Willie Mays, RIP: Loss, but Gratitude

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Mays hitting his 500th career home run, in 1965. “He has gone past me,” Ted Williams would say at his own Hall of Fame induction, after Mays hit number 522, “and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie’.”

Seeing Willie Mays in my boyhood when he was a Giant still in his prime was as transcendent as seeing him in his baseball dotage, as a late-career Met, was heartbreaking. Having Mays at all back in the city where he really made his baseball bones was as much a belated blessing as having him too much less than his best was sorrow. But . . .

“What do you love most about baseball?” asked Joe Posnanski, in The Baseball 100. (He ranked Mays number one.) Then, he answered. “Mays did that. To watch him play, to read the stories about how he played, to look at his glorious statistics, to hear what people say about him is to be reminded why we love this odd and ancient game in the first place.

“Yes, Willie Mays has always made kids feel like grown-ups and grown-ups feel like kids. In the end, isn’t that the whole point of baseball?”

But having Mays say farewell the way he did in Shea Stadium on 25 September 1973, with the Mets still yanking themselves back to take a none-too-strong National League East, brought tears not just of loss but of gratitude. If so few of the greats retire before the game retires them, fewer than that retire with Mays’s soul depth:

I hope that with my farewell tonight, you will understand what I’m going through right now. Something that—I never feel that I would ever quit baseball. But as you know, there always comes a time for someone to get out. And I look at the kids over here [pointing toward his Mets teammates], the way they are playing, and the way they are fighting for themselves, tells me one thing: Willie, say goodbye to America.

America never really said goodbye. Now America must say a reluctant au revoir. Mays left this island earth at 93 Tuesday. “I want to thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart for the unwavering love you have shown him over the years,” said his son, Michael, in a statement. “You have been his life’s blood.”

We’ve been his life’s blood? The younger Mays had it backward. His father was the lifeblood of every objective and appreciative baseball fan of his time. He didn’t have to wear the uniform of the team for which I rooted since their birth (not right away, anyway) to be that for me, in hand with Sandy Koufax, and believe me when I tell you that watching Koufax going mano a mano against Mays was something precious to behold.

(For the record, Mays faced Koufax 122 times and nailed 27 hits. Five were home runs, eight were doubles, one was a triple, for 33 percent extra bases off the Hall of Fame lefthander. Mays also wrung 25 walks out of him while striking out 20 times.)

Before Mays’s Giants and Koufax’s Dodgers high tailed it out of Manhattan and Brooklyn for the west coast, the most bristling debates in New York involved not politics, finance, or rush-hour traffic, but baseball. As in, whom among the three Hall of Fame center fielders patrolling the territory for each team was The Best of the Breed.

I was born in the Bronx and raised there and on Long Island; I heard the debates for years to follow after the Dodgers and the Giants went west. I had skin enough in that game long before Terry Cashman wrote and recorded his charming hit, “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke (Talkin’ Baseball).” Well, now. Let’s look at the trio during their New York baseball lives two ways, for all the seasons they played in New York together. (Snider was a four-year major league veteran by the time Mays and Mantle arrived in 1951.)

First, according to my Real Batting Average metric (total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances):

Together In New York	PA	TB	BB	IBB	SF	HBP	RBA
Mickey Mantle	3493	1648	524	34	11	5	.636
Willie Mays	3299	1718	362	70	23	11	.662
Duke Snider	2629	1305	283	42	6	7	.625

Mays has a 26-point RBA advantage over Mantle and that’s with Mays losing over a season and a half to military service. (Mantle’s osteomyelitic legs kept him out of military service; Snider served in the Navy before his major league days began.) Mays also landed 70 more total bases and was handed 36 more intentional walks.

Mantle may have been a powerful switch hitter, but just from one side of the plate Mays outperformed him while they shared New York even with precious lost major league time between ages 21-23. Mantle also had a .756 stolen base percentage to Mays’s .738, but a) Mantle’s already compromised legs kept him from trying more often; and, b) Mays led his league in thefts twice during the period under review. (Snider? Even a hobbled Mantle left him behind: for their shared New York years, his stolen base percentage was .586.)

Sometimes Mantle gets the props as the best of the trio purely because his Yankees were far better teams than the others’. Actually, Snider’s Dodgers were almost as good as Mantle’s Yankees. It was no more Snider’s fault that his Dodgers couldn’t get over those Yankee humps until 1955 than it was Mantle’s sole doing that his Yankees won seven pennants and five World Series (three consecutively) while they shared the Big Apple.

And it was hardly Mays’s fault that his Giants won a mere two pennants in the same shared span, even if Mays’s Giants got squashed by the Yankees in five in the 1951 Series but swept the far better Indians in the 1954 Series. You may have heard of a little play known as The Catch from Game One of that Series, happening when it seemed the Indians had a shot at taking the opener. (Mays would play on two more pennant winners, too, the 1962 Giants—who beat the Dodgers in another memorable pennant playoff—and the 1973 Mets.)

“The Catch,” of course—460+ feet from home plate in the ancient Polo Grounds.

“That really wasn’t that great of a catch,” harrumphed curmudgeonly Indians pitcher Bob Feller, nearing the end of his own Hall of Fame career. What made him think not? “As soon as it was hit, everyone on our bench knew that he was going to catch it . . . because he is Willie Mays.” (But did they know Mays would also keep Hall of Famer Larry Doby from scoring with an equally staggering throw in to the infield off The Catch?)

Which brings me to the titanic triumvirate in center field. We’re going to look at them according to total zone runs, the number of runs their play in center field turned out above or below their leagues’ averages. Baseball-Reference begins measuring total zone runs with the 1953 season, so we’ll have five solid Big Apple seasons to review for each of the trio:

Willie Mays: +45.
Mickey Mantle: +22.
Duke Snider: +25.

Once again you see where Mantle’s physical health issues got in his way despite his supernatural talent and skill. But it might not have mattered. Mays and Mantle both played in unconscionably deep home center fields before the Giants and the Dodgers left the Apple for 1958. You can fantasise all you like how many runs Mantle might have prevented on good legs, but if you guess that he might have proven just about even you’re making a solid guess.

“Willie Mays going after a fly ball was cotton candy and a carousel and fireworks and a big band playing all at once,” Posnanski wrote. “His athletic genius was in how every movement expressed sheer delight.”

When Mays got to San Francisco, he and Mantle continued their top of the line play. When he got to Los Angeles, Snider had two decent seasons followed by a decline phase that actually took him back to New York for a round with the early Mets before finishing his career in 1964 as . . . a Giant, of all things.

Mantle managed to remain Mantle through the end of 1964. Mays managed to remain Mays through at least 1971. Even if his home run power had dissipated somewhat in the previous four seasons, he spent 1971—at age 40—leading the National League in walks and on-base percentage. Mantle’s body took him out at last at age 36; Mays’s, at age 42; Snider’s, at age 37.

And here is how the trio finished career-wise. First, how they sit among the Hall of Fame center fielders whose careers covered the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era, according to RBA:

Center Field	PA	TB	BB	IBB	SF	HBP	RBA
Mickey Mantle	9907	4511	1733	148	47	13	.651
Willie Mays	12496	6066	1464	214	91	44	.631
Ken Griffey, Jr.	11304	5271	1312	246	102	81	.620
Duke Snider	8237	3865	971	154	54	21	.615
Larry Doby	6299	2621	871	60	39	38	.576
Andre Dawson	10769	4787	589	143	118	111	.534
Kirby Puckett	7831	3453	450	85	58	56	.524
Richie Ashburn	9736	3196	1198	40	30	43	.463
HOF CF AVG							.588

But now, how they sit among center fielders for run prevention above their league averages, showing the top ten:

Andruw Jones +230
Willie Mays +176
Paul Blair +171
Jimmy Piersall +128
Kenny Lofton +117
Devon White +112
Carlos Beltrán +104
Willie Davis +103
Curt Flood +99
Garry Maddox +98

Thanks to his leg and hip issues, Mantle finished his career at -10. Snider finished his at -7; his late career was compromised by knee, back, and arm injuries. (Richie Ashburn, their great Hall of Fame contemporary, finished his career +39.) Two such talented center fielderss who’d had excellent throwing arms and range deserved far better than such physical betrayals.

Mays stood alone as the complete, long-enough uncompromised, all-around package. He was blessed with a body that wasn’t in a big hurry to betray him, but no blessing means a thing if you don’t take it forward. Good luck stopping Mays from doing so. Should-be Hall of Famer Dick Allen once advised Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt to play the game as though he were still the kid who’d gladly skip supper to play ball. Mays played the game precisely that way until age began to say “not so fast,” after all.

“The greats don’t always go gently into that good gray night when they can no longer play the games that made their names,” I wrote when Mays turned 90.

This son of an Alabama industrial league ballplayer fought a small war in his soul when his age insisted he was no longer able to play the game he loved so dearly at the level on which he’d played it for so many years. Some said he’d become sullen, moody, dismissive in the clubhouse. Some resented him, others felt for him, still others mourned.

. . . When he smiled as a Met, you still saw him in his youth, you didn’t see the manchild who was yanked rudely into manhood by a San Francisco that shocked him with skepticism as a New York import rather than a hero of their own. By a San Francisco that also shocked him, for all its reputation otherwise, when his bid to buy a home with his first wife was obstructed long enough by the sting of neighbourhood racism.

Mays taken for a drive around PacBell Park in a 1956 Oldsmobile to celebrate his 90th birthday. San Francisco came to love him as New York did, but not without growing pains.

After his first marriage ended in divorce and in his son living across country with his mother, Mays dated Mae Louise Allen for about a decade before marrying her after the 1971 season. His happiness there was compromised by her premature Alzheimer’s diagnosis; his caring for her until her death in 2013 is the stuff of true love stories.

A welcome presence at the Hall of Fame’s induction ceremonies following his own in 1979 and at various Giants events (and numerous home games) in the years that followed, Mays wouldn’t be able to attend this year’s Field of Dreams game at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, the field where he first played with the Birmingham Black Barons of the old Negro American League.

“I’d like to be there, but I don’t move as well as I used to,” he said in a statement on Monday. “So I’m going to watch from my home. But it will be good to see that. I’m glad that the Giants, Cardinals and MLB are doing this, letting everyone get to see pro ball at Rickwood Field. Good to remind people of all the great ball that has been played there, and all the players. All these years and it is still here. So am I. How about that?” A day later, sadly, he was gone.

Mays never apologised for making the game look fun with his fabled basket catches in front of his belt, his winging turns running the bases as his deliberately oversized hat flew off, his high-pitched voice sounding like a kid getting to play yet another inning.

“That’s what his idea was,” said one-time Giants relief pitcher Stu Miller, “to please the crowd.”

“I’m not sure what the hell charisma is,” said Ted Kluszewski, the musclebound Reds first baseman of the 1950s, “but I get the feeling it’s Willie Mays.”

“The only thing Willie Mays could not do on a baseball diamond,” Posnanski wrote, “was stay young forever.”

May his entry into the Elysian Fields, where it’s Willie, Mickey, and the Duke once again, and especially his reunion with his beloved Mae, have been as joyous for him as the way he played the game was joyous to us for as long as we were honoured to see him play.

Do better, Met fans

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Max Weiner, hoisted by the fan group Metsmerized Online, in the image that stirred SNY’s Andy Martino to outrage. Weiner didn’t call himself the Rally Pimp, so far as we know.

A Mets fan named Max Weiner has been turning up often at Citi Field of late. This would not be great news except that Weiner has a thing for appearing in assorted garish haberdashery at least some of which appears comparable to that worn by actual, professional pimps, and he has become a symbol of the Mets’ in-season resurgence.

Identity unearthed by the Mets fan group known as The 7 Line, Weiner has been tagged colloquially as the Rally Pimp by fans; he may not have assumed the nickname for himself. But he and they have stirred up a small social media storm, particularly since the Mets have gone 9-3 since his first known appearance at the park following a 1-5 season opening that included losing their first five straight.

We’ve become coldly accustomed to “pimp” as a verb referencing the bat flips and other celebratory displays upon home runs long and longer or theatrical plays in the field. It’s sobering to think that those deploying it so casually may have too little comprehension about the word’s actual, core meaning, in times when baseball’s handlings of domestic violence and sexual assault matters stir contradictory but deeply troublesome passions.

The deployers aren’t just fans any longer; you can hear some broadcasters and journalists use it with the same casual carelessness. But one journalist, SNY’s Andy Martino, author of Cheated, one of a pair of excellent books conjugating the Astros’ illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign stealings of 2017-18, isn’t amused one feather by the Rally Pimp idea. Saying so has gotten him a few rounds of social media abuse.

“Pimp imagery is problematic on so many levels,” Martino Xtweeted, after spying and re-Xtweeting a previous Xtweet from a Mets fan account a photo of Mr. Weiner in a purple fur jacket and large gold-looking chain around his neck holding the Mets’ interlocking NY cap logo at the chain’s end. “Let’s think about it for 2 seconds. Can we please not make this a big part of the 2024 Mets’ imagery? Cue replies about woke culture blah blah. I don’t care, I’m right about this.”

We don’t really know whether Weiner called himself the Rally Pimp or whether the tag was attached to him by zealous Met fans. It certainly didn’t help Martino to say flatly at the finish, “I don’t care, I’m right about this.” But Martino has a point. To tag such haberdashery that way above others, you might (must?) first ask how much you know about the actual doings of actual pimps. Reclaiming Hope, a group dedicated to caring for the survivors of sex trafficking, offers as clear a definition as you might ask of the pimp and his operating style:

Traffickers are often referred to as “Master Manipulators”. They use a variety of tactics to recruit victims and pimps are many times classified as (1) “A Romeo” pimp or someone who portrays himself as a “boyfriend” who loves her and will take care of her, or (2) A “guerilla” pimp who controls through force.

The modern day pimp/trafficker initially seems like a very nice guy who cares deeply about their victims. Then the manipulation and threats begin. One of the most powerful ways traffickers keep their victims controlled is by the trauma bond that develops between the victim and trafficker. Victims are controlled by their pimp through repeated beatings, rapes, drug dependency, withholding of food and sleep, debt bondage, isolation, and psychological abuse, which can include threats against family or friends.

Sex trafficking is a high profit, low risk business with a relatively small risk of a pimp going to prison for human trafficking. Additionally, their “product” can be sold repeatedly, unlike drugs or weapons, where the product can only be sold one time. The faces of victims know no ethnic, religious or social-economic boundaries.

Considering that baseball’s last few seasons have been pockmarked by several players and even front office personnel tagged and disciplined for domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse, bringing “pimp” to bear as a term of endearment for a particular and colourfully expressive on-field celebration or a particular and colourfully expressive fan in the stands is described most civilly as grotesque.

More agreeably, the Mets have gone 10-3 since that season-opening five-game losing streak. They’ve done it against teams seen as contenders in the early going, though some may think it debatable that the like of the Reds (from whom they took two of three), the Royals (two of three likewise), and the Pirates (a three-game sweep) will go the distance that way.

Why soil it by attaching to one hideously if demonstrably dressed fan in particular a colloquialism that emanates from a profession whose victims often incur damage even more deranged than those victims of the Roberto Osunas, Aroldis Chapmans, Domingo Germáns, Trevor Bauers, Sam Dysons, Julio Uríases, Wander Francos?

This Met fan since the day they were born urges: Do better, Met fans. Weiner’s costumery is also the type that might be seen wrapped around the bodies of contemporary rock, pop, and hip-hop musicians. Would “Rally Rocker” have had insufficient thrust?

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.

Gooden’s number retirement gives pause

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Whether throwing his multi-movement fastball or the curve ball known as “Lord Charles,” Dwight Gooden owned hitters and electrified Met fans in 1984-86.

A week ago, Stephen Strasburg finally got to make official what was determined last August and bungled almost at once: his retirement. A career worth of elbow and shoulder issues, brought to a head and then by thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS).

The former Nationals righthander leaves memories of the number-one draft pick who delivered so-often-brilliant pitching, harsh struggles, a World Series MVP in 2019, and a deadly posteason pitching resumé. (1.46 lifetime postseason ERA; 2.07 lifetime postseason fielding-independent pitching.) He’s not the only pitcher with flawed mechanics who succumbed (in his case, the inverted-W arm positioning before delivering), and he won’t be the last.

But on Sunday, the Mets did honour to a pitcher for whom the craft came naturally, with mechanics unflawed resembling an elegant young assassin on the mound, but whom the Mets decided inexplicably was the unbroken pitcher who needed to be fixed.

They retired Dwight Gooden’s uniform number 16, forty years after his staggering Rookie of the Year season. It’s the eighth team number the Mets have retired. (Jackie Robinson’s 42 is retired MLB-wide.) And, other than that of 1969 Miracle Mets manager Gil Hodges, it may contain the saddest story. Hodges’s time on the Mets’ bridge ended with a fatal heart attack in spring 1972. Gooden was ruined by his own team.

“Had New York’s [spring 1986] decision makers been present in 1506 when Leonardo da Vinci was painting the Mona Lisa,” wrote Jeff Pearlman in The Bad Guys Won, “they would have insisted on a mustache and larger ears. Here they had Gooden, called ‘the most dominant young pitcher since Walter Johnson’ by Sports Illustrated, and it wasn’t good enough.”

That spring, Gooden stood as the National League’s defending Cy Young Award winner approaching his third major league season. In his first, he pitched a Rookie of the Year season leading the entire Show with 276 strikeouts (smashing Herb Score’s rookie strikeout record in the bargain), a 1.69 fielding-independent pitching rate (FIP), a 1.07 walks/hits per inning pitched rate (WHIP), and an 11.4 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He saw and raised in his second season: he led the Show with 268 strikeouts, a 229 ERA+, and a 2.13 FIP, while being credited with a Show-leading 24 wins and 1.53 ERA.

And, over those first two seasons, Gooden became a Mets matineé idol while leaving National League batters (not to mention the American League side he struck out in the 1984 All-Star Game) wondering what became of their lumber: opposing batters hit .201 against the tapered young black man they called Dr. K.

Nobody could hit him. And he threw as though he was born to it. Every movement was both elegant and unforced, from his small windup (lifting his hands to his face) to his high-enough leg kick, his turn to hide the ball behind his right thigh, before throwing almost purely overhand and striding to the plate, in near-perfect timing, as though taking a long, unhurried step over a rain puddle.

He never looked uncomfortable. He never looked as though forcing a pitch. He threw a fastball with more movement than a dance company. He threw a curve ball with such a big trajectory that the pitch normally called Uncle Charlie was called Lord Charles when Gooden threw it. It was the third most voluptuous curve ball I have ever seen, behind only those thrown by Hall of Famers Sandy Koufax and Bert Blyleven. They were the only pitches Gooden had, the only ones Gooden needed.

“Every game,” he’d come to remember about those first two seasons but 1985 in particular, “I could put the ball where I wanted it.” Every Gooden game, you could feel Met fans thinking to themselves: Strike out twenty! Win thirty! See you in Cooperstown, Doc!

Much later than that, alas, Gooden would come to look back upon those two seasons and wonder, with no disingenuousness, how he did it at all. He knew he’d set an ionospheric bar for himself. Someone within the Mets’ brain trusts decided, inexplicably, that the evidence meant nothing. The Mona Lisa needed the ‘stache and ear job, anyway.

It might have been pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, whom Perlman noted spent all 1985 marveling at Gooden and fantasised about what Gooden might do with another pitch or two: “That’s what he set out to do–teach the best pitcher in baseball to be better.” On the surface it sounds noble enough. But did Stottlemyre miss the memo saying you can’t improve on perfection?

“All through [spring training 1986],” Pearlman wrote, “Stottlemyre had Gooden toy with a changeup and a two-seam fastball, two pitches he did not throw. It was hard to watch. Gooden was a trouper, but the confidence he exuded on his fastball and curve ball never attached itself to the other pitches. He felt awkward and unsure.”

“I remember catching him one day in the bullpen and they were working with him on the two-seam,” said Mets backup catcher Ed Hearn. “I’m thinking, What the hell is this? He was a power pitcher with tons of movement, and they’re trying to teach him movement? What the hell for?”

“I always thought they should have left Doc alone,” said Hall of Fame catcher Gary Carter, who came to the Mets in 1985 and caught all but three of Gooden’s games. “Mel thought teaching him a third pitch would be to his advantage. But he didn’t need it. He needed someone to say, ‘Hey, you’ve been successful. Just keep going at it.’ But they didn’t’. I also think it hurt his shoulder. The pitches didn’t feel natural to Doc, and pitching was so natural to him. It just wasn’t smart.”

Emphasis added, because indeed Gooden did develop serious shoulder issues over the next several years.

The Mets’ general manager, Frank Cashen, also urged Gooden to shorten his leg kick the better to keep baserunners from taking off on him. Oh. You think a man against whom the league hits a whopping .201 has that much to worry about with baserunners? Assistant GM Joe McIlvaine went Cashen one worse: he told manager Davey Johnson, “If we can reduce Doc’s pitches, we can save his arm. He doesn’t need 200 strikeouts to succeed.”

Two hundred strikeouts is exactly what Gooden would deliver in 1986. He also delivered a 2.84 ERA but a 3.06 FIP, and the opposing on-base percentage jumped 24 points higher than in 1985. He’d pitch respectably in the 1986 National League Championship Series against the Astros; he’d get thumped twice by the Red Sox in the ’86 World Series. That year, Gooden no longer resembled the complete dominator he’d been in 1984-85.

Gooden did have an unconscionable workload for that young a pitcher: he may have thrown over 10,800 pitches in 1984-85, according to some reports, and that’s not including warmups before his starts or what he threw on his between-starts throwing days. Still. Look again at the comments of Hearn and Carter. That’s how a guy to whom pitching came that naturally, without apparent body stress other than the normal effects of pitching almost five hundred innings in the Show at ages 19-20, got compromised as badly as Gooden was.

There was one way where you could assign Gooden any blame for his reduction from off-the-charts great to merely good. He was known to be so pliant and accommodating, with his manager and coaches, and with the public (he was the no-questions-asked most popular Met on a team with several stars including Carter, Keith Hernandez, and Darryl Strawberry), that he left himself open to the wrong advice as well.

With former teammate Mookie Wilson to his right, under an umbrella, Gooden in the rain talks to the Citi Field audience: “My health is good, my mental health is good and today I get to retire as a Met. And I want all you guys to know, you guys are part of this. Thank you so much.”

“In the pursuit of excellence,” Pearlman wrote, “Gooden made a tremendous mistake. He listened to everyone.”

Thus a young man who resembled a scientifically-sculpted model for effortless, untaxing pitching was sent from Hall of Fame-great his first two seasons to merely a good pitcher who might brush up against greatness again now and then—for the rest of his 16-year major league career. He’d lead his league in only two categories ever again (FIP, 2.44; homers per nine, 0.4; both in 1989); he’d throw a no-hitter later in his career (as a Yankee).

From 1984-86, Gooden’s FIP was 2.31 and his ERA was 2.28. For the rest of his career: 3.95 ERA, 3.69 FIP. From ’84-’86: 9.0 K/9; 3.4 K/BB. The rest of his career: 6.8 K/9; 2.1 K/BB.

Gooden’s too-well-chronicled battles with substance abuse (which got him into rehab in early 1987, delaying his season’s beginning, and got him suspended for all 1995, in between which other reputed disgraces came and went) have obscured the true reasons why he was knocked down from a perch that pointed him to the Hall of Fame. Baseball Reference ranks him the number 87 starting pitcher ever. Being inside the top hundred is remarkable enough, considering what was done to him and what he began doing to himself, of course. And in that order.

Several of Gooden’s old Mets teammates came to do him honour Sunday afternoon, including a surprising Strawberry, who’d suffered a heart attack a month earlier and may not have been expected to make it. (“I had to be here for Doc,” Strawberry told a reporter. His own Mets number 18 will be retired in June.) Hernandez and Ron Darling, now two-thirds of the Mets’ respected television broadcast team, were there. So were relief pitchers Roger McDowell and Jesse Orosco, outfielder Mookie Wilson, third baseman Howard Johnson, and outfielder/pinch hitter Lee Mazzilli, among others. So was Carter’s widow, Sandra.

Gooden walked out to the field on a blue carpet, lined with people holding up K placards such as those hanging from the old Shea Stadium railing in the deep outfield seats, the old K Korner that tracked every Gooden strikeout during every Gooden game.

He thanked Citi Field fans and Mets owner Steve Cohen Sunday afternoon, the fans for standing by him through everything great, good, and bad, and Cohen—who’s been as enthusiastic about acknowledging Mets legends as the Wilpons were reluctant, previously—for enabling him to retire officially as a Met . . . almost a quarter century after he threw his last major league pitch.

Then, he threw a ceremonial first pitch to his grandson, Kaden.

Several times, Gooden’s big smile made him look once more like the child prodigy who owned baseball for two transdimensional seasons, the one whom the younger Denzel Washington might have portrayed on film with astonishing physical accuracy. The smile must have grown exponentially when the Mets did him further honour by beating the Royals, 2-1, in the Sunday afternoon game to follow.

But it also made me remember what the very regime that took the chance on Gooden so young did to him when they decided perfection was insufficient.

This essay was published originally at Sports Central.

Bud Harrelson, RIP: Don’t back down

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Perhaps unfairly, Bud Harrelson is remembered less for solid shortstop play than for getting plowed into an NLCS brawl by Pete Rose.

God rest her soul, my paternal grandmother (herself a victim of Alzheimer’s) called her favourite Met “my little cream puff.” The reference was to Bud Harrelson’s not-so-tall or large dimensions, surely. Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, a longtime Mets coach and their manager for three and two-third seasons, merely called him Shorty.

The only Met in uniform for both their World Series triumphs (as their starting shortstop in 1969, as their third base coach in 1986) was anything but a cream puff on the field. “Buddy was 150 pounds soaking wet,” his Hall of Fame teammate and best friend Tom Seaver remembered three decades later, “but he wouldn’t back down from anyone.”

Not even from Pete Rose, who plowed him moments after Harrelson threw on to first to finish a 3-6-3 double play in Game Three of the 1973 National League Championship Series. Not even from umpire Augie Donatelli in the World Series to follow, Donatelli calling him out at home despite Oakland catcher Ray Fosse seeming to miss the tag and provoking a wild Met argument around the plate.

And not even from Alzheimer’s disease, with which Harrelson was diagnosed in 2016 and against which he fought a bold fight until his death at 79 Thursday morning. Some of the obituaries that followed lasted several paragraphs before mentioning the Rose play and the infamous bench-and-bullpen-clearing brawl that erupted. Some of them lasted only several syllables. It almost figured.

Rose entered Game Three of the set between the Mets and the Reds steaming over Harrelson’s post-mortem following Mets righthander Jon Matlack’s Game Two two-hit shutout. It wasn’t braggadoccio by any means. The .236-lifetime-hitting Harrelson’s grit was matched by his wit. He observed Matlack had “made the Reds look like me out there” at the plate, adding only that he thought, “It looked like they were swinging from their heels.”

That doesn’t seem normally to be an observation that would steam a team, not even a Big Red Machine. Indeed, as New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro observes, most of the Reds weren’t interested when Rose tried to use Harrelson’s benign remarks as the equivalent of what we call today bulletin-board fodder.

The most “printable” of Rose’s post-mortem replies, in Vaccaro’s word, was, “What’s Harrelson, a [fornicating] batting coach?” Hall of Famer Joe Morgan even warned Harrelson during pre-Game Three practises that one more such remark would get him punched out, and Rose was going to get him at second if given the opportunity. Some of the Big Red Machine weren’t exactly renowned for a sense of humour about themselves.

So, come the Game Three top of the fifth, Morgan tapped one toward Mets first baseman John Milner, who threw to Harrelson to get Rose (a one-out single up the middle) by ten plus feet for one before Harrelson winged it back to Milner to get Morgan for the two. The next thing anyone knew, Rose had plowed and thrown an elbow at Harrelson and the pair were up and swinging.

“When he hit me after I had already thrown the ball I got mad,” Harrelson once remembered. “And we had a little match. He just kinda lifted me up and laid me down to sleep and it was all over.” It wasn’t all over that quickly, alas. To say all hell broke loose in Shea Stadium after Mets third baseman Wayne Garrett hustled over to try protecting Harrelson would be to call a prison riot a debate.

The less-than-willing Reds had little choice but to back their impetuous star. After order was restored at last, Rose took his position in left field and that portion of the Shea crowd let him have a shower of debris that included a glass bottle near his head. It got so out of hand that the Reds’ Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson pulled his team off the field. (“Pete Rose has done too much for baseball to die in left field,” the ever locquacious Anderson said postgame.)

A forfeit to the Reds was threatened. Under National League president Chub Feeney’s urging, Berra led Seaver plus Hall of Famer Willie Mays and outfielders Rusty Staub and Cleon Jones to plead for peace in the stands. Order was restored and the Mets finished what they started, a 9-2 Game Three win and a five-game triumph over the Reds for the pennant.

Rose didn’t hold a grudge for very long. Handed the Good Guy Award by the New York contingency of the Baseball Writers Association of America the following January—the long since disgraced and banished Rose was one of the game’s great notebook fillers during his playing days—Rose accepted it . . . from Harrelson himself.

“I want the world to know,” Harrelson cracked as he presented Rose the award, “that I hit him with my best punch. I hit him right in the fist with my eye.” In due course, Rose returned the favour, signing a photograph of the fight, “Thank you, Buddy, for making me famous.”

In some ways, Harrelson was responsible for the Mets making it to that postseason in the first place. He missed significant regular season time with an injury and the Mets slumped almost coincidentally. But when he returned to action the Mets—with or without a little firing up from relief pitcher Tug McGraw’s “You gotta believe!” holler, aimed sarcastically at first (at a pep talk by general manager M. Donald Grant)—ground their way from the basement to the National League East title that September.

“You had Seaver, who was the greatest pitcher I ever saw,” Rose told Vaccaro in 2008, “and you had great hitters like Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee, and later Rusty [Staub] and Milner. But the heart and soul of that team—ask anyone who played against them—was Bud Harrelson.”

Harrelson’s weak bat was offset by his sure-handed play at shortstop; he averaged turning 57 double plays a season in his twelve prime seasons from 1967-1978, even missing significant time to injuries. He also retired being worth +34 defensive runs above his league average, retroactively leading the National League’s shortstops with a +17 1971.

He roomed with Seaver for the entire time they were Mets together, having first met in AAA-level ball in the Met system. “We were perfect roommates,” Harrelson remembered in his memoir, Turning Two. “Tom did all the reading and I did all the talking.”

After finishing his playing career with two seasons in Philadelphia (where Rose was a teammate) and one in Arlington, Harrelson returned to the Mets and soon became their third base coach. That was Harrelson giving Ray Knight a pat and running down the third base line with him as Knight scored, after Mookie Wilson’s grounder skipped through hapless Bill Buckner’s feet, to finish the Game Six comeback win that sent the Mets toward their 1986 World Series conquest.

Later, when Davey Johnson was finally cashiered as the Mets’ manager 42 games into the 1990 season, Harrelson took the bridge and helmed the Mets to a 71-49 record the rest of the way, good for a second-place NL East finish. The following season, enough of the 1980s Mets’ contending core players were gone and suspicions arose that Harrelson was just the dugout figurehead while bench coach Doc Edwards called the shots.

The Mets went 74-80 under Harrelson, toward a fifth-place NL East finish, before he executed before the season’s final week. There were those who thought Harrelson’s problem was trying to manage like a pal more than a leader. Harrelson himself said, candidly enough, “If the public wanted a manager with vast experience, I wasn’t it . . . If they wanted somebody who would grow with the organization, I think that was me.”

Harrelson (far left) traveled with a few 1969 Mets teammates plus After the Miracle co-author Erik Sherman (center rear) for a final visit in California with Hall of Fame teammate Tom Seaver (front right). Joining them: pitcher Jerry Koosman (second from left), outfielder/After the Miracle author Art Shamsky (second from right, rear), and outfielder Ron Swoboda (far right rear). Seaver was stricken with Lewy Body dementia; Harrelson, with Alzheimer’s. (Photo posted to Xtwitter by Erik Sherman.)

In due course, Harrelson helped bring minor league baseball to Long Island as the co-owner, senior vice president, and first base coach of the Long Island Ducks. He even managed the Atlantic Leaguers to a first place tie in their maiden season. Then, come 2016, after a few incidents first attributed to aging’s mere memory lapses, Harrelson and his former wife, Kim Battaglia, got the fateful diagnosis.

Battaglia remained his close friend and primary caretaker. Harrelson was part of the contingent of 1969 Mets—organised by outfielder Art Shamsky, also including pitcher Jerry Koosman and outfielder Ron Swoboda—who trekked to California for a final visit with Lewy Body dementia-stricken Seaver at his vineyard a year later. The journey was recorded by Shamsky with Erik Sherman (who accompanied the group) in After the Miracle. (Seaver, alas, died in 2020.)

The former Mrs. Harrelson urged Shamsky to have voluminous photographs taken to help Harrelson remember the trip. Harrelson himself admitted to Sherman that he’d begun writing numerous notes to himself to help him fight the Alzheimer’s memory robbery. He also described co-owning and promoting the Ducks as “the best thing I’ve ever done in baseball,” indicating his displeasure that the now-former Wilpon ownership was not always kind to himself and too many other former Met stars.

Harrelson and his former wife even joined and became active with the Alzheimer’s Foundation after making his diagnosis public in 2018. “I want people to know you can live with this and that a lot of people have it,” he said. “It could be worse.”

When traveling with Koosman, Shamsky, Sherman, and Swoboda for that final Seaver visit, Harrelson had nothing but praise for his former wife (“She’s the best ex-wife I ever had”) who urged him on. “She’ll call me and go, ‘You know you have to go to the doctor. Our son T.J. can bring you’,” said the twice-divorced father of five. “Married, we just didn’t gel after awhile. But I still love her and give her hugs. Kim doesn’t have to do what she does, but I appreciate it.”

Perhaps not quite as deeply as she and his children appreciated Harrelson’s grace under fire as he fought the insidious disease that finally claimed him. The scrapper who didn’t let Pete Rose intimidate him became the elder who didn’t let a medical murderer intimidate him.

Now Harrelson can be serene and happy in the Elysian Fields with his old roomie pal Seaver, his old skippers Berra and Gil Hodges, and too many other 1969 and 1973 Mets who preceded him there. Maybe Grandma Gertie will elbow her way out there to shake his hand, and maybe Harrelson can give her a wink and a “Your little cream puff, huh?”

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