“They threw the first punch”

Posted on October 13, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Gleyber Torres, making Zack Greinke’s and the Astros’ Game One life miserable . . .

It was supposed to be a treat watching the Astros and the Yankees, mostly recovered from their regular season’s medical challenges. If you could say a pair of 100+ game winners were lucky to be there after they fought injury bugs as arduously as they fought field opponents, the Astros and the Yankees were just that.

Didn’t the Astros fight like six parts street gang and half a dozen parts cheetahs on speed to get their postseason home field advantage, going 12-2 to finish the season to nail down the point? Didn’t they look just that much better than the 6-8 finishing Yankees when the postseason began?

And hadn’t they survived an unexpectedly arduous division series with the upstart Rays—forcing them to open with Zack Greinke instead of Justin Verlander or Gerrit Cole—to get to the American League Championship Series in the first place? While the Yankees turned out to have it so painfully simple sweeping the suddenly somnambulent Twins to get there that you could be forgiven for suggesting the Yankees might be just a little vulnerable?

There went those ideas in Game One Saturday night.

The Yankees were good on the road this year(.568 winning percentage) but they weren’t supposed to be able to handle the Astros there. They played each other seven times on the regular season with the Astros sweeping the Yankees in three in Minute Maid Park. But somebody forgot to remind the Yankees as they opened the ALCS.

At least, somebody forgot to remind Yankee second baseman Gleyber Torres. The Yankees shut the Astros out 7-0 in Game One and Torres was practically their one-man demolition operation. The Astros’ long term survival may now depend on how well they can keep Torres from even thinking about seeing and raising from Game Two forward.

Nobody’s going to accuse the Astros of being on the ropes after a Game One loss. The Yankees won’t be foolish enough to level that charge. Not even when they punctured the Astros’s hard won, hard desired home field advantage.

“We’ve been in the situation before,” said Astros second baseman Jose Altuve after the game, referring to 2017, when the Astros were down 3-2 in that ALCS but won. “Tomorrow we have Justin, we all know how good we feel about him, so it’s just one game, it’s a seven game series, so we still have a lot of baseball to play.”

With Verlander to start Game Two and Cole to start Game Three, everyone in Astroworld should be feeling good again. No matter how good these Yankees are at finding and exploiting even the tiniest rupture in the other guys’ armour.

“They played a great game,” said Astros shortstop Carlos Correa, “a near perfect game.”

But who the hell is Gleyber Torres? Oh, yeah—he’s the guy who became a Yankee when they traded Aroldis Chapman to the Cubs in the middle of 2016. But now he’s the youngest Yankee ever to drive in five in a single postseason game. And his clutch hit reputation is beginning to fan out beyond the Bronx.

You expected trouble going in with the Aaron Judges, Giancarlo Stantons, D.J. LaMahieus, Edwin Encarnacions, and Brett Gardners. The last one from whom you expected any pinstriped lip, never mind bat, is a kid middle infielder who may have hit the most quiet 38 regular season home runs of the year.

Outside New York, Torres isn’t exactly the Yankees’ biggest star yet. But on a night when Yankee starter Masahiro Tanaka was as untouchable as he was very touchable in the regular season, and Greinke proved vulnerable enough if not quite the pinata the Rays made out of him in the division series, Torres became the last guy the Astros wanted to see at the plate. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

“Man, they’re going to be telling stories about that kid for a while,” said Judge after the game. “He’s going to be a Yankee great, I know it. He just comes to work every single day. He’s always got a smile on his face. No situation is too big. I’ll see him in the box, bases loaded, big situation and he’ll give us a little smile in the dugout like he knows he’s going to go up there and do his job.”

At first it looked as though Tanaka and Greinke would turn Game One into a pitching clinic, if not quite the ones put on by Nationals pitchers Anibal Sanchez and Max Scherzer in the first two National League Championship Series games. Tanaka looked as untouchable as he normally does against the postseason Astros, and Greinke looked nothing like the guy who’d been humiliated at the hands and tails of the Rays.

“I thought Zack did a good job giving us a chance to win,” said Astros third baseman Alex Bregman, “and we just didn’t do anything offensively.”

“When you’re facing really good pitching, it makes hitting even harder,” said mostly struggling Astros center fielder George Springer, their 2017 World Series MVP but hitting a buck twenty in this postseason to date. “Hitting’s hard. But that being said, we’re a good team, and we understand that, so we’ve got to grind and string together some at-bats and we’ll see what happens.”

As the top of the fourth began each side had one base hit apiece and they’d both been negated by inning-ending double plays. Then LaMahieu opened the Yankee fourth with a base hit and swiped second while Judge struck out swinging on one of Grienke’s nastier sliders of the night. Up stepped Torres, whom Greinke struck out swinging to end the first. And he drove one to the back of left center bounding off the fence to score LaMahieu with the game’s first run.

Torres and Greinke squared off again in the sixth after Judge led off flying out to Astros center fielder George Springer. Once again Greinke’s first service looked just too good to Torres. This one got hammered into the middle of the Crawford Boxes.

And after a six-pitch, full count, wrestling strikeout to Encarnacion, Greinke battled Giancarlo Stanton—who’d only gotten to play eighteen regular season games thanks to two trips to the injured list—and, after wriggling his way to a full count after opening 0-2, Stanton nailed a fastball just under the middle of the plate and sent it into the Astros’ bullpen behind the right center field fence.

An inning later, Torres was in the middle of it yet again. With two outs, Yankee shortstop Didi Gregorius, LaMahieu, and Judge singled back-to-back-to-back, all into right field, off Astros reliever Ryan Pressly, before Torres sent the first pair home with a bloop single to center and helped himself to second when Springer threw in futilely toward the plate.

It was the kind of night on which Torres even making an out proved productive enough. With reliever Bryan Abreu on the mound for the top of the ninth Yankee third baseman Gio Urshela hit the first pitch of the inning, a slightly hanging slider, into the right field seats. Then with one out LaMahieu walked, Judge singled him to third, and—with the Astro infield drawn in just enough—Torres whacked a grounder to an oncoming shortstop Carlos Correa.

The good news: Correa pounced on the run to throw Torres out handily enough. The bad news: LaMahieu got such an excellent jump off third he could score the seventh Yankee run without fear even with Correa all over the Torres grounder well onto the infield grass.

The Astros hurt themselves when it was still a one-run game, though. In the bottom of the fifth, Bregman, their no-questions-asked MVP candidate, worked Tanaka for a leadoff walk and Yordan Alvarez, their probable no-questions-asked Rookie of the Year, slashed a line drive to right.

As Bregman led a little too far off first, as in more than half way to second, obviously thinking of third base as his immediate destination, Judge ran to snare Alvarez’s rope. Then the tall Yankee with the toothy grin of a kid a third his age fired in to first. Bregman slipped running back to the pillow but it almost wouldn’t have mattered since he’d had a bigger lead than the law allowed in the first place.

Was Judge catching Alvarez’s liner a guarantee? Fifty-fifty at best. But he has one of the better throwing arms among American League right fielders and with Bregman that far off the pillow, slip back or no, Bregman was dead meat.

It negated the spectacular theft Bregman committed in the top of the third, when he took a spinning leap behind third with his glove arm up like the Statue of Liberty to turn Urshela’s nasty line drive, which probably would have gone further up the line for extra bases, into a nasty out.

Tanaka can’t beat the Astros in the regular season, but in the postseason he looks like an ogre against them, taking a 2.00 lifetime postseason ERA against them into Game Two. He worked the corners like a craftsman and left the usually smart hitting Astros looking half lost at the plate.

“He was throwing the ball really good today,” said Altuve. “He was hitting spots with the slider, split, and fastball. He makes it out pretty good. You have to tip your hat to that. He got a late break, normally you can see the spin, but we couldn’t see anything.”

When they got into the Yankees’ effective bullpen, they actually pried a couple of base hits out of Adam Ottavino, back-to-back singles by Michael Brantley and Altuve, but Ottavino lured Bregman into dialing an inning-ending Area Code 6-4-3.

The Astros bullpen is usually one of the league’s best, too, but Pressly didn’t look comfortable in his turn and Abreu’s inexperience was exploited a little too readily. Especially against a Yankee team who—knowing Verlander and Cole awaited them in Games Two and Three—treated Game One like a must-win contest.

“They threw the first punch in Game One,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch. “We get to the next day. We can punch right back tomorrow. I don’t think they’re going to be too comfortable tomorrow coming to the ballpark thinking they’ve got an easy game ahead of themselves.”

Verlander gives the Astros a far above average chance to punch back in Game Two. The last thing they want is going to the south Bronx in the hole. The Yankees have ways of burying people once they’re in holes against them. One of them is a 22-year-old second baseman who prefers hitting with men on base and has the numbers to prove it so far.

“The way he’s able to get to all kinds of pitches on different planes is impressive,” said Yankee relief pitcher Zach Britton, who worked a near-spotless eighth (one walk, two punchouts) Saturday night.

“As a pitcher, you know you have to executive every single pitch throughout an at-bat or you know he’s going to beat you,” Britton continued. “That’s where the bat-to-ball skill comes in. It’s crazy. You just don’t see it in such a young player.”

You do now.

The survival of the unfittest

Posted on September 20, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no Yankee was injured during the making of this division-clinching celebration.

Future baseball trivia contests should feature this question: “Name the team that won the 2019 American League East despite making a M*A*S*H triage seem like a day camp’s first aid station.” Then, they should add, “P.S. Name the American League’s 2019 Manager of the Year—according to major league baseball and the American Red Cross.”

Aaron Boone must have days when he thinks he’s not a major league manager but the hapless chief administrator of an overworked urgent care clinic. The Broken Bombers must have days when they think the umpire isn’t going to start a game hollering “Play ball!” but pulling out a bugle to sound sick call.

They locked down the American League East Thursday night with their 100th win, beating the hapless, Mike Trout-less Angels 9-1 at home in St. Elsewhere, Yankee Stadium. And they still had twelve players—not including the apparently terminally hapless Jacoby Ellsbury—either on the injured list or listed day-to-day with one or another ailment.

“Nothing has got in their way,” said Boone after the game. “Whatever has come adversity-wise, they faced it and powered right through it.” As almost usual, Boone deflected most attention toward his players, rather modestly for the first manager to win 100 games in each of his first two seasons on the job.

Nobody else has done that. Not John McGraw. Not Connie Mack. Not Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, or Casey Stengel. Not Walter Alston, Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, Davey Johnson, Tony LaRussa, Bobby Cox, or Terry Francona. The man who once broke Boston hearts by nailing the 2003 American League pennant with an eleventh-inning home run in the old Yankee Stadium sits alone with those C-notes.

Boone may not be one of the game’s premier tacticians or strategists, but maybe he doesn’t have to be for now. Just sending a Yankee team to the field every day in spite of the ceaseless call of calamity was probably enough for the 46-year-old skipper. That and a few tranquilisers.

There’s no truth to any speculation that Johns Hopkins is negotiating for the rights to present the Yankees as medical school exhibits yet. But don’t be shocked if the talks begin any time soon.

Only the Astros among the American League’s powerhouses had an injury overload anywhere near the one that accompanied the Yankees this year. They were episodes of Bones, House, Private Practise, Grey’s Anatomy, E.R., Chicago Hope, Medical Center, and Marcus Welby, M.D. on any given day of the week. Their bangs, bruises, and batterings got so profound so often that Yankee fans could have been forgiven if they felt compelled to claim the New England Journal of Medicine as this year’s Yankee yearbook.

There may not be a baseball team alive that figured out ways to win 100 regular season games and counting despite putting every New York area emergency room on double red alert. And it didn’t seem like any single Yankee faction becoming so injury prone. The 2019 injury bug did the equal-opportunity Yankee panky.

About the only Yankees on or near the field who didn’t have dates with the doctors were the bat and ball boys and girls. Boone was probably ready more than once a week to decide whether he needed an internist on call—or Frasier.

And when the Yankees closed out the Angels Thursday night they didn’t dare dogpile, chest bump, forearm bump, fist bump, jersey strip, or anything else to which celebrating baseball players take these days when celebrating arduous wins or even divisional clinches. With their luck, five Yankees might have ended up in traction.

“We’re just trying to avoid injuries,” deadpanned second baseman D.J. LaMahieu, whose three-run homer with two out in the bottom of the third began the Thursday night thrashing. All things considered, it’s a wonder making that comment didn’t instigate a case of lockjaw.

“There’s a couple guys that are irreplaceable here,” said catcher Austin Romine in April, little knowing he’d have to step in bigger for Gary Sanchez who just went down with a tight groin and could be gone until the postseason rounds, “but we’ve got to find a way to do it. We’re still winning games. We’ve got guys stepping up left and right.” Careful. With the Yankees’ luck, one of them is liable to twist an ankle on the landing.

Guys stepping up left and right? The Yankees practically led the league in reaching down and finding help on the farm, lots of it, enough to make you wonder—even allowing their seemingly infinite financial resources—why other teams who aren’t as financially strapped as they let you believe can’t figure out as well as the Yankees how to re-tool on the fly without tanking and within in far less extreme circumstances.

That should be good enough to earn longtime general manager Brian Cashman consideration as baseball’s Executive of the Year. Whether he gets it from the game or from the American Medical Association probably doesn’t matter.

They’ve used 53 different players and sent thirty to the injured list this year, the latter being the most for any team since 2004. And they couldn’t even win Thursday night without more medical emergencies preceding it.

Relief pitcher Dellin Betances was barely back from shoulder and lat muscle issues that kept him drydocked until Sunday—when he faced two Blue Jays in the bottom of the fourth and struck them both out . . . then somehow incurred a partial Achilles tendon tear doing the happy dance after the second punchout. Surgery he won’t need. But his season ended before it began even partially.

And Aaron Judge is being watched day-to-day after Hizzoner landed hard on his right shoulder Wednesday night trying for a diving catch.

The Yankees already had to live a lot of the season without Judge, Betances, Sanchez, Luis Severino, Aaron Hicks, Miguel Andjuar, Didi Gregorius, Giancarlo Stanton, Jake Barrett, and Greg Bird. Among others. They’ll have to live the rest of the season and postseason without David Hale, Jonathan Holder, and Mike Tauchman. Possibly among others. Tauchman went from an obscure spring acquisition from the Rockies to a co-household name with Gio Urshela—until he, too, pulled up injured with a likely season-ending calf strain.

They’ve managed to comport themselves like overly seasoned professionals in spite of the still-preponderant youth of the team. (Their average age: 28.) But it wasn’t easy this year. Even the most stoic professional can get frazzled when reporting to work the next day to discover yet another colleague in need of major repairs.

And you’d have to be either ignorant or a pure Yankee hater not to appreciate an irony in this year’s AL East conquest. The last time the Yankees won the division, Hall of Famer in waiting Derek Jeter wrecked his ankle in the twelfth inning of what turned into a sweep out of their 2012 division series by the Tigers. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t have even a tiny similar fear of even a hint of similar calamity awaiting them this time.

It may rankle Yankee fans that their heroes have only one 21st Century World Series ring to the rival Red Sox’s four. But they shouldn’t be too hard on the Yankees if they don’t quite make it back to the Promised Land this time around. If baseball’s cliches include that great or even persevering teams become the forgotten men once they don’t reach the Promised Land, these Yankees have a chance to stand it on its own head.

Just pray, while you toast the Yankees’ season long witness to survival of the unfittest, that doing it doesn’t tear another Yankee muscle, fracture another Yankee bone, tear another Yankee Achilles, strain another Yankee lat. Or, send even their uncannily resilient manager to the E.R. If not the psychiatrist’s couch.

Thurman Munson’s war and peace

Posted on August 2, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Thurman Munson, whose bull-in-the-china-shop style in and around baseball masked a tender man of peace off the field and away from the ballpark.

Among the roll of Yankees who leave enduring impressions for better or worse, Thurman Munson may have been the single least understood by those outside his clubhouse. And even inside that sanctuary, at the conjoined height and depth of the Bronx Zoo-era Yankees, there seemed times when even those few to whom Munson allowed access to even a portion of his inside self didn’t quite understand.

Today is forty years to the day since Munson died in the crash of his Cessna Citation jet, while landing at the Akron-Canton (Ohio) Airport. The loss still stings teammates and fans deeply. “Thurman Munson was a blue-collar criminal behind the plate, the kind of player who would exploit any edge to win a ballgame,” writes a one-time Munson teammate, designated hitter Ron Blomberg. “But away from the ballpark, he was a teddy bear. He was also the best and most loyal friend I ever had in baseball.”

Two decades ago, Esquire writer Michael Paterniti revealed to the world at large just what kind of teddy bear Munson really was. The piece remains required reading for anyone who saw Munson the street-hustling catcher and scourge of sportswriters but never got to know the young man whose most valuable lesson learned from his own upbringing was what not to do and how not to do it.

“Bastard or not, the man cares,” Paternini wrote. “Thurman Munson cares. Never backed down from anyone in his life—not his father, not another man, not another team, let alone fifty thousand fans calling for his head. And they love him for it. See part of themselves in him. To this day they hang photographs of him in barbershops and delis and restaurants all over the five boroughs—all over the country. A Thurman Munson cult. Tens of thousands of people who bawled the day he died. Including me.”

Like Ted Williams before him, Munson was one of those men who couldn’t bear to let people see the tender side of a man who impressed too many people in opposing ballparks or even his own team’s press box as a kind of spoiled brat. Munson seemed self-confident only in public, in the heat of a baseball game, when he could try being the immovable force through whom the other team had to go at the plate.

“There was an intensity about his manner and a total lack of humour,” remembered the late sportswriter Maury Allen, in due course, in All Roads Lead to October. “It was as if the mission he was on, success in baseball, was not for a career but for survival. What manner of goblins were marching through the head of this guy?”

Munson could misunderstand as deeply as he was misunderstood himself. He dismissed his Red Sox rival Carlton Fisk as a pretty boy who never had a hair out of place, unwilling to acknowledge that Fisk, the Hall of Famer of stolid New England stock, worked as hard and even as bull-headedly as Munson did behind or at the plate.

The late Jim Bouton worked as a sportscaster on New York WCBS-TV’s evening news when Munson died. Asked about Munson, Bouton remembered an earlier incident, when he was with WABC-TV, in which he sought an interview with Munson only to have the bristling catcher instruct him “to perform an anatomical impossibility” upon himself with his microphone.

Bouton recalled the incident plainly and added that he respected Munson as a hustling ballplayer while regretting that their only contact together had been so unpleasant. Based on the switchboards going nutshit, you would have thought Bouton’s comparatively benign recollection and regret equaled calling for a president’s assassination.

Munson was such a deliberate chore to the writers who covered the Yankees and their opponents that Allen couldn’t help remembering Newsday writer Jack Mann’s reaction to Ty Cobb’s death, in an era in which Cobb’s reputation as a crusty bigot had yet to be debunked: “The only difference now is that he’s a dead prick.”

This oddly constructed catcher (Yankee pitcher Fritz Peterson bestowed upon Munson his two best-remembered nicknames, Tugboat and Squatty Body) could be unconscionably rude to non-writers and non-players with a few drinks in him on team flights, too. Bill Madden and Moss Klein in Damned Yankees recorded that, when a passenger complained about the excessive volume of his cassette player, Munson’s kindly reply was, “Mind your own business, [fornicate]face.”

But he’d also visit children in hospitals frequently, even though he was loathe to let even his wife, Diana, know when he was doing it. He feared she might let the press in on it. (If you know the myth of Babe Ruth promising to hit home runs for sick children, be aware that, according to Blomberg, Munson—who had an excellent throwing arm—would promise to throw would-be base stealers out at second for them.)

Munson also habitually held her close while saying “I love you” in his family’s ancestral German when coming home, wrote her poetry, and played slightly crazy but amusing games with his young children. Even more telling, he refused to treat his children’s fears the way his father had treated his own fears and, concurrently, his own self.

Paternini learned of that when he visited Munson’s widow and children for his piece. Munson’s youngest son, Michael, had the same fear of the dark that his father knew as a child. But Michael’s father refused to persecute or humiliate him for it. Munson “would sit with his own boy in the wee hours—at two, three, four, five A.M,” Paternini wrote.

Often he couldn’t sleep himself, lying heavily next to Diana, his body half black and blue, his swollen knees and inflamed shoulders and staph infections hounding him awake. So he’d just go down the hall and be with Michael awhile. Just stretch out in the boy’s bed. It’s all right, he’d say. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

At Munson’s funeral, his father, Darrell, a truck driver, held what Paternini called an impromptu press conference at which he disparaged his son as never a really great ballplayer, “that it was really him, Darrell, who was the talent, just didn’t get the break.” Then, Darrell Munson stood before his son’s casket and, his daughter-in-law swore, said, “You always thought you were too big for this world. Well, look who’s still standing, you son of a bitch.”

Diana Munson’s father, who’d become her husband’s best friend, had to be kept by police from tearing his son-in-law’s father apart on the spot. If Darrell Munson’s grotesquery accomplished anything positive it revealed the depth of his son’s contradiction. Thurman Munson played baseball as total war because he’d grown up learning it in total war with an embittered father, and he fought it on the field and among those writing about the game alike.

But he married and raised his children as deep in a world of peace as he could fashion. The house that Munson built was a home through which nothing of the war he waged in and around baseball would be permitted if he had anything to say about it. Perhaps in order to keep that peace, Munson needed desperately to keep it hidden from even the fans who admired his refusal to take prisoners on the field. Maybe even from teammates who loved him otherwise.

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson told Paternini he wished he could have taken back the infamous article in which he called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” and Munson the one who might stir it bad. Jackson admitted that he and Munson began getting along well enough by the time of Munson’s death but that he wished above all that he could have cultivated a real friendship with the catcher.

“If Thurman had played five more years,” said Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter, whose own father died a week before Munson, and who was stricken by then with Lou Gehrig’s disease, “he’d own half the Yankees. Everybody liked the guy. The whites, the blacks, the Hispanics.”

“It was just, God damn,” Hall of Fame relief pitcher Goose Gossage told Paternini about learning of Munson’s death. “We all felt bulletproof, and then you see such a strong man, a man’s man, die . . . Then it’s like we’re not shit on this earth, we’re just little bitty matter.”

The last Yankee to see Munson alive, Paternini wrote, was outfielder Bobby Murcer, who’d turned down Munson’s invitation to fly from Chicago to Canton with him that day. Murcer watched Munson “barrel down the runway in this most powerful machine, then disappearing in the dark. Remembers him up there in all that night, afraid for the man.”

A decade and a half before Munson died, Cubs second baseman Ken Hubbs died when his single-engine plane crashed over the mountains of Utah. The heartbreaking irony was that Hubbs took up flying to conquer his fear of it. Munson bought the Citation to better facilitate returning home to his wife and children during Yankee homestands and certain road trip stops.

He’d hit his decline phase as a player by the time the Citation crashed; he may have chosen beyond his competence when he bought the complex jet. But until Hall of Famer in waiting Derek Jeter, no Yankee wore the rank of captain after Munson died.

Munson’s testiness with the press probably kept him from being elected to the Hall of Fame, but it’s entirely possible that a future confab of the Modern Era Committee will review his career and his case. When sabermetrician Jay Jaffe wrote The Cooperstown Casebook, he rated Munson the twelfth best catcher who ever played major league baseball; Munson’s peak value should make his case the proverbial no-brainer at last.

“What happens when your hero suddenly stands up from behind home plate, crosses some fold in time, and vanishes into thin air?” Paternini concluded. “You go after him.”

So I give you Thurman Munson, rounding third in the half-light of the ninth inning and gently combing out the hair of his daughters. I give you Thurman Munson, flying over America, looking down at the same roads his father drives, and returning home to his wife, speaking the words ich liebe dich. I give you Thurman Munson shooting at shadows and leaping into the arms of his teammates. I give you Thurman Munson beaned in the head and sleeping next to his son again.

I give you the man on his own two feet.

Hubbs, Munson, Nestor Chavez (a Giants pitcher), Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, Tom Gastall (briefly an Orioles catcher), Marv Goodwin (a Reds pitcher), Cory Lidle (a Yankee pitcher when he died in 2006), and Charlie Peete (a Cardinals outfielder) are the other major league players who lost their lives in plane crashes while still active players. Except possibly for Clemente’s death on a humanitarian hurricane relief mission, none touched as deeply as Munson’s.

Aside from his wife losing a husband, lover, and best friend, and his children losing their father, it seems a shame only that we lost a man who couldn’t bear to let the world see his sweet side until decades passed after his death. The side that wrote love poetry to his wife, spent entire nights comforting his children when they needed it most, and built a home where nothing was allowed but loving peace.

The side we might have loved far more than Yankee fans loved and even his most outraged opponents respected his play.

Greinke makes the ‘Stros trade winners

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Zack the Knife makes the Astros the big trade winners. Will he help make them World Series winners?

No questions asked. The Astros slipped in at the eleventh minute, practically, and not only stole the new single trade deadline show but they did the absolute most to fortify themselves for the postseason run nobody doubts is theirs this season. Barring unforeseen disaster, of course.

With Gerrit Cole looking at free agency after the season it made sense for the Astros to seek a top-of-the-line starting pitcher with at least another full season of team control to line up with (don’t doubt it) future Hall of Famer Justin Verlander, so far the new ageless wonder of baseball.

So it came forth after the deadline passed that the Astros sent a quartet of prospects—good, promising, but not quite platinum-rated prospects—to the Diamondbacks for Zack Greinke, who isn’t exactly a slouch on the mound and who’s having a solid season in his own right so far.

They’ll get the rest of this season plus the final two seasons on the gigadeal Greinke signed with the Diamondbacks. The Snakes also sent the Astros a reported $24 million to help cover the rest of Greinke’s contract, on which the Astros will be responsible for the other $53 million. They’re not exactly complaining.

General manager Jeff Luhnow knew only two things about Greinke before he pulled the trigger on the big deal of the day: Zack the Knife has been a consistent pitcher who’s on the borderline of a Hall of Fame case; and, the righthander isn’t exactly one of the most combustible personalities in baseball.

“I don’t know him personally,” Luhnow told reporters, “but I think he’s not a guy that seeks the limelight, and that actually works well for us here in Houston. And slotting in with Verlander and Cole, he’s gonna not have to be the guy that’s in front of the camera the whole time.”

The Astros weren’t exactly over-occupied on doing the Greinke deal. Before that deal hit the news running Wednesday, they did a little bullpen fortification, getting Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini from the Blue Jays. The Jays also sent the Astros minor league outfielder Cal Stevenson. The Astros sent the Jays outfielder Derek Fisher.

Greinke was last seen striking out seven Yankees in five innings Wednesday. He left the park without talking to reporters, which may or may not have been an indication that he suspected or was told it was time to re-pack his bags.

On the same day, the Astros got flattened by the Indians, 10-4, in Cleveland; they finish with the Tribe Thursday before a weekend hosting the Mariners, but Greinke may not have his first Astros start until the Rockies hit town starting Monday.

“I know he’s really good. I don’t know him personally, but I’m going to get to know him,” said Astros manager A.J. Hinch. “We acquired him because of how good he is. Certainly we expect him to be a big part of our push to win the division and keep winning into October. He’s an incredible pitcher.”

He has been, and he still is when all is said and done. His new teammates won’t disagree. “What a pickup!” Cole himself crowed. Referring to the front office, he added, “They nailed it. They did a fantastic job.”

Landing Greinke shot the Astros into being World Series co-favourites with the Dodgers at Caesar’s Palace Sports Book. But the Astros are smart enough to know Berra’s Law is immutable. Zack the Knife increases their odds of a return to the Series, but so is Andujar’s Law, as uttered by a long-ago Astro, the late Joaquin Andujar: “In baseball, there’s just one word—you never know.”

What we do know, though, is who were really the big winners and the big losers of major league baseball’s first single mid-season trading deadline.

THE WINNERS

Braves—Another starting pitcher wouldn’t have hurt them, necessarily, but what the National League East leaders really needed was a back-of-the-bullpen retooling. And, they got it, in an almost rapid fire series of deals.

They landed Shane Greene from the Tigers. They landed Chris Martin from the Rangers. They landed Mark Melancon from the Giants. As CBS Sports’s Matt Snyder observes, if the prices were too high for such reported availables as Edwin Diaz (Mets) and Felipe Vasquez (Pirates), the Braves did well enough shopping the sale aisle.

None of the new pen trio are anything near the most glittering names in the relief world, but neither are they slouches or pushovers. Changes of scenery from nowhere land to pennant contention do wonders for such pitchers, and it would be absolute gravy if the Braves get something out of Melancon resembling his final years in Pittsburgh and his only spell in Washington.

Greene, of course, was an All-Star this year and was wasted on a Tigers team in the middle of a rebuild. When the Braves can turn to him near the end of a game, either as the sure ninth-inning option or if things get a little dicey in the eighth, the sight of Greene warming up with his 1.18 ERA should be enough to make their division and the rest of the league quake.

Throw in Martin’s 10+ strikeout-to-walk ratio and 10.2 K/9 rate, and all of a sudden the Braves’ bullpen doesn’t look like it’s full of bull anymore.

Indians—So Trevor Bauer turned out to be a bigger pain in the you-know-where than his otherwise solid pitching was worth. Doesn’t mean the Indians dealt from weakness. Not with Corey Kluber on the threshold of returning from the injured list.

And the Tribe managed to address their biggest weakness in the deal: their corner outfielders weren’t hitting anywhere near the same area code as their new toys Yasiel Puig (from the Reds) and Franmil Reyes (from the Padres) put together. Add Puig’s mostly plus throwing arm in right field, and all of a sudden the Indians outfield isn’t just going to roll over and play dead.

The Indians also landed lefthanded pitching youth Logan Allen (also from the Padres), and when you consider how well they develop or re-tool starting pitching this is an upside acquisition for them, too.

But the real key was the impact bats. Puig secures them in right field for the rest of the season, and perhaps if he continues doing well enough the Indians would think of pursuing him when he hits free agency in the fall. Reyes, though, secures a DH spot for them for the foreseeable future while giving them an outfield platoon option in the bargain.

Suddenly it’s not to laugh about the Tribe’s outfield anymore.

Mets—Don’t laugh. Not only are they on a six game winning streak at this writing, the formerly left for dead Mets—and even I thought they were just awaiting the nails to be hammered into their coffin after that terrible weekend in San Francisco—are 12-7 since the All-Star break.

And maybe it’s an illusion since, aside from the Giants, they faced only real contender during the string. But they did take both games against the Twins in Minnesota, including a 14-4 blowout. All of a sudden, these Mets can play as well as they can pitch.

And while the world seemed to be sure only that either Noah Syndergaard or Zack Wheeler would have a change of address after Wednesday’s deadline, it took the Astros landing Greinke to knock the Mets’ landing Marcus Stroman well enough before the deadline out of the park.

Maybe Stroman wasn’t thrilled at first to go to what he thought was a non-contender. And maybe someone ramped up for kicks a rumour that the Mets had ideas about flipping Stroman to the Yankees post haste for some of the Yankees’ top farm produce. But the Mets wasted no time ridding themselves of Jason Vargas—who should have been cashiered over a month earlier—sending him to the Phillies almost as soon as Stroman’s acquisition was a done deal.

The Mets rotation now looks like Jacob deGrom (who pitched brilliantly against the White Sox Wednesday night only to get his almost-usual no-decision, the poor guy), Stroman, Syndergaard, Wheeler, and Steven Matz. And with Matz putting on a deadly off-speed clinic shutting out the Pirates last Saturday night, looking as though he’s finally found the secret to pitching without the power of a deGrom or a more disciplined Syndergaard, it gives the Mets a rotation with two number-ones, a two, and a pair of threes.

Nationals—Like the Mets, the Nats were left for dead a few times before the All-Star break. Like the Mets, too, the Nats are riding resurgent, sort of: 10-9 since the break. And the Nats needed a bullpen remake in the worst way possible.

Not at the absolute rear end, where closer Sean Doolittle remains effective when he has something to save. It’s getting the games to Doolittle that caused one after another National migraine. But then the Nats landed Jays reliever Daniel Hudson and Mariners reliever Roenis Elias.

All of a sudden, the Nats seemed to find relief in the best way possible for that beleaguered bunch of bulls. And then they got really surreal—it turned out that they also got an old buddy (ho ho ho) from the Mariners, Hunter Strickland.

Strickland—who carried an almost three-year grudge over then-Nat Bryce Harper taking him deep twice in a division series, the second time awaiting whether his fresh blast straight over the foul line would leave the yard fair but misinterpreted as admiring the shot. (It flew fair into McCovey Cove.)

Strickland—then a Giant, who somehow hadn’t gotten the chance to face Harper until 2017, then entered a game with Harper leading off an inning and threw the first pitch right into Harper’s hip. Triggering Harper’s charge to the mound and the very delayed Giants pouring out of their dugout, during which pour former Nat Michael Morse’s career ended up being sealed when he collided with Jeff Samardzija and suffered a concussion.

Harper, of course, now wears the Phillies’ silks. But it would have been intriguing if Harper was still a Nat with Strickland coming aboard. Strickland’s coming back from a lat strain that disabled him for almost three months. And the Nats don’t see hide nor hair of the Phillies again until a four-game home set beginning 23 September.

By which time, the Nats may or may not be in the thick of the NL East race (the Braves suddenly started looking human enough the past couple of weeks), securing a wild card berth, or hoping they’ve got a leg up on 2020. A lot rides on the new bulls. But for now, the Nats took their number one need and addressed it respectably enough.

THE LOSERS

Red Sox—Like the Braves and the Nats, the Red Sox needed bullpen help badly. Unlike the Braves and the Nats, the Red Sox landed nothing. Not even a calf, never mind Diaz, whom the Mets were making available and who probably could have been had for a little less than they were said to have demanded for Syndergaard and Wheeler.

The Red Sox bullpen ERA in June: 4.92. The Red Sox bullpen ERA in July: 5.18. Letting some reasonably effective pieces make their ways to Atlanta and Washington instead does not portend well for the Olde Towne Team.

Dodgers—I know, it sounds funny to apply “losers” in any context to the National League’s 2019 threshing machine. But the threshing machine has one monkey wrench looming: the Dodger bullpen isn’t as formidable as it used to be.

Kenley Jansen isn’t really pitching like the Kenley Jansen of old this year. What’s behind him in the pen depends on whose description you read: mess, disaster, toxic waste dump, landfill, take your pick.

If the Mets and the Pirates were asking the moon for Diaz and Vasquez, the Dodgers if anyone had the moon to give in return. They’re loaded with prospects on the farm, and money in the vault, enough to have dealt a package of them for either reliever and still have a bountiful harvest to come.

Good luck holding leads against postseason lineups with that kind of pen. And the Dodgers won’t be able to hit themselves beyond their pen’s capability eternally. They won’t lose the NL West, necessarily, not with a fifteen-game lead at this writing, but their chances at a third consecutive World Series appearance and just one Series ring since 1988 just got a lot more thin.

Brewers—The pre-season favourites to defend their NL Central title aren’t exactly that good anymore. Losing Brandon Woodruff and Jhoulys Chacin to the injured list has left their rotation in tatters, and with the Giants yanking themselves back into the wild card play there went their ideas of maybe adding Madison Bumgarner for a stretch drive.

But they also needed some pen help, and what they brought aboard (Ray Black, Jake Faria, Drew Pomeranz) is serviceable but not quite as serviceable as what the Braves and the Nats brought aboard. The Brew Crew is liable to spend the rest of the season watching the Cardinals’ and the Cubs’ rear ends, but then with the NL Central as it’s been this year there could be a surprise in store. Could. Remotely.

Because the Brewers can’t live by Christian Yelich alone.

Twins—The AL Central leaders have gone from a double-digit division lead to looking only human at three games up on deadline day. They needed a little rotation help and a little bullpen help.

And they got only a little in the pen. Sam Dyson (from the Giants) and Sergio Romo (from the Marlins) are solid but not overwhelming. Maybe not for lack of trying, but the Indians’ blockbuster suddenly puts the Twins close enough to the Tribe’s mercy to make for a too-interesting stretch drive for them when they once looked like the division’s runaway train.

They can hit all the home runs they want, but if their pitching is compromised the Twins have a big problem coming. Like the Yankees, the Twins should have been more aggressive trade deadline players. Like the Yankees, they weren’t, for whatever reasons. And it could come back to haunt them down the stretch.

Yankees—Even Yankee haters won’t understand this one. The number one need for the injury-battered Bombers was rotation help. Especially after they’d just been flattened by the Twins and the otherwise-troubled Red Sox. And they did nothing to fix it.

The question may be why, or why not. If Bumgarner was off the market, they could have played for Stroman or for Mike Minor, even allowing for Minor’s rough July after a sterling June. They didn’t seem to play for any of the above. They didn’t even seem to be a topic if the Diamondbacks—knowing their own chances were still none and none-er—were looking to move Greinke to a contender.

And since their number one American League competition overall did land Greinke, the Yankees may ride a weakening AL East into October but they’re not liable to get past round one again, even if it may not be the Red Sox shoving them to one side this time.

Jim Bouton, RIP: The grip

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Jim Bouton steps forth from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office and the meeting in which Kuhn tried to suppress Ball Four—based entirely on a magazine excerpt.

Fifty years ago Jim Bouton pitched the season he would record to write Ball Four. Once a glittering Yankee prospect reduced to relief pitching thanks to arm trouble that arose after the 1964 World Series, Bouton’s wryly candid notes, asides, and observations while pitching for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Astros both humanised and scandalised baseball and enough of its actual or reputed guardians.

By now, of course, Ball Four is the only sports book included on the New York Public Library’s list of 20th Century Books of the Century. And Bouton died Wednesday at 80, at the Massachussetts home he shared with his second wife, Paula Kurman.

A 2012 stroke left Bouton to suffer cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease linked to dementia that compromised his ability to speak and write. Making it worse: the stroke occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of his daughter Laurie’s death in a New Jersey automobile accident.

Baseball may have gone ballistic when Ball Four hit the ground running in 1970, and Bouton could never be certain whether the Astros sent him down that year because he wasn’t pitching well or because the book was driving the front office and others out of their gourds. But he out-lived enough of his critics, most of the time the living and breathing evidence of the maxim about living well and the best revenge.

And Ball Four keeps company on the New York Public Library list with the likes of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus, Agatha Christie, Grace Metalious, and Tom Wolfe.

Go ahead. Say if you must that Bouton didn’t exactly write The Waste Land, Light in August, Invisible Man, On the Road, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. But then T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe never had to try throwing to Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Lou Brock, Frank Howard, or Willie Mays and living to tell about it, either.

To say Ball Four was received less than approvingly around baseball is to say Baltimore needed breathing treatments after the Mets flattened the Orioles four straight following a Game One loss in the 1969 World Series. “F@ck you, Shakespeare!” was Pete Rose’s review, hollered while Bouton had a rough relief outing against the Reds. All things to come considered, it was a wonder Rose knew Shakespeare wasn’t something the tavern served on tap.

Nicknamed Bulldog in his pitching days, Bouton would have been the first to say how fortunate he was to have met and married Kurman, an academic and speech therapist who holds a Columbia University doctorate in interpersonal communications, and who has worked with brain damaged children during her career. She worked with her husband carefully and helped him re-gain much of his speaking ability despite his illness.

“Together we make a whole person,” Kurman once told a Society for American Baseball Research panel, to laughter that was sad as much as approving.

But Bouton struggled concurrently with what Kurman told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times was “a pothole syndrome: Things will seem smooth, his wit and vocabulary intact, and then there will be a sudden, unforeseen gap in his reasoning, or a concept he cannot quite grasp.”

Teammates were divided mostly over Ball Four; they seemed less offended by Bouton’s vivid descriptions of the lopsided contract talks too many players experienced before the free agency era than by his candid descriptions of their clubhouse, off-field, and road off-field activities.

“The first thing I have to tell people,” said his Seattle roommate and fellow pitcher Gary Bell, with whom Bouton maintained a lifelong friendship to follow, “is that you’re not [fornicating] Adolf Hitler.” Bouton wrote in his book that being Bell’s roommate helped make him slightly more tolerable amidst teammates who weren’t exactly forward-looking or thinking. “Every year,” Bouton said of Bell, “I receive a Christmas card addressed to ‘Ass Eyes’.”

Bouton long believed fellow pitcher Fred Talbot (who died six years ago) was the teammate who was quoted anonymously as saying Bouton’s prose “would gag a maggot.” (“When I asked Fred how he was doing,” Bouton would remember in Ball Four‘s tenth anniversary edition’s postscript, “Ball Five,” after a where-is-he-now call to Talbot, “he said, ‘Well, I’m still living,’ and hung up. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him I was glad.”)

And before the Astros sent him to the minors, where he entered what proved a first retirement, unknown members of the Padres left a burned copy of Ball Four on the Astros’ dugout steps.

He got a delicious chance to write about the reaction/overreaction to Ball Four in the just-as-delightful I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, from then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s active attempt to suppress Ball Four to New York Daily News sportswriting legend Dick Young ripping him as a “social leper” for having written the book. When Bouton met Young in the clubhouse after that column, Young said hello and Bouton couldn’t resist replying, “Hi Dick, I didn’t know you were talking to social lepers these days.” Young replied genially, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take it personally.” Little did Young know.

Bouton’s most famous words may well be the ones with which he ended Ball Four: “You spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out that it was the other way around.” But in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, it may have been an exercise in futility for him to write, ““I think it’s possible that you can view people as heroes and at the same time understand that they are people, too, imperfect, narrow sometimes, even not very good at what they do. I didn’t smash any heroes or ruin the game for anybody. You want heroes, you can have them. Heroes exist in the mind, anyway.”

Bouton enjoys a dance with his wife, Paula Kurman, at their Massachussetts home; the couple once competed as ballroom dance partners.

It took a very long time for baseball people to get it. Even longer than it took them to get that the late Jim Brosnan, a decade earlier, wasn’t trying to smash heroes or ruin a game when he wrote The Long Season and Pennant Race, and Brosnan didn’t go half as far as Bouton went in revealing baseball’s inner sanctum even if Brosnan incurred comparable wrath.

“I had . . . violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety — i.e., what they were really not like,” Brosnan wrote on the 40th anniversary republication of Pennant Race. “Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab.”

Bouton wrote and recorded Ball Four by himself, too, his editor Leonard Shecter doing nothing much more than knocking it into book-readable condition, as he would for I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. It didn’t stop Kuhn from hauling Bouton into his office and trying to jam down the pitcher’s throat a statement saying he hadn’t meant it and the whole thing was Shecter’s fault.

Both pitchers were very aware of the worlds around them, and both wrote about the periodic spells of boredom, racial tensions, off-field skirt chasings, and self-doubts endemic in their professional baseball lives. Brosnan saved them for his books and articles; Bouton was less reluctant to speak his mind about things like politics, Vietnam, and civil rights when asked or when a conversation left him the opening.

Bouton bought even less into the still-lingering press representations of athletes as heroes. Teammates didn’t always hold with that or other things, like calling them out on it when they made mistakes that cost the Yankees games he pitched.

“After two or three years of playing with guys like [Mickey] Mantle and [Roger] Maris,” he wrote in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wise guy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”

“He stands out,” Shecter wrote of Bouton in Sport, “because he is a decent young man in a game which does not recognize decency as valuable.” Much the same thing was said of Brosnan no matter what particular writers did or didn’t think of his two books.

For decades Bouton believed Ball Four got him blackballed from the Yankees in terms of Old-Timer’s Days and other such events involving team alumni, and that Mantle was the instigator. When one of Mantle’s sons died in the mid-1990s, Bouton left a message of sympathy on Mantle’s answering machine. To Bouton’s surprise, Mantle himself called to thank Bouton and, by the way, say that it wasn’t Mantle who put Bouton in the Yankee deep freeze.

Laurie Bouton’s death prompted her oldest of two brothers, Michael, to write an astonishing op-ed piece in The New York Times calling for the Yankees to reconcile with both his father and with Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, estranged ever since George Steinbrenner fired him as manager through an intermediary in the 1980s. Michael Bouton got what he asked for. In both regards. (Yankee Stadium rocked especially with a section occupied by Laurie’s friends, holding a banner hollering LAURIE’S GIRLS!)

When Bouton retired the first time in 1970, he assembled another book, a splendid anthology of writings about baseball managers and managing called “I Managed Good But, Boy, Did They Play Bad,” then became a sportscaster for New York ABC and CBS. As his first marriage was falling apart, Bouton also tried a baseball comeback. He slogged the minors a couple of years before then-Braves owner Ted Turner abetted his September callup in 1978. After a start that prompted such comments as, “It was like facing Bozo the Clown,” as Bouton eventually recorded (in “Ball Five”), “In his next start, Bozo the Clown beat the San Francisco Giants. The pennant-contending San Francisco Giants.”

Then he tangled with Astros howitzer J.R. Richard. “The young flamethrower and the old junkballer,” Bouton described them. On the same night the towering Richard broke the National League’s single-season strikeout record for righthanded pitchers, the old junkballer fought the young flamethrower to a draw, somehow. In the interim, Bouton and a Portland Mavericks teammate named Rob Nelson cooked up the concoction that became Big League Chew gum, the kind that looked shredded like chewing tobacco, and its success made some nice dollars for Bouton and Nelson.

Bouton ended his brief baseball comeback, satisfied that he’d proven what he tried to prove, and also became a motivational speaker who also continued writing as well as joining his second wife administering a recreational 19th century-style baseball league, helping preserve an old ballpark (about which Bouton wrote Foul Ball), and becoming a competition ballroom dancing team. The Renaissance Bulldog.

Whenever one of Bouton’s former Ball Four-season teammates went to his reward, Bouton was genuinely saddened. “I think he came, over the years, to love them,” Kurman told Kepner. “As each one died, he got really teary about it. He realized how deeply they were part of him.” (The Pilots, of course, were sold and moved to Milwaukee for the 1970 season, becoming the Brewers. “The old Pilots are a ghost team,” Bouton once wrote, “doomed forever to circumnavigate the globe in the pages of a book.”)

Ball Four‘s true success, wrote Roger Angell himself (one more time: Angell isn’t baseball’s Homer; Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell), “is Mr. Bouton himself, as a day-to-day observer, hard thinker, marvellous listener, comical critic, angry victim, and unabashed lover of a sport. What he has given us is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost side, along with an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

Baseball didn’t collapse. The world didn’t implode. That Star Spangled Banner yet waves. Things have happened in baseball since that make any outrage over Ball Four resemble the kindergarten style debate most of the original hoopla really was. “If Mickey Mantle had written Ball Four,” Bouton once wrote, “it wouldn’t have been a big deal. A marginal relief pitcher on the Seattle Pilots had no business writing a book.” Or, implicitly, exposing the foibles and more of the reserve era’s abuses than anyone suspected existed within the Old Ball Game.

The marginal relief pitcher, once a Yankee World Series star, ended up meaning far more than that. If you want to call Bouton part of the conscience of baseball, then you must admit with more than a single tear that baseball lost something precious with his illness and, now, his death. So has his wife. So have their children and grandchildren. So has America. May the Lord and his beloved daughter welcome him home gently but happily.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

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