish, and he threw out a respectable 33 percent of runners who tried to steal on him lifetime. (He led the American League twice: 53 percent in 2007; 43 percent in 2013.)

WARriors should remind themselves, too, that in the ten seasons Mauer played as the Twins’ regular catcher, he out-WARred the three other catchers active during all ten of those seasons by a wide margin: his 44.6 bested Victor Martinez (28.1), Yadier Molina (27.6), and Jorge Posada (20.0).

Well, now. A year ago, after Scott Rolen’s election to the Hall of Fame provoked the usual chatter about who’d be elected this year, Twins fans tried to smother social media with assaults and batteries of Mauer for “stealing” the money in that yummy contract extension he signed before his first concussion compelled the Twins to get him the hell out from behind the plate.

He suffered his second well into the extension, chasing a foul ball from first base. Those brain-dead fans either forgot, never knew, or didn’t care that injuries incurred in the line of duty don’t equal goldbricking or defrauding. I swore then that I wouldn’t say another word about their idiocies, but I can’t resist today.

Who has the last laugh now?

For those who’ve passed to the Elysian Fields . . .

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

The Hoover, called up to beat, sweep, and clean the Elysian Fields.

Once upon a time, Hall of Famers Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford stood in Yankee Stadium on an Old-Timer’s Day and watched a video board presentation of former Yankees who’d gone to the Elysian Fields that year to date. Berra turned to his old battery mate and said, “Boy, I hope I never see my name up there.”

Mr. Yogi went there in 2015; the Chairman of the Board, three years ago. Their ranks now serene and happy in the presence of the Lord have swollen, as inevitably if sadly they must, by several this year, including a badly haunted former teammate, a Hall of Fame third baseman, an infamous umpire, and perhaps the rarest of baseball people—a likeable, even loveable owner. Among too many others.

Brooks Robinson (86) turned third base into a black hole for hundreds of hitters while maintaining such a sterling reputation as a person that his Day’s master of ceremonies told the crowd Baltimoreans didn’t name candy bars but their children after The Hoover. Frank Howard (87) was traded to the second Washington Senators for lefthanded pitcher Claude Osteen after the 1964 season, in the event the Dodgers’ Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax broke down into a once-a-week pitcher. The 6’7″ Howard became a Washington matinee idol who hit mammoth home runs (including a heartbreaker in the final Senators game before moving to Texas), and wore a nickname entirely contrary to his friendly, gentle-giant personality. (Capital Punishment.) “By the time you learn to play this game properly,” he observed as his career ended, “you can’t play anymore.”

“No one,” George F. Will once observed, “has ever paid money to go to a major league baseball game in order to see the team’s owner.” The exception might have been Peter Seidler (63), who was so beloved in San Diego that Padres fans could be seen wearing team jerseys with his name on the back as often as with assorted Padres players. “He brought passion to that fan base,” Brewers owner Mark Attanasio said of him, “and that’s as loud a crowd as you will ever hear.”

Joe Pepitone (82) was the shakiest 1960s Yankee, a haunted, self-immolating young man produced by a ferociously abusive father, a talented first baseman (three Gold Gloves and All-Star teams) whose inner turmoil and outer taste for night life and carnal knowledge helped him trash marriages, friendships, and family ties, until he finally sought and acceped the proper help late enough in life to repair most of those family relationships. A later-generation Yankee, George Frazier (68), was the last pitcher to be saddled with three losses in the same World Series (1981) and the cleverest to defend himself against charges of chicanery on the mound: “I don’t use foreign substances. Everything I use is made in the U.S. of A.”

Jesús Alou (80) was a serviceable utility outfielder, one of the first three brothers to patrol the same outfield as Giants, and the answer to a San Francisco graffitist’s gospel trivia question. (Jesus is the Answer! What’s the question? Who’s Felipe and Matty’s kid brother?) His immediate contemporary Vic Davalillo (84) won one Gold Glove, two World Series rings (1971 Pirates, 1973 Athletics), turned up number 32 on my own survey of the 33 best pinch hitters of all time (300+ plate appearances in the role), and married his second wife over the telephone.

Jesus (left), Matty (center), and Felipe Alou: Jesus is The Answer! What’s the question? Who’s Felipe and Matty’s kid brother?

Albie Pearson (88) would tell you Jesus is the answer without being pushy or obnoxious about it, waiting until someone asked him before speaking of it. Known as “The Littlest Angel” during his tenure with the original Angels (“I think he’ll be an archaeological find,” Angels coach Rocky Bridges said of him), the 5’5″ outfielder looked good enough (he was a tough strikeout, a 1958 Rookie of the Year, and a 1963 All-Star) until back trouble shortened his career—and sent him to a second life as an ordained Baptist minister and, especially, the co-founder (with his wife) of Father’s Heart Ranch in southern California, devoted to abused and abandoned boys between six and twelve.

Vida Blue’s (73) reward for pitching his way onto a Time cover and into a Cy Young Award and a Most Valuable Player Award with 301 strikeouts and a league-leading 1.82 ERA 1971 was to be told by A’s owner Charlie Finley, during contract talks, I know all that. And if I was you, I would ask for the same thing. [A $100,000 salary—JK.] And you deserve it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you. It yanked Blue inside-out, nearly destroyed his love of the game (despite becoming the first pitcher to start All-Star Games for each league), and left him and too many to wonder what might have been before he kicked substance addiction in retirement and became a Bay Area philanthropist.

Blue’s teammate on the Swingin’ A’s of the early 1970s, third baseman Sal Bando (78) was considered the soul of those teams, a solid third baseman underrated for his fine defense and quick to defuse trouble whether from the front office or in his own clubhouse. (The godfather. Capo de capo, boss of all bosses . . . Sal was the leader and everyone knew it.—Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson.) The bad news was that, as the American League’s overall player rep in 1980, Bando—eventually the Brewers’ general manager—voted against including short-career, pre-1980 major leaguers in the pension plan realignment that meant full pensions after 43 days’ major league service time and full health benefits after one day’s service time.

Tim McCarver (81) let black Cardinals teammates (especially his eventual longtime friend Bob Gibson) teach him with wit as well as wisdom about race, became a personal favourite catcher to a pair of Hall of Fame pitchers (Gibson and, in St. Louis and Philadelphia, Steve Carlton), then became a Frick Award-winning Hall of Fame broadcaster whose own wit married to his deft analyses instructed as well as delighted several generations of fans. (Before he made his Hall of Fame speech, McCarver would remember, “I saw Frank Robinson at breakfast and said, ‘I’ll try to be brief.’ He said, ‘You?'”)

Jack Baldschun (86) was Gene Mauch’s favourite relief pitcher on the early 1960s Phillies, with a nasty screwball he’d learned to throw without arm stress and with excellent results . . . until he wasn’t, during the ill-fated 1964 season that saw the Phillies bring veteran Ed Roebuck aboard and both Mauch and general manager John Quinn lose confidence in him inexplicably. They traded Baldschun to the Orioles and he was an Oriole for 72 hours—long enough to be part of the package that brought the Orioles Frank Robinson from the Reds. His career never the same again (he suffered what he called “arm lock” while in Cincinnati and spent his final seasons in the minors except for a 1969 with the newborn Padres: “I felt like a man serving time for a crime he didn’t commit”), he retired to lumber sales and family life.

“I felt like a man serving time for a crime he didn’t commmit.”—Jack Baldschun.

Nate Colbert (76) was plucked from the Astros organisation for the 1969 expansion draft and became the Padres’ first genuine star (he averaged 30+ home runs a season), tying one record and setting another with five bombs and thirteen steaks in a 1972 doubleheader, but saw his career curtailed by chronic back trouble after five years as a Padres then two years in three towns. (Detroit, Montreal, Oakland.) He remains the franchise’s career home run leader (173) and—after one dicey scrape involving fraudulent loan applications and six months in prison—reclaimed his post baseball life as a minister.

Dick Groat (92) was a slick shortstop, the National League’s Most Valuable Player as a member of the World Series-winning 1960 Pirates, and eventually held the same job without winning the same award for the World Series-winning 1964 Cardinals. Bob Garibaldi* (81) resisted the personal recruitment of Casey Stengel for the Mets to sign with the Giants, pitch in fifteen games over four seasons, then (after long years in the minors) become a college basketball referee. Pat Corrales (82) was a reserve catcher, major league manager (the first Mexican to have such a job), and well enough respected as a man that, when his first wife died giving birth to their fourth child in 1969, Frank Robinson ordered all the fines collected by his kangaroo court in the Baltimore clubhouse to be given to him instead of used for the usual season-ending party. (Corrales remarried happily soon enough.)

Wayne Comer* (79) was a 1968 Tiger (usually a late game replacement for outfield star Willie Horton; he got a base hit in his lone World Series plate appearance), a 1969 Seattle Pilot (his 3.2 wins above replacement tied for the team lead), a 1970 Brewer, and a respected high school baseball coach in his native Virginia. He was also the subject of a hilarious attempted game ejection in the minors: an umpire assumed Comer was giving him the business from the team bullpen and ordered him ejected, whereupon the team’s manager told the arbiter, “You’re going to have to yell louder. We sent Comer to Detroit this morning.”

Dennis Ribant (81) was the first Mets pitcher to finish in the National League’s ERA top ten (in 1966) and with a winning season’s record. (11-9, also 1966.) His reward was being traded after that season—to make room for a kid named Seaver. His ill fortune resumed in 1968, when—reduced to journeyman relief work by then—he was one of only three Tigers who was actually native to Detroit (catcher Bill Freehan and outfielder Lenny Green were the others) . . . but he got little enough work and was traded to the White Sox late that July. After several more seasons of being traded and put into the minors at once (he was once traded for legendary pitcher-playboy Bo Belinsky), the righthander who once admitted “experimenting” with a spitball despite learning a good changeup from Hall of Famer Warren Spahn retired to life insurance, living in Newport Beach, and (with his daughter, Tracy) winning the Equitable Family Tennis Championship at Forest Hills in 1983.

Tim Wakefield: Knuckleball inspired a catcher to use a first baseman’s mitt. Narcissistic teammate denied his right to fight his illness privately.

Willie Hernández (69) won the American League’s 1984 Cy Young Award and MVP as the World Series-winning Tigers’ relief king with his 1.92 ERA. Two years later, he blew his popularity in Detroit during a struggling season when a critical Mitch Albom column provoked Hernández to dump a bucket of ice water over Albom’s head. Elbow trouble put paid to his pitching career before he had a second successful act as the owner of a steel construction business and cattle ranch in his native Puerto Rico, before his health (including multiple strokes) hit bottom.

Tim Wakefield (57) was a class act, a good knuckleball pitcher (his floater was tough enough to inspire one of his catchers to use a first baseman’s mitt behind the plate), who picked himself up, dusted himself off, started all over again after surrendering a pennant-losing home run (to Aaron Boone in 2003), and became a key to the Red Sox’s 2004 drought-busting triumph at last. Beloved in Boston, Wakefield and his wife were also done dirty by a 2004 Red Sox rotation mate who decided their choice to fight two insidious diseases together out of the public eye wasn’t their choice to make.

Ken MacKenzie (89) was the first Mets pitcher who could call himself a Yalie. An Original Met, the bespectacled MacKenzie was once brought into a deep jam with manager Stengel telling him, “Now, just pretend you’re pitching against Harvard.” (As a Yale pitcher, MacKenzie’s record against Harvard was 6-0.) Roger Craig (93) turned ignominy as an Original Met (an eighteen-game losing streak in 1963 despite often solid pitching) into a later life as a messenger of the split-fingered fastball and a World Series-winning manager. (The “Hum Baby” 1989 Giants.) Their Original Met battery mate (for a short while), Hobie Landrith (93) landed me two crates of oranges for winning a sports radio trivia contest long after he performed his greatest service to those Mets: being traded for Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

Ken MacKenzie: Yale Class of 1956; Original Mets Class of 1962-63: “Now just pretend you’re pitching against Harvard.”

Yet two more Original Mets—Frank (The Big Donkey) Thomas (93) and Joe Christopher (97) factored in a couple of classic Metsian mishaps: Christopher had to tell Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn how to holler “I got it!” in Spanish to keep shortstop Elio Chacon from plowing into him on short flies to the shallow outfield. The first time Ashburn hollered Yo la tengo, yo la tengo, Chacon backed away . . . but Thomas, the Mets’ first home run king (34 in 1962), running in from left field, plowed into Ashburn instead. The passings of Christopher, Craig, Landrith, MacKenzie, and Thomas leave only nine men standing at this writing who served sentences as Original Mets and still live to tell about it.

Don Denkinger (86) developed a sense of humour about his hour of infamy, blowing the call at first base in the top of the ninth of Game Six, 1985 World Series. (He called the Royals’ Jorge Orta safe when everyone in the ballpark and watching on television saw Orta was out by a full step plus.) He also proved a better man than most calling for his prompt execution: he not only owned the mistake but, in due course, advocated powerfully enough for the proper resolution: replay review in the postseason.

His umpiring career went forward with little enough controversy. And, with distinction: he was behind the plate for Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan’s sixth no-hitter, Hall of Famer Jack Morris’s 1991 World Series jewel, and Kenny Rogers’s 1994 perfect game. (Having also called Len Barker’s 1981 perfecto, he’s the only ump to call the pitches for two perfect games.)

But Denkinger showed baseball and the world the right way to atone for a grievous error. (And, no, it wasn’t his fault the Cardinals went from the Game Six loss to imploding completely in Game Seven, either.) It’s a lesson only too many umpires (and non-baseball people, for that matter) could stand to learn, and re-learn.

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* Garibaldi and Comer were two of the now 500+ short-career major leaguers denied pensions in the 1980 pension realignment.

The Hawk wants to flip his lid

Posted on December 2, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks Robinson, RIP: Swept up to the Elysian Fields

Posted on September 26, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

Nothing got past The Hoover too often in two decades at third base.

When Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson celebrated his 83rd birthday, I couldn’t resist having a little mad fun with his nickname, actual or reputed. Commonly known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner, I recalled longtime Washington Post writer Thomas Boswell calling him The Hoover.

Considering how he beat, swept, and cleaned at third base for two decades, I thought Boswell had it more dead on. So did Reds first baseman Lee May during the 1970 World Series. May first called Robinson—who died at 86 on Tuesday—the Human Vacuum Cleaner at that time. Then, May asked, right away, “Where do they plug Mr. Hoover in?”

Anyway, I thought of other great fielders at third and otherwise. Almost none of them were quite on Robinson’s plane. (“I’m beginning to see Brooks in my sleep,” lamented Reds manager Sparky Anderson during that Series. “I’m afraid if I drop this paper plate, he’ll pick it up on one hop and throw me out at first.”) But they were some of the best their positions ever hosted.

Fellow Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt combined breathtaking power at the plate with his own kind of sweeping and cleaning at third. Considering that plus his sculpted physique, I thought that, for him, it could only be the classic Electrolux, the sleek tank vacuums of 1924-2004.

You couldn’t possibly top The Wizard of Oz for Ozzie Smith at shortstop, but I tried. For him, I designated Aero-Dyne, the model name of Hoover’s first tank-style vacuum cleaner. Nor could you possibly top Graig Nettles’s actual nickname, Puff the Magic Dragon, and I was kind enough not to try. But for others, I came up with things like these:

The Constellation—Roberto Clemente. Hoover’s once-famous, Saturn-shaped canister, born as a swivel-top in 1951, seems to fit Clemente since it often seemed that his ways of running balls down and cutting baserunners down did emanate from somewhere beyond this galaxy.

The Courier—Andruw Jones. That machine was Sunbeam’s brilliant 1966 idea of stuffing vacuum cleaner works into what resembled a Samsonite hard-shell suitcase. Jones traveled so many routes so well becoming baseball’s all-time run-preventive center fielder that you could only think of him as the Courier delivering messages of doom to opposition swingers and runners.

The ElectrikBroom—Keith Hernandez. Mex was as sculpted at first as Schmidt was at third. As vacuum cleaners went, the classic Regina ElectrikBroom was the Bounty paper towel of its time: the quicker picker upper. That was Hernandez at first base.

Eureka—Ken Griffey, Jr. Tell me you saw him turn center field into his personal playground and making spectacular catches without thinking, “Eureka!”

The Hoover Junior—Mark Belanger. Robinson’s longtime partner at shortstop and the second most run-preventive player at his position ever behind The Wiz. The only reason he won’t be in the Hall of Fame is because he couldn’t hit if you held his family for ransom.

The Kirby—Kirby Puckett. Should be bloody obvious.

The Premier—Johnny Bench. Should be self explanatory if you saw him behind the plate. (After watching Robinson’s third base mastery against his team in that 1970 Series, Bench quipped of his MVP award, “If he wanted the [MVP prize] car that badly, we’d have given it to him.”)

The Roto-Matic—Clete Boyer. That Yankee third base acrobat moved around so much cutting balls off at the third base pass you could have mistaken him for the swiveling hose atop Eureka’s canister cleaner of the same name.

The Royal—Curt Flood. The king of defensive center fielders when Mays began to show his age. (Maybe it should have been a wet-dry vac, since it was said so often that three-quarters of the earth is covered with water and the rest was covered by Flood.)

The Swivel-Top—Willie Mays. That General Electric canister of the early 1950s boasted of giving you “reach-easy” cleaning, and Mays was nothing if not the reach-easy center fielder of his time.

There was more to Robinson, of course, than just his third base hoovering. There was the decency that enabled this white son of Little Rock, Arkansas, to welcome African-American son of Oakland, California by way of Beaumont, Texas Frank Robinson, upon the latter’s controversial trade out of Cincinnati after the 1965 season. “Frank,” Brooks said, “you’re exactly what we need.”

Brooks Robinson and his wife, Connie, at the dedication of Brooks Robinson Dr. in Pikesville, Maryland, just off the Baltimore Beltway, in 2007. The Hoover and the stewardess whose feet he swept her off aboard a 1959 flight to Boston were married 63 years.

There were the eighteen All-Star Games, the sixteen straight Gold Gloves, the 1964 American League Most Valuable Player award, the 1970 World Series MVP. (Forgotten amidst the beating, sweeping, and cleaning at third base that Series: The Hoover hit a whopping .429 with his plate demolition including two home runs.)

There were the 39.1 defensive wins above replacement level (WAR) and the 105 OPS+, making Robinson one of only two players ever to have 30+ dWAR and an OPS+ over 100. The other? Fellow Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr.

There was the end of his career, the final two seasons when the Orioles essentially carried him despite his diminution at the plate and his age-reduced range at third—simply because a) they thought so well of him as a man, and b) they knew he needed the money. Bad. And he wouldn’t in position to benefit from the advent of free agency.

He was broke and in debt thanks to his off-season sporting goods business. Not because he made mistakes but because he was taken advantage of. “At every turn,” Boswell wrote (in The Heart of the Order), “Robinson’s flaw had been an excess of generosity.”

How could he send a sporting goods bill to a Little League team that was long overdue in paying for its gloves? He’d keep anybody on the cuff forever. Said Robinson’s old friend Ron Hansen [one-time Orioles middle infielder], “He just couldn’t say no.” As creditors dunned him and massive publicity exposed his plight, Robinson answered every question, took all the blame (including plenty that wasn’t his), and refused to declare bankruptcy. He was determined to pay back every cent. With great embarrassment, he returned tens of thousands of dollars that fans spontaneously sent him in the mail to soften his fall.

When the Orioles gave him a Thanks Brooks Day upon his 1977 retirement, the master of ceremonies was Associated Press writer Gordon Beard. “Around here,” he said, “people don’t name candy bars after Brooks Robinson. They name their children after him.”

This was the fellow who’d autograph anything proffered—including, it’s been said, a pet rock and a bra. A fellow who so appreciated what he was able to do for a living for his first two decades of adulthood that, when the end came nigh, he could only be grateful for having been there at all.

“Every player I’ve ever managed,” cantankerous Orioles manager Earl Weaver told Boswell, “blamed me at the end, not himself. They all ripped me and said they weren’t washed up. All except Brooks. He never said one word and he had more clout in Baltimore than all of them. He never did anything except with class. He made the end easier for everybody.”

Robinson in retirement climbed out of his financial hole well enough, becoming a popular localised Orioles broadcaster in the 1980s with a flair for candid and perceptive analysis even when it meant being critical. If he lacked anything in those years, it was ambition. He never sought to manage in baseball and he never sought a national audience on the air, but he did have partial ownership of a pair of minor league teams for a time.

The Orioles have retired only six uniform numbers and one is Robinson’s number 5. His statue looms inside Camden Yards, where the Orioles and the Nationals observed a moment of silence before Tuesday night’s game, lined up outside their dugouts, in respect. The American League East-leading Orioles beat the Nats, 1-0.

Robinson also served as chairman of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association’s board of directors. If there’s any single blemish on his resumé, it’s that he didn’t move the group toward helping to gain redress for pre-1980 short-career players frozen out of the 1980 pension re-alignment. “He dropped the ball, says A Bitter Cup of Coffee author Douglas Gladstone. “He never went to bat for them, many of whom were his teammates.”

In recent years, the first-ballot Hall of Famer dealt with health issues such as prostate cancer (he 32 radiation treatments), a subsequent followup surgery, and a fall that hospitalised him with a shoulder fracture in 2012. He also became an Orioles special advisor, insisting that it be tied to community events. He was quoted as telling owner John Angelos he’d do anything except make baseball decisions: “That’s passed me by, if you want to know the truth.”

The only love deeper than baseball in Robinson’s life was his wife, Connie, whom he met in 1959 aboard an Orioles flight to Boston when she was a stewardess on board. (They married in 1960.) When he auctioned off his volume of remaining memorabilia (My children, they have everything they ever wanted from my collection), the proceeds went to a foundation the couple established for worthy Baltimore causes, a Baltimore adopted son to the end.

Now The Hoover will beat, sweep, and clean the Elysian Fields. He might even pick up a paper plate and throw Sparky Anderson out at first.

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.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Tag Archives: National Baseball Hall of Fame