“I don’t care who said it.”

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Aaron Boone fingers the culprit impressionist who really barked at umpire Hunter Wendelstedt after Boone kept his mouth shut following one warning. (YES Network capture.)

Umpire accountability. There, I’ve said it again. The longer baseball government refuses to impose it, the more we’re going to see such nonsense as that which Hunter Wendelstedt inflicted upon Yankee manager Aaron Boone in New York Monday.

The Yankees welcomed the hapless Athletics for a set. Wendelstedt threw out the first manager of the game . . . one batter and five pitches into it. And Boone hadn’t done a thing to earn the ejection.

Oh, first Boone chirped a bit over what the Yankees thought was a non-hit batsman but was ruled otherwise; television replays showed A’s leadoff man Esteury Ruiz hit on the foot clearly enough. Wendelstedt got help from first base umpire John Tumpane on the call, and Tumpane ruled Ruiz to first base.

The Yankees and Boone fumed, Wendelstedt warned Boone rather loudly, and Boone kept his mouth shut from that point.

Until . . . a blue-shirted Yankee fan in a seat right behind the Yankee dugout hollered. It looked and sounded like, “Go home, ump!” It could have been worse. Fans have been hollering “Kill the ump!!” as long as baseball’s had umpires. George Carlin once mused about substituting for “kill” a certain four-letter word for fornication. His funniest such substitution, arguably, was “Stop me before I f@ck again!” The subs also included, “F@ck the ump! F@ck the ump!”

Neither of those poured forth from the blue-shirted fan. Merely “Go home, ump!” provoked Wendelstedt to turn toward the Yankee dugout and eject . . . Boone, who tried telling Wendelstedt it wasn’t himself but the blue shirt behind the dugout. “I don’t care who said it,” Wendelstedt shouted, and nobody watching on television could miss it since his voice came through louder than a boat’s air horn and, almost, the Yankee broadcast team. “You’re gone!”

I don’t care who said it.

“When an all-timer of an ejection happens,” wrote Yahoo! Sports’ Liz Roscher, “you know it, and this qualified.”

There was drama. There was rage. There was the traditional avoidance of blame on the part of the umpire. It’s a classic example of the manager vs. umpire dynamic, in which the umpire exercises his infallible and unquestionable power whenever and wherever he wants with absolutely zero accountability or consequences of any kind, and the manager has no choice but to take it.

Bless her heart, Roscher actually used the A-word there. And I don’t mean “and” or “absolutely,” either. She also noted what social media caught almost at once, that Mr. Blue Shirt may have mimicked Boone well enough to trip Wendelstedt’s trigger even though the manager himself said not. one. syllable. after the first warning.

May. You might think for a moment that a manager with 34 previous ejections in his managing career has a voice the umpires can’t mistake no matter how good an impression one wisenheimer fan delivers.

This is also the umpire whom The Big Lead and Umpire Scorecards rated the third-worst home plate umpire in the business last year, worsted only by C.B. Bucknor (second-worst) and Angel (of Doom) Hernandez (worst-worst). I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating now. Sub-92 percent accuracy has been known to get people in other professions fired and sued.

A reporter asked Boone whether the bizarre and unwarranted ejection was the kind over which he’d “reach out” to baseball government. “Yes,” the manager replied. “Just not good.”

Good luck, Skipper. Umpire accountability seems to have been the unwanted concept ever since the issue led to a showdown and a mass resignation strategy (itself a flagrant dodge of the strike prohibition in the umps’ collective bargaining agreement) that imploded the old Major League Umpires Association in 1999.

The Korean Baseball Organisation is known for its unique take upon umpire accountability. Umps or ump crews found wanting, suspect, or both get sent down to the country’s Future Leagues to be re-trained. Presumably, an ump who throws out a manager who said nothing while a fan behind his dugout barked would be subject to the same demotion.

If the errant Mr. Blue Shirt really did do a close-enough impression of Boone, would Wendelstedt also impeach James Austin Johnson over his near-perfect impressions of Donald Trump?

Well after the game ended in (do you believe in miracles?) a 2-0 Athletics win (they scored both in the ninth on a leadoff infield hit and followup hitter Zack Gelof sending one into the right field seats), Wendelstedt demonstrated the possibility that contemporary baseball umpires must master not English but mealymouth:

This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.

The fact that an umpire can order stadium personnel to eject fans or even toss a loudmouth in the stands himself (it happened to Nationals GM Mike Rizzo courtesy of now-retired Country Joe West, during a pan-damn-ic season game in otherwise-empty Nationals Park) seems not to have crossed Wendelstedt’s mind. The idea of saying “I was wrong” must have missed that left toin at Albuquoique.

Major league umpires average $300,000 a year in salary. If I could prove to have a 92 percent accuracy rate and learn to speak mealymouth, I’d settle for half that.

Fritz Peterson, RIP: The changeups

Posted on April 13, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Peterson on the mound in the original Yankee Stadium; his 2.52 ERA pitching there was the lowest by any Yankee pitcher at home in the original Stadium, including Hall of Famer Whitey Ford.

When the late Jim Bouton battled cerebral amyloid angiopathy, I wrote of Bouton’s battle and received a surprise: a note from Bouton’s Yankee teammate and fellow pitcher Fritz Peterson. The note read, simply, “If anyone can beat this, Jim can.” Bouton couldn’t in the long run, of course. And neither could Peterson beat Alzheimer’s disease in the long run.

Peterson got his diagnosis in September 2017. He died Friday at 82. Seven months after his diagnosis, the righthander who owns the lowest earned run average of any man who pitched in the original Yankee Stadium (2.52) told New York Post writer Kevin Kernan his condition “was a wacky disease.”

“It’s been happening like that for me all year,” he told Kernan. “So it’s confusing . . . It’s something so different. I don’t want to look into what comes next because I just want to enjoy every day.” Easier said than done, alas.

“I can’t go places,” Peterson continued then. “Unless something comes medically that can give me my mobility back . . . I can’t drive, so I’m depending on my wonderful wife. Whenever I get up I have to ask my wife, ‘What do we have today?’ As far as which doctors appointment. And when we do go somewhere. I have trouble walking, so I use a cane now. I feel like the old man from Scrooge.”

Fabled among fans for a sponge-like baseball memory, Peterson told Kernan his diagnosis would now keep him from attending Yankee Old-Timer’s Days, as he’d first planned to do during 2018. You can only guess the heartbreak that cause a man who loved engaging with fans on Facebook.

Peterson was a good lefthanded pitcher who grew up in the Chicago area (his favourite ballplayer was White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce) and arrived when the 1960s Yankees hit below bottom. His righthanded rotation mate Mel Stottlemyre arrived in time to help pitch those Yankees to their final pennant before the Lost Decade to come. The franchise’s first last place finish since 1912 happened in Peterson’s rookie 1966.

His roommate Bouton and Hall of Famer Whitey Ford were fading due to arm and shoulder issues. The remaining Yankee legends (Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Elston Howard) were reduced by age and injuries to box office appeal alone, what remained of it. Their few other good 1960s prospects proved journeyman major leaguers at best.

Peterson and Stottlemyre had a mutual admiration society, though Peterson was quick to name their pecking order. “I always came in number two,” he cracked to Kernan. “Like Hertz and Avis, it was Stottlemyre and me.” That from a pitcher who led the American League in walks/hits per innings pitched back-to-back (1969-1970) and with the lowest walks per nine innings rate in five straight seasons (1968-72).

Prankish and fun-loving, Peterson found himself relieved of Bouton as a roommate before Bouton was plucked for the Seattle Pilots in the expansion draft for 1969. “They thought I was a bad influence on Fritz,” Bouton would write in Ball Four. “The Yankees had some funny ideas about bad influence . . . As for teaching Peterson the wrong things, the only thing I ever taught him was how to throw that changeup he uses so effectively. And he still enjoys giving me the credit.”

Peterson himself remembered best his 1 July 1966 game against the White Sox, when he took a perfect game to the eighthwith one out—and lost it when his own throwing error enabled the first White Sox baserunner before veteran White Sox catcher John Romano sent a base hit back up the middle. Peterson surrendered a run-scoring double and a sacrifice fly to follow, then made the inning-ending putout and pitched a scoreless ninth tio finish the 5-2 Yankee win.

“No immortality for me,” he’d remember in 2015.

That plus the changeup Bouton taught him were nothing compared to the changeup that came into Peterson’s wheelhouse in 1972.

Left to right: Marilyn Peterson, Mike Kekich, Susanne Kekich, Fritz Peterson. Photographed here aboard a schooner on a summer 1972 outing, the two pitchers had already exchanged spouses, well before making it public the following spring. Fritz and Susanne eventually married and stayed that way; Mike and Marilyn proved a short-lived match, after all.

Exit Bouton, enter Mike Kekich, a lefthanded pitcher whom the Yankees acquired from the Dodgers in a December 1968 trade. Like Peterson, Kekich was fun-loving and a bit on the adventurous and flaky side. (Peterson pre-Alzheimer’s loved to remember watching Kekich dive in Florida waters chasing a giant manta ray.) They’d become linked forever publicly in a far more jaw-dropping way in spring 1973.

The two pitchers and their wives went to a July 1972 barbeque at sportswriter Maury Allen’s home and first made their plans for what Kekich called a “life swap” but both Peterson and his old pal Bouton called “a husband swap.”

According to Allen and others, Peterson had once found himself sharing transportation with Susanne Kekich, and the latter’s husband had found himself likewise with Marilyn Peterson. The partners-to-be each found common grounds they’d come to lack in their incumbent marriages. All stayed among them alone until, as Allen recalled it in his 2000 book, All Roads Lead to October, Peterson came to him in January 1973 to say he had a story for him:

Peterson unloaded the facts of the story he wanted me to write. On that evening back in July at our home, he and Kekich had made the original plans for exchanging wives. Also kids, houses, furniture, dogs, and cats. The new families had been in operation for several months, everything was still going well, and he wanted to share his wonderful news with the world. He had chosen me as the conduit.

“Are you crazy?” I asked.

“No, we’d been thinking about this for many months,” he said. “We wanted you to write it because you won’t make it sound dirty.”

Allen resisted at first because, he wrote, he thought the entire deal should have remained private. Perhaps it should have. Indeed, Allen told Peterson to hand the story to United Press sportswriter Milton Richman, instead. Peterson did. Richman wrote it straight, no chaser, no salaciousness, and it still exploded into a scandal that only began with New York Daily News columnist Dick Young tearing them apart.

“At least,” the ever-sensitive Young wrote, “they did it before the inter-family trading deadline.”

The timing for going public couldn’t have been more ticklish in hindsight: George Steinbrenner finalised his purchase of the Yankees from CBS in the same month Peterson and Kekich elected to go public with their life swap, and he’d announced Mike Burke (the CBS executive assigned to run the team for the network) would stay as the team’s president. (Temporarily, as things turned out.)

Allen ultimately wrote a long article for The Ladies Home Journal about the Peterson-Kekich swap, with full cooperation and participation of both husbands and wives. For him, perhaps the most telling comment about the entire matter came from the erstwhile Mrs. Kekich, who married Peterson and stayed that way until death did they part, and who told Allen her marriage to Kekich crumbled long before the two couples began swapping lives.

I never could seem to live up to Mike’s standards. No matter what I did, he wanted me to do it a little better. I always felt unsure about him, uncertain about myself, a little insecure. Fritz accepted me as I was.

Kekich himself told Allen he thought he was matched better with Marilyn Peterson until “things developed and we began to butt heads.” Possibly the most reluctant partner in the swap (and possibly the most stressed by it), Mrs. Peterson parted from Kekich soon enough, she to marry a doctor happily, according to Allen.

Peterson married the former Mrs. Kekich in 1974 and remained a father to his sons as well as a stepfather to his new wife’s daughters; the couple had a daughter together. Kekich, too, remained a father to his children while remarrying in due course. After several non-baseball ventures that failed, including in medicine and paramedicine, he moved to New Mexico before the turn of this century.

Kekich has been reported as comfortable out of the public eye as Peterson was in it when the occasions arrived, particularly at Yankee-related events and aboard social media, before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

The uproar may or may not have taken a toll on both men. Peterson pitched well below his top form in 1973, but he also came down with shoulder trouble. (Pre-1973: 3.10 fielding-independent pitching; 1974 through his retirement: 4.00.) Kekich had respected stuff but was prone to wildness before 1973; he finished his nine-season career with a 4.16 FIP and a 4.59 ERA.

Both pitchers would be traded away soon enough. Kekich was traded to the Indians during the 1973 season; Peterson was also traded there the following season, after Kekich had moved on from the team. His baseball career ended in 1976; Kekich’s, a year later. (A road accident caused Kekich his own shoulder issues.)

Bouton would remember Yankee manager Ralph Houk’s handling of the swap when compiling and editing “I Managed Good But, Boy, Did They Play Bad”, his anthology of writings about baseball managers.

As this book was going to press, Ralph Houk said one of the finest things I’ve ever heard him say . . . “The players’ lives are their own. We all have problems. You only go through this world once and everyone has a right to go through it happy.” This may indicate that Houk the manager is changing with the times, or it may be manager Houk’s way of minimizing the effect on his team while he waits to trade one of them. But it may also be a truer insight into Ralph Houk the person.

Peterson in 2015, during an interview on New York’s WPIX-TV, two years before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

The Peterson-Kekich scandal proved mild sauce compared to sports scandals past and future, of course. Peterson’s trade to Cleveland proved more beneficial to the Yankees: it brought them two mainstays of their pending championship revival, first baseman Chris Chambliss and relief pitcher Dick Tidrow.

He’d work in the insurance business, as a blackjack dealer, an eschatological monograph author, and even a play-by-play announcer in minor league hockey. He wrote three books including When the Yankees Were On the Fritz: Revisiting the Horace Clarke Era. He survived bankruptcy. Eventually, Peterson and his family moved to Iowa. (“We’re still on the honeymoon and it has been a real blessing,” he said of his once-controversial remarriage, in 2013.)

“I’m hanging on for my family—that’s the most important thing,” Peterson told the Post in 2018. “If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t care. Heaven is not a bad place to be. I think we are all saved and that we all are going to end up in heaven.” May heaven prove a far less judgmental place for him than earth did once upon a time.

Mickey Mantle, as he actually was

Posted on February 22, 2024 by Jeff Kallman

Even now it’s impossible to see discussions of Mickey Mantle without unfair laments over what the Hall of Famer wasn’t.

It’s almost three decades since Mickey Mantle’s death and it is a half century since he was elected to the Hall of Fame. Wouldn’t you think by now that the lamentations over what could have been, should have been, would have been, might have have been for Mantle had ceased and desisted? Isn’t what been been far more than enough?

Could have been one of the truly greats. Never quite lived up to his potential. Squandered so much of his enormous talent. Variations on those themes and more. All patent nonsense. I began getting that a-ha! when reading Allen Barra’s 2002 book, Clearing the Bases: The Greatest Baseball Debates of the Last Century.

Barra devoted a chapter to an in-depth comparison between Mantle and his transcendent contemporary Hall of Famer Willie Mays. Near the end of it, he ran down the foregoing laments, sort of, then asked, “But what about what Mantle did do?” to finish the chapter:

We spent so much of Mantle’s career judging him from [his longtime manager] Casey Stengel’s* perception as the moody, self-destructive phenom who never mastered his demons, and we spent much of the rest of Mantle’s life listening to a near-crippled alcoholic lament over and over about what he might have been able to accomplish. For an entire generation of fans and sportswriters who saw their own boyhood fantasies reflected in Mantle’s career and their worst nightmares fulfilled by his after-baseball life, Mantle’s decline became the dominant part of the story.

It’s time to dispel this myth . . . He was one of the most complete players ever to step on a big league field, a hitter with a terrific batting eye . . . spectacular power, blinding speed, and superb defensive ability. He could do things none of his contemporaries could do . . . He could switch-hit for high average and power, and he could bunt from either side of the plate, and no great power hitter in the game’s history was better at stealing a key base or tougher to catch in a double play . . . That his life is a cautionary tale on the dangers of success and excess can not be argued, but as a player he has a right to be remembered not for what he might have been but for what he was.

Of course Barra was and remains right. Even Mantle’s most unapologetically cynical observers buy that of course he’d have smashed Babe Ruth to smithereens, of course he’d have out-run Willie Mays in center field, of course he’d have out-stolen Ty Cobb first, of course he’d have left an impossible bar to clear, if only his lifelong-troublesome legs and a less young-death-present upbringing had left him the whole body and fully sound mind do it.

(For a contrast, hark back to Jim Bouton’s original lament in Ball Four: “Like everyone else on [the Yankees], I ached with Mantle when he had one of his numerous and extremely painful injuries. I often wondered, though, if he might have healed quicker if he’d been sleeping more and loosening up with the boys at the bar less. I guess we’ll never know.” Critics crucified Bouton over that, written in 1969-70. Whoops.)

If only. Enough.

When Barra wrote, no player—not Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Babe Ruth, nobody—played more games as a Yankee than Mantle’s 2,401. Hall of Famer Derek Jeter got to play two more seasons and 346 more. Jeter’s the only Yankee to suit up in the fabled pinstripes for more games than Mantle did.

If you want to lament what couldawouldashouldamighta been for Mantle, you should keep it to his center field play. That’s where his notorious legs really cost him. Sure, he could run a fly ball down with the best (he saved Don Larsen’s World Series perfect game with just such a running stab), but he finished his career ten fielding runs below his league average in center field—and only once was good for ten or more above it. (In 1955.)

Mantle had an excellent throwing arm but his legs kept his range factors at his league’s average as long as he played center field. He had twenty outfield assists in 1954 . . . and ten or more only twice more his entire career, both in the 1950s. His legs also hurt him on the bases: he did finish with an .801 stolen base percentage, but playing in the time when the running game returned he never stole more than 21 bases in a single season.

But . . . he did take extra bases on followup hits 54 percent of the time he reached base in the first place. Willie Mays out-stole him (and led the entire show annually from 1956-58), yet Mays finished with a slightly lower lifetime stolen base percentage. (.767.) In center field? No contest. Mays was worth +176 fielding runs lifetime.

So who was really better at the plate? I’m going to repeat a table I posted as a footnote a few days ago, when I assessed where Mike Trout sits among Hall of Fame center fielders who played all or most of their careers in the post-World War II/post-integration/night-ball era. The table looks at those center fielders according to my Real Batting Average metric: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by total plate appearances:

Player	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
AVG							.576

Mantle’s RBA is twenty points higher than Mays. (Trout, I repeat, is 21 points higher than Mantle at this writing, believe it or not.) You might notice that he took almost two hundred more walks than Mays despite playing several seasons fewer. They actually finished with the same average home runs per 162 games (36), but Mays was the far more difficult strikeout: 66 per 162 games, compared to Mantle’s 115.

So where would Mantle finish with an RBA twenty points higher than Mays. Look deeper. Mantle hit into far fewer double plays than Mays did. Even with his badly-compromised legs, which you might think would get him thrown out at first a little more often in such situations, Mantle hit into 138 fewer double plays than Mays did.

Here’s a couldashouldawouldamighta for you: Imagine how many fewer double plays Mantle might have hit into if he had healthy or at least less-frequently-injured legs. Today’s blowhard fans, writers, and talking heads love to yap about the guys who strike out 100+ times a year. Ask them whether they’d take Mays’s 66 against 11 GIDPs a year . . . or Mantle’s 115 against six.

Try this on for size. Mantle was seen so often as lacking compared to the Hall of Famer he succeeded in center field, Joe DiMaggio. Yet, and Barra himself noted this in the aforementioned book, Mantle averaged 83 more strikeouts than DiMaggio . . . but DiMaggio hit into seventeen more double plays even playing five fewer seasons. When last I looked a strikeout was a single out. (Unless, of course, you swing into a strike-‘im-out/throw-’em-out double play, and we don’t know how many of those were involved in Mantle strikeouts.)

Here’s another: In the same era, only three players have win probability added numbers above 100. In descending order, they are: Barry Bonds (127.7), Ted Williams (103.7), and Mays (102.4). Henry Aaron’s 99.2 is just behind Mays; Mantle’s 94.2 is right behind Aaron. Those are the only five players from the same era with WPAs 90 or higher. (Did I forget to mention Teddy Ballgame whacked into 197 double plays?)

If you still want to tell me that a guy with a 94.2 win probability added factor “didn’t live up to his potential,” go right ahead. But then I’m going to tell you that we don’t have to wonder what couldawouldaashouldamighta been if Mantle’s physical and mental health allowed.

They didn’t calculate wins above replacement-level player [WAR] when Barra wrote Clearing the Bases, alas. Mays (156.1) has Mantle (110.2) beaten by ten miles. Mantle was 36 when he retired. Mays from 36-40 was still worth an average 5.0 WAR a season, which is actually still All-Star caliber. It’s not Mantle’s fault Mays’s body allowed him a longer useful baseball shelf life. Any more than it was Mays’s fault he didn’t get to play on more than four pennant winners and one World Series champion.

I don’t know if the foregoing will put a lid on the couldawouldamightashoulda stuff around Mantle once and for all. But I can dream at least as deeply as all those fans and sportswriters did when Mantle was in pinstripes doing things nobody else save one in his time did, and doing it for teams that won twelve pennants and seven World Series rings while he did them.

For me, I haven’t cared about how great he couldawouldamightashoulda been since I first read Barra’s book. I still don’t. Pending the final outcome of Mike Trout’s career (Trout, too, has had injury issues enough the past three seasons, and he’s right behind Mantle as the number five center fielder ever to play, according to Baseball Reference), Mantle and Mays remain the two single greatest all-around position players who ever suited up.

It’s still heartbreaking to remember Mantle apologising for and owning what he wasn’t in life itself not long before his death. But he owes nobody any apology for what he was on a baseball field in spite of his compromised health. Barra remains right: “as a player he has a right to be remembered not for what he might have been but for what he was.”

———————————————————————————-

* My personal favourite story about Mickey Mantle and Casey Stengel: When Mantle first became a Yankee, the team was scheduled to play an exhibition with the Dodgers in Ebbets Field before the regular season began. Stengel took Mantle to the once-fabled Ebbets Field wall from right field to center field, bisected by a giant scoreboard and beveled to create an angle toward the field in its lower half.

Stengel wanted to show Mantle the tricky angles made by the scoreboard and the bevel. “Now, when I played here,” Stengel began. He was cut off by Mantle exploding into laughter, hollering, “You played here?!?” (Stengel did, as a contact-hitting, base-stealing outfielder with the Dodgers from 1912-1917, then with three other National League teams including the Giants from 1918-1925.)

“Boy never saw concrete,” the Ol’ Perfesser told a reporter who happened to overhear the exchange. “He thinks I was born sixty years old and started managin’ right away.”

It really was in Rizzo’s head, after all . . .

Posted on August 4, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

This is the 28 May collision—on a strike-’em’out/throw-’em-out double play—that turned Anthony Rizzo’s season into disaster whose cause nobody could figure out until this week.

Yankee and other fans now have the answer to what compelled a veteran first baseman with a jeweler’s eye for the strike zone to drop from an .880 OPS on 28 May to the arguable worst hitter in the game since. They should not like that nobody in his organisation could catch on sooner.

On that day, Anthony Rizzo took a bump on his head from the hip of the Padres’ Fernando Tatis, Jr., who was scrambling back to first on a strike-’em-out/throw-’em-out double play that ended the top of the sixth in Yankee Stadium. Watch the play from any angle you wish.

Yankee starting pitcher Gerrit Cole struck Xander Bogaerts out swinging, with Tatis well off the pad at first. A very alert Yankee catcher Kyle Higashioka whipped a throw up the first base line to an equally alert Rizzo. The throw went up the line low but Rizzo speared it cleanly to tag Tatis out on his lower right leg.

You should see clearly that, without intent, Tatis’s right hip caught the right side of Rizzo’s head hard as Rizzo bent down to apply that tag. Rizzo lost his hat, stood up as the ball fell from his mitt, then walked several steps toward second base before collapsing.

The Yankees thought it was a neck injury at first. They got Rizzo out of the game post haste, moving D.J. LeMahieu from third to first and Isiah Kiner-Falefa from left field to third, sending Greg Allen out to play left and to bat in Rizzo’s lineup slot. (The Yankees hung in to win the game, 10-7; Rizzo himself had pitched in with an RBI single prior to the fateful collision.)

Rizzo didn’t return to the lineup until the Yankees played the Dodgers on 2 June. In the interim, according to most reporting, he passed official concussion protocols. Yet, come Thursday, the Yankees let it be known that Rizzo was indeed dealing with post-concussion syndrome and that it was no questions asked traceable back to that 28 May play.

Nobody caught on after the original protocols passage. Rizzo himself says he began noticing “fogginess” last weekend, against the American League East-leading Orioles, where he’d previously couldn’t figure out how he dropped so far off the batting table.

“I remember talking to someone and they said, ‘Do you feel like you’re coming out of this soon?’” the first baseman finally told reporters. “I answered honestly that no I don’t because I couldn’t feel what you’re trying to feel as a hitter.”

I guess now we can link two and two together. Over the last few weeks, you just start going to different checklists of mechanics, timing, consistently being late. Why am I being consistently late? I’ve made these adjustments plenty of times in my career. I just didn’t forget how to do this all of a sudden. Everything (the doctors and I) talked about and everything they came back with basically came back on a silver lining of I’m not crazy for walking back to the dugout consistently thinking how I missed that pitch because I usually don’t miss that pitch.

The Yankees should be thinking about how they could have missed Rizzo dealing with and playing through both a concussion and its following syndrome for almost two months. They should be demanding answers from their own medical people and from baseball’s government itself.

All advanced knowledge coming forth over the last few decades doesn’t quite mitigate that baseball medicine is still not exactly sport’s equivalent to the Mayo Clinic. It still remains rare that a baseball team’s medical staff gets to the deepest heart of an injury issue before a career is compromised or ended.

And it still takes something such as Rizzo’s case to shake Joe and Jane Fan out of their smug dismissiveness toward slumping players to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there was a physical or neurological cause for the slump, as we now know was Rizzo’s case.

Ask Met fans who still dismiss Jason Bay as a mere bust. Signed to a four-year free agency deal, Bay was one of the game’s better outfielders and run producers . . . before he incurred two concussions as a Met, one hitting the outfield wall in 2010 and the second hitting one in 2012.

Never mind teammates and his manager praising his work ethic, nobody put two and two together and figured two concussions might have had something to do with his dying bat. Bay and the Mets parted under mutually acceptable terms; he signed with Seattle, was given a clean bill of health, but after one horrid season called it a career.

Last winter, Twins fans inexplicably poured phlegm, bile, and acid over the very idea that Joe Mauer should be on the next Hall of Fame ballot. Their rage was over that fat contract extension Mauer signed when he was still the best catcher in the American League . . . and before he suffered the first of two concussions when he took a hard foul tip off his mask behind the plate.

Those fools called Mauer a thief because the concussions wouldn’t let him play to his previous level. Never mind the Twins yanking him out from behind the plate after that hard foul tip. They weren’t taking chances, especially after seeing what concussions did to their former first base star Justin Morneau.

Does the name Pete Reiser ring any bells? It should. That Brooklyn Dodgers legend with Hall of Fame talent ended up a Hall of Fame might-have-been, thanks to an insane playing style that caused him one too many concussions when he still couldn’t learn a concrete outfield wall—like the one they had in Ebbets Field—didn’t suffer fools gladly and he couldn’t make them collapse on contact.

Pistol Pete may have been lucky that he ended up with a somewhat long post-playing life as a minor league manager and major league coach. He also had an impact on the game beyond his own self: the Dodgers made Ebbets Field the Show’s first ballpark to feature padded walls after they traded him to the Boston Braves following the 1948 season.

Ryan Freel had it even worse. That cheerful character of an outfielder got blasted into a concussion on a collision with both an outfield teammate and the warning track in 2007; then, a second one in 2009, when he was hit flush on the head by a pickoff throw. Career over a year later.

Baseball began its concussion protocols in 2011. A year later, troubled by assorted mental issues and possibly remaining aftereffects of his two concussions, Freel committed suicide. Knowing what he’d been through playing baseball, his family donated his brain to Boston University—for research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In due course, it was determined Freel had Stage 2 CTE.

It’s bad enough that too many fans and too many sportswriters who ought to know better continue to dismiss the injured as malfeasant, especially when the injured take what those people believe to be longer than needed to recover. Too many sports teams behave likewise even today, too.

And too many fans still can’t draw the proper line between hard nosed and bullheaded, any better than Pete Reiser and others did. Baseball players shouldn’t have to blast themselves to smithereens to prove they’re delivering maximum effort.

Even the Yankees couldn’t figure out how Rizzo cratered after that 28 May game. They thought he was fine physically. They knew he wasn’t laying down on the job. Manager Aaron Boone kept insisting his man was going through a particularly protracted patch of slumping.

Rizzo himself didn’t think about further testing even though he’s admitted to feeling foggy and having days where he felt he’d been “waking up feeling hung over and you didn’t drink at all.” He also has to figure out how to balance his health to his itch to compete. He’s only too well aware that too many people, including those with and against whom he plays the game, still think injuries and their impact are mere excuses for poor play.

“[W]hen people come up and (are) like, ‘You haven’t been the same since the collision,’ I want to go tell people off because that’s not who we are as competitors,” he admits.

Even still, I feel like being injured or playing through a back injury or ankle injury in the past, you just adapt. Your body adapts. Obviously with this, I did everything I could and it’s unfortunate. The hardest part is missing time because I want to be out there. I want to be playing, but also to the level that I know I’m capable of playing at.

Easier said than done, alas. Even in today’s advanced medical atmosphere, professional athletes still can’t let themselves have the time they absolutely require to return to complete health. Often as not, their teams can’t. More often than that, Joe and Jane Fan don’t want to hear it. More often than that, Joe and Jane Sportswriter whip them into that froth.

Maybe the Rizzo case will start waking them up at long enough last. Maybe.

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

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