Tag Archives: Pittsburgh Pirates

Griffin’s lines of early spring

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Konnor Griffin, striking for Opening Day at age nineteen.

Opening his poem, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” William Wordsworth lamented,

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

That could have been the opening spring lament of baseball fans whose teams are owned by those to whom building and sustaining competitive rosters is an impediment to making or further augmenting fortunes. It’s not impossible to conceive Wordsworth living in America in our day being, say, a Pirates fan.

Except that, for now, early enough in spring training still, the Pirates make some sounds not associated with them too frequently.

A child prodigy, shortstop Konnor Griffin, considered the absolute best of baseball’s youth in waiting, last year’s Minor League Player of the Year, electrifies Pirate fans long bereft of spiritual electricity and non-Pirate fans who savour the excitement young sprouts generate often enough.

Griffin at this writing has slugged his third home run of the spring exhibition season. The co-owner of a baseball laboratory known as Maven Baseball Lab compares him to top-of-the-line performance cars. “You’re looking at a Ferrari. You’re not looking at a little Fiat.” ESPN’s Jeff Passan says Griffin “represents more than a glimmer of hope for a woebegone organization.”

He is the dream of any franchise: top-of-the-scale power and speed, with a nifty glove and a shotgun-blast arm, the kind of work ethic that will make any slacker in his orbit feel like a lout, and a demeanor so polite and accommodating that the words “yes” and “sir” might as well be surgically attached to one another.

Top power and speed? Nifty glove and shotgun blast arm? Work ethic that embarrasses slackers? It sounds rather like Mickey Mantle without the notorious leg trouble and long nights out on the town, at least before the Yankees discovered he might be useless as a shortstop but had center field potential to match his otherworldly power.

Polite? Accommodating? “Yes” and “sir” might as well be surgically grafted? When was the last time we heard a boy shortstop with Griffin’s upside described that way? Cal Ripken, Jr.?

“Can you imagine what John McGraw would say if he saw this kid?” Mantle’s first Yankee manager Casey Stengel said about him in his first Yankee spring. Ripken invited comparisons to Honus Wagner both at the plate, with the glove, and off the field. The Pirates may have to be careful. May.

No, scratch that. At nineteen years old, Griffin so far displays disarming maturity. Either that, or he’s learned some lessons in how not to do media blarney from Bull Durham‘s million-dollar-armed, ten-cent-headed pitching phenom Nuke LaLoosh. LaLoosh was (shall we say) a loose cannon before Crash Davis polished him just enough, including his press cliches.

“I’m happy to be here, and I hope I can help the ball club,” LaLoosh says to the fictitious sports reporter after his late-season call-up to the parent club. “You know, I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing things will work out. You know, you got to play ’em one day at a time.”

Griffin seems neither that callow nor that scripted. So far.

“I felt really comfortable,” he told reporters after the Sunday game where he delivered spring homer number three. “I’m really working on just being present, taking each game one game at a time. I’m enjoying where I’m at right now, but still got to continue to work and get ready to go tomorrow again.”

A young man on the threshold of his twenties who swung, caught, and threw his way through three minor league levels last year and keeps his head while turning enough others this spring training, thus far, isn’t quite the living, breathing resurrection of a thunderbolt arm attached to an airhead.

Griffin even has room enough to thank the Pirates for letting him be him and letting him let his own serious work of play define him for them. “They’ve done a great job so far allowing me to be free in the minor leagues and be able to move and continue to face challenges,” he tells Passan.

But this spring, I’m really trying not to think about it too much. There’s a lot of noise. I’m just trying to treat it just like I did last spring. I knew I had no chance of just making the big league team. And so every day I was just trying to be a sponge and soak up the advice of these great players who’ve been through it. And I’m trying to do the same thing this year. I know there could be a chance I make the big leagues at some point soon, and that’s great, but I just want to feel ready.

Passan thinks Griffin’s some point soon may come sooner than either he or Pirate fans think. The veteran writer could hardly resist reminding one and all that no teenager has made an Opening Day debut since the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the original World Wide Web debuted. That teenager’s name was Ken Griffey, Jr. No pressure, you understand.

“Goes to church every Sunday, doesn’t cuss, doesn’t do any of that stuff, married at 19,” says the Pirates’ youthful super-pitcher, Paul Skenes. “It’s not common, but nothing about him is common. Everything screams uncommon. And if you want to be uncommon, you want to do uncommon things, it starts with thinking uncommon—and he does that.” Put some Caesar dressing on that word salad if you must, but take it as high praise.

All Griffin has to do is continue living up to it. Even with his well-composed head, that will prove at least as much of a challenge as refusing to let opposing pitchers decompose him or opposing liners and grounders disintegrate him.

He seems aware enough of his game and its encyclopedic history to know that, for every Griffey that arrives on Opening Day still in his teens and goes all the way to the Hall of Fame, there are several hundred who go over, under, sideways, and down, for numerous reasons, and under numerous circumstances. It’s a cinema show for fans—equal parts romance, drama, comedy, horror, psychological thriller, and back—but potential hell for players.

If Griffin keeps the good work up and convince the Pirates he should play on Opening Day, he may or may not have his work cut out for him. The Pirates will face the new-look Mets, who’ve announced Freddy Peralta (import from Milwaukee) as their Opening Day starting pitcher.

The good news for Griffin: Peralta can be prone to the home run. (He surrendered 25 last season.) The bad news: Peralta also struck twice as many out as he walked last year (3.09 K/BB rate) and 10.4 per nine innings. The worse news: Griffin is trying to make a team retooled toward a postseason expectation or three but with ownership known for mistaking monkey wrenches for baseball equipment.

Wrote Wordsworth four verses later:

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

Yep. Wordsworth among us today just might be a Pirate fan. Or, at least, an empath toward their current most shining prospect.

 

Bill Mazeroski, RIP: Fair play

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Bill Mazeroski

Striking a pose in the Polo Grounds during his earliest Pirates seasons, Bill Mazeroski shows what really got him into the Hall of Fame at long enough last.

Let’s get it out of the way right away. “I was gonna hit one out,” said Dick Stuart, the on-deck batter. “Could I help if it Mazeroski decided to get cute?”

There. The best gag to follow after Bill Mazeroski hit the 1960 World Series-winning home run is resurrected just long enough and, now, cast aside. Because anyone who thinks the greatest defensive second baseman ever got into the Hall of Fame because of that home run alone should be dismissed unceremoniously.

Mazeroski died Friday at 89. The Game Seven-ending homer he hit to hand his Pirates a World Series win despite being outscored 55-27 will live in baseball lore as long as baseball itself lives, of course. Neither Dr. Strangeglove nor any other Pirate could help it if Maz decided to get cute.

It’s also one of the absolute classic instances of a player doing something so far above his own head the most powerful telescope available won’t locate it. If the only way you judge a ballplayer is at the plate, Mazeroski is too much of a piece with other mere mortals delivering transdimensionally immortal moments:

* Bumpus Jones pitched only one full major league season, 1892. His 10.19 ERA may explain a lot about why. The year before, he got to pitch one game . . . and became the first major league pitcher ever to pitch a no-hitter in his first-ever major league start. Go figure.

* Bobby Lowe is sixteen places outside the top one hundred second basemen of all time, but in 1894 he was the first major league player ever to hit four home runs in a single game.

* Howard Ehmke snuck one notch inside the top two hundred starting pitchers the game’s ever seen. With his career about to end, he was the surprise starter for Game One of the 1929 World Series. And he surprised everyone, perhaps even himself, by setting the single-game Series strikeout record (13) and doing it in large enough part at the expense of three Hall of Famers whom he struck out twice each. (Kiki Cuyler, Rogers Hornsby, and Hack Wilson.) His record was broken eventually by Carl Erskine, who was broken by Sandy Koufax, who was broken by Bob Gibson

* Don Larsen was the number 231 starting pitcher in the major league game’s history . . . but in 1956 he pitched the first and so far only perfect game in World Series history.

* Bill Mazeroski, a lifetime .260 hitter who hit slightly below average for second basemen, and had a lifetime .299 on-base percentage, hit the first and so far only World Series-winning Game Seven walkoff home run.

That quintet yielded forth one Hall of Famer. And he didn’t get there because he was the second coming of fellow Hall of Fame second baseman Rogers Hornsby, his diametric opposite in more ways than one. (Never mind the statue outside PNC Park’s right field gates, showing Mazeroski rounding second and waving his outstretched batting helmet after hitting that home run.)

Hornsby hit about ten tons in his prime and showed the pre-integration National League what it was like (and how bad it wasn’t) to have Babe Ruth or close enough to him in your league. But he was league-average at best at second base. And, he was described most politely as the cantankerous personality type.

Mazeroski could barely hit ten ounces. Some people might still be trying to figure out just how he averaged drawing eight intentional walks a season or hitting 13.8 home runs a season. (The National League’s pitchers weren’t that generous.) But slip a glove onto his left hand and he became second base’s answer to Brooks Robinson. (Or was Brooks Robinson third base’s answer to Bill Mazeroski?)

Maz’s 148 total defensive zone runs above his league average remain the best among second baseman in major league history. (His nearest trailer: Frank White, the longtime Royals second baseman, with 126.) When he retired after the 1972 season (and a second World Series ring, with the 1971 Pirates), he was believed to own the best defensive statistics of any player at any position, ever, pending the final outcome of Robinson’s career. (Total Baseball, the pre-Retrosheet baseball co-Bible, ranked the eight-time Gold Glove-winning Mazeroski the best fielder at any position, ever.)

The Hall of Fame voters weren’t in a big hurry to elect him.

“What he has to sell,” wrote Bill James in The Politics of Glory, “is lots and lots of defense, and the Hall of Fame isn’t buying. Trying to sell defense to the Hall of Fame is like trying to sell diplomacy to a terrorist. They may listen politely, but what they’re really looking for is big guns.” (Which reminds me: Hands up to everyone who barely remembers Mazeroski also hit a two-run homer in Game One of that 1960 Series to put that game out of Yankee reach, too.)

Come 2001, in The New Historical Baseball Abstract, James wrote that his own Win Shares system credited Mazeroski—whose other nickname was No-Touch, in honour of the speed at which he released a ball to start turning a double play (it was the speed of light, we think we remember)—with 113 such shares for his second base defense, “the highest total of all time.”

Some way, somehow, one of the last of the pre-Era Committee-partioned Veterans Committee finally caught on to the idea that run prevention was just as important to winning ball games as run production. Maybe slightly superior. “[T]he Cubs have had two problems,” wrote George F. Will during the peak (?) of their 108-year rebuild between 1908 and 2016. “They put too few runs on the scoreboard and the other guys put too many.” Good pitching isn’t the only thing that beats good hitting.

James once related that Dave Cash, who succeeded Mazeroski at second base, had no problem at all waiting around for Mazeroski’s age to overthrow him at long enough last. “Actually,” he quoted Cash as saying, “I learned a lot from Mazeroski.”

He’s a real man, and one of the things he taught me was to keep things in perspective. Maz didn’t make many errors, and he hardly ever made any bad plays, but when he did, he didn’t let it bother him. He was always the same, whether things were going good, bad, or indifferently.

A man that sanguine, whether playing second base or teaching it (as he did for numerous years to follow as a Pirates spring training instructor) is going to make short and sweet work of his Hall of Fame induction speech. That’s exactly what Mazeroski did when his (long overdue) time came, shamelessly letting emotion come forth before he finished:

I think defense belongs in the Hall of Fame. Defense deserves as much credit as pitching and I’m proud to be going in as a defensive player. I want to thank the Veterans Committee for getting me here. I thought when the Pirates retired my number [9] that would be the greatest thing ever to happen to me. I don’t think I’m gonna make it, I want to thank everyone who made the trip up here to listen to all this crap …Thank you to everybody.

As had been so while turning 1,706 double plays (it’s still a major league record), Mazeroski’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Just a year after he pronounced defense as Hall of Fame important in its own right, the platinum standard for shortstops, Ozzie Smith, was inducted.

We can allow thoughts of Maz and The Wiz in the same middle infield in our imaginations alone. But boy, what those imaginations would show us, to the chagrin of a few too many hitters learning the hard way how easy it isn’t to sneak something past them.

Worry not that Mazeroski reunited with his beloved wife in the Elysian Fields will drive her mad all over again. Milene Nicholson met him when she worked in the Pirates front office and married him in 1958. They were a couple until she preceded him to the Fields two years ago. Rest assured she’s kept the gloves ready for him near second base.

Dave Parker, RIP: Presence

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Dave Parker

The Cobra had a blast playing baseball–and he leveled a few blasts, too . . .

Dave Parker almost lived long enough to take the Cooperstown podium for his Hall of Fame induction. A long-enough battler with Parkinson’s disease, there had been a time when Parker wondered whether it was his own fault he hadn’t or wouldn’t be elected to the Hall.

The Classic Baseball Era Committee elected him last December. The Cobra died at 74 Saturday, 29 days before he’d have been up on that stage. Not fair.

Even before his notoriety during the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials, Parker could have caused a lot of people to wonder the same thing. Power hitter though he might be, he also played with the attitude of scrappy little middle infielders.

On the bases he thought infielders plus catchers were nothing more than papier mache walls through which to run. not living breathing humans liable to stand just as strong against him as the linebackers against whom he played as a high school running back. Describing him as a Sherman tank running on high test would not have been inaccurate.

Those caused him injuries that got in the way of his performance more often than not as time went on. His admitted cocaine use at the drug trials surely did, too. He might apologise for having been a fool, but Parker never once shied away from taking responsibility for his own self.

That classic prankish-looking face and that classic wisenheimer smile—invariably, Parker resembled a man unable to mask that he’d just detonated a ferocious prank somewhere within the vicinity—married his jaw-dropping power at the plate to make the Cobra look as though he couldn’t wait to carve his autograph into a hapless pitcher’s cranium and make the poor sap laugh his fool head off over it.

His self-worth was bottomless and unapologetic. He wasn’t even close to kidding when he told a fan trying to get the best possible angle for a cell phone camera shot, “It wouldn’t take much to make me look good.” But what made him look better was his reputation for team leadership wherever he played.

In Pittsburgh and in Oakland he was part and parcel of World Series winners. In between, he had a memorable stop in Cincinnati, where his manager was Pete Rose and he sat on deck one fine day in Wrigley Field, about to close a road trip out, awaiting manager Rose’s decision on what player Rose would do at the plate—and whether player Rose would take a final shot at passing Ty Cobb on the all-time hit list in the bargain.

Parker’s presence helped Rose make his decision. Manager Rose knew his Reds had only the slimmest shot at staying in the 1985 pennant race and that nobody batting behind Parker was liable to deliver the clutch hit. A sacrifice bunt would have left first base open and the Cubs liable for malpractise if they pitched to Parker rather than put him on to go for the weaker pickings behind him.

Never mind every Red fan on the planet plus their (shall we say) mercurial owner Marge Schott demanding Rose bunt and save the big hit for the home folks. Manager Rose ordered Player Rose to swing away knowing that would give his team just enough more chance to win—but he struck out. It was the most honourable strikeout of Rose’s life. Maybe the most honourable play of it, too. Imagine if Parker wasn’t on deck.

Once he cleaned up from his cocaine issue, Parker’s clubhouse leadership came back to the fore. Making him the kind of guy who had big value to his team even when he slumped. Your clubhouse might be a lot more fun but it would also become a lot more baloney-proof.

As a matter of fact, that clubhouse value shone brightest when the Cobra left Oakland after their 1989 Series triumph, but the Athletics got swept out of the 1990 Series—by a Reds team picking itself up and dusting itself off after Rose’s violations of Rule 21(d) cost him his professional baseball career.

Stop snarling and let Thomas Boswell (who will be in Cooperstown that July weekend accepting his Career Excellence Award induction) explain, as he did in a sharp post mortem analysing just how those mighty A’s could have been humbled by those underdog but hardly modest Reds:

Where is Dave Parker when you need a clubhouse enforcer? The A’s always knew, sooner or later, they’d need Big Dave to quell a cell-block riot, just as the ’77 Reds desperately missed Tony Perez after they traded him. In ’88 [Jose] Canseco popped off about beating the Dodgers in five games. The Dodgers won in five. In ’89 Parker promised to clean, stuff, and mount Jose if he spoke above a whisper. The A’s swept. Now Dave’s gone, Jose predicted a sweep. General manager Sandy Alderson makes a lot of good moves, but saving money on Parker may have cost him a world title.

Dave Parker

“Where is Dave Parker when you need a clubhouse enforcer?” The A’s missed Parker more than they thought when they let him escape after 1989.

“He’s one of the greatest teammates I’ve ever had,” said Parker’s Oakland teammate, pitcher Dave Stewart, a man who looked like six parts commando and half a dozen parts assassin on the mound. “He had such a presence when he walked into the room.”

“He used to say, ‘When the leaves turn brown, I will be wearing the crown’,” said Keith Hernandez, who played against Parker as a Cardinal and a Met and saw Parker win the National League batting title back to back. “Until I usurped his crown in ’79. He was a better player than me. RIP.”

Until his illness made it difficult if not near impossible, Parker’s post-playing days included working as a special batting instructor for the Pirates. Longtime Pirates star Andrew McCutchen was one of those who learned a few things from the Cobra.

“It was rough to see him go through that,” said McCutchen in a formal statement. “I just hope now he’s in a better place and not having to worry about that stuff anymore . . . He was probably Superman to a lot of people when he played.”

Parker’s kryptonite turned out to be Parkinson’s. “I’m having good days, bad days, just like everybody else,” he told a Pennsylvania radio station four years ago. “My bad days, you just got to play the hand that’s dealt. And I know that it’s something that I got to deal with for the rest of my life.”

One of his ways of dealing with it was setting up the Dave Parker 39 Foundation (39 was his uniform number), raising money to continue research into finding a cure for the disease whose other famed victims have included actor Michael J. Fox, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, singer Linda Ronstadt, and Pope John Paul II.

Pirates middle infielder Nick Gonzales wears Parker’s old number 39. He said Saturday, learning Parker had just passed, “It just meant a little more playing today with that number. Personally, I think it should be retired. I think I should get a new number, honestly.”

That kind of tribute would be one of two Parker might appreciate from his new eternal perch in the Elysian Fields. The other was the Pirates doing just what they did Saturday, thumping the higher-flying Mets 9-2 a day after they thumped them 9-1. And the Cobra didn’t have to promise to clean, stuff, and mount anyone to make it happen, either.

Al McBean, RIP: Always leave ’em laughing

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Elroy Face, Al McBean

Stepping up when relief ace Elroy Face (left) struggled in 1964 earned Al McBean (right) the Sporting News Fireman of the Year (NL) Award he displays proudly with Face here.

Al McBean was both major league baseball’s first Virgin Islander by birth and a first class character. The righthander with the hard sinkerball who died at 85 at home Wednesday seems never to have met a situation he couldn’t clown his way through. Even opponents didn’t seem to mind.

He was “the funniest man I have ever seen in a baseball uniform,” Hall of Fame second baseman and manager Red Schoendienst once said of him.

Even the way McBean came into a game from the bullpen got laughs. “Whatever those walks mirrored,” wrote the Philadelphia Daily News‘s Sran Hochman in 1963, “concentration, determination, or intoxication, nobody walked into a game the way Alvin O’Neal McBean walks into a game.”

Writing McBean’s full name may have been drawn from longtime Pirates broadcast Bob Prince, who seemed to love referring to McBean that way. But about those walks in from the pen, McBean’s manager Danny Murtaugh said, “You’d have to say McBean saunters in.”

He never apologised for enjoying life and the game. “My thing was fun,” McBean told Society for American Baseball Research biographer Rory Costello in a 1999 interview.

I liked to do little crazy things, something different for the fans, they see the same thing over and over and over. Like crawling over the foul line and not touching it. Throwing the first pitch underhand, pulling on a big red bandana and wiping my face with it. Something the fan can feel a part of.

But the guy who went to a Pirates scout’s tryout in 1957 as a press photographer (he was goaded into trying out and ended up signing with the Pirates for a $100 bonus) also liked to learn as much about the game as he could. One of his teachers was Elroy Face, the Pirates’s star relief veteran.

“I used to go to his house, barbecue a lot, pal around with his family,” McBean told Costello. “And he would tell me intricacies of the game. You could get a guy on, walk a few guys once in a while, based on how you felt that particular day. Learn how to pitch in those situations.”

Though inconsistency dogged him much of his career, McBean actually got to step in for the main man when Face struggled in 1964. McBean had posted a brilliant 1963 (2.57 ERA, 2.81 fielding-independent pitching rate, over 122.1 relief innings pitched in 58 games), then went out and all but equaled it in ’64. (1.91 ERA, 2.97 FIP, 1.04 WHIP, 89.2 innings in 58 games.)

That earned him the Sporting News‘s 1964 National League Fireman of the Year award, placing McBean in some very distinguished company: the American League winner was Red Sox legend Dick (The Monster) Radatz. And Face himself won the NL award two years earlier.

Not that McBean’s prize win was simple. Four attempts to send McBean a commemorative trophy to his Virgin Islands home resulted in broken goods in shipment. When an unbroken trophy finally arrived, McBean “erupted in mock outrage,” Costello recorded—he’d wanted the head to have a fireman’s hat atop it.

That was the least of his problems. He went to Puerto Rico to play winter ball after the ’64 season and became the subject of rumoured death threats. Heavy bettors among fans were said to have suffered heavy losses in McBean’s games and were reported to be considering shooting the effervescent righthander.

McBean continued his stellar relief work in 1965 while Face missed much of the season with a knee injury. Then Face returned healthy for 1966 and McBean lost plenty of chances to nail down Pirate wins. He had three more decent seasons for the Pirates before they exposed him to the second National League expansion draft and the newborn Padres took him.

Oops. The Padres weren’t prepared for McBean’s freewheeling kind of fun. Costello records that he asked where to find the nearest spa—and worked out in a dance leotard. McBean ended up getting one start for those 1969 Padres . . . and traded almost promptly to the Dodgers for a pair of no-names. It was the only trade between those two teams for almost three decades.

But he got a return engagement with the Pirates when the Dodgers released him a year later and the Pirates picked him up. After looking nothing like the way he once was at age 32, McBean got what proved his final release. He played winter ball in Puerto Rico again in 1970-71 before the Phillies signed him and sent him to their Eugene, Oregon (AAA) affiliate with an apparent promise to bring him up if he did well.

He did well enough at Eugene, but the Phillies opted instead to bring up a far younger pitcher named Wayne Twitchell, about whom the most memorable thing (other than a nasty knee injury that compromised his career) was getting an All-Star appearance and a public compliment from Hall of Famer Steve Carlton before Carlton went completely silent to the press.

When the Phillies demoted him to AA-level ball for 1972, McBean retired and went home to the Virgin Islands permanently. He once claimed his sole regret was making the Pirates after one World Series championship and leaving them before another: “I have never seen myself pitch,” alluding to the broadcast highlights now ubiquitous on YouTube.

He joined St. Thomas’s department of housing, parks, and recreation, and co-founded the city’s Little League program, before becoming the housing, parks, and recreation department’s deputy commissioner. He never lost his zest for life or love for baseball even if he became critical of changes in the game in the years that followed his career.

He bemoaned guaranteed big contracts compromising players’ hunger for the game; he zinged the vaunted Braves starting rotation of the 1990s for their corner life (only Hall of Famer John Smoltz escaped his snark: “At least he comes after you”); he dismissed Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn as “a [fornicating] banjo hitter”; he swore Hall of Famer Frank Thomas would be putty in his sinkerballing hands. (“The Big Hurt, my ass. I would eat him up.”)

Well, nobody’s perfect. (Though it’s not unreasonable to think that maybe, just maybe, McBean might well have done well against the Big Hurt: Thomas’s lifetime slash line hitting ground balls that good sinkerballers normally get—.268/.268/.293/.561 OPS.)

The guy whose best man at his 1962 wedding to Olga Santos was Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente (McBean once posited that Clemente was a better all-around player than his fellow Hall of Famers Henry Aaron and Willie Mays) didn’t have to be perfect. He just had to be himself.

What I enjoyed most from baseball was the camaraderie that I had with the fans in Pittsburgh. The signing of autographs, then going to people’s homes for dinner. Mt. Lebanon was one of my areas, real nice–I used to wear the little black thing on my head, I didn’t know what it was for, but I wore it anyway! Up at St. Brigid’s Parish, I knew most of the nuns there, they’d come to Forbes Field, they’d come down to the bullpen and we’d talk. I’d go to church up in the Hill District. I would drink dago red. I had fun basically with everybody.

That was the man who is said to have had a run-in with segregated facilities during one spring training by drinking water from a fountain marked “white only” and crowing, “I just took a drink of that white water and it’s no damned different from ours!”

The man who pursued his future wife by showing up at the Puerto Rican drugstore where she worked while he played winter ball, buying soap from her daily until she agreed to go on a date with him. His love affair with Olga endured on earth far longer than his pitching career.

If you thought McBean left some side-splitting memories around baseball, you can only imagine what his Olga, his daughter Sarina, and his three grandsons have to hold until they meet again in the Elysian Fields.

Danny Young, RIP: The hard climb and fall

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Danny Young

It took Danny Young just over a decade to make the Show, and a shoulder injury following a harsh cup of coffee to return home.

The 21st Century’s first official grand slam wasn’t hit in the United States. The Mets and the Cubs opened the 2000 season on 30 March in Japan’s Tokyo Dome. The game went to an eleventh inning, and Cubs manager Don Baylor sent a longtime minor leaguer named Danny Young to the mound to pitch the top half.

The first student from Woodbury, Tennessee’s Cannon High School to make the Show in the first place, Young started auspiciously enough, getting two quick outs on a grounder to shortstop by Robin Ventura and a pop fly around the infield by Derek Bell. Then he surrendered a base hit to Todd Zeile before walking the bases loaded by way of Rey Ordóñez and Melvin Mora.

Mets manager Bobby Valentine sent Benny Agbayani out to pinch hit for relief pitcher Dennis Cook. Young’s first pitch to him missed for ball one. Agbayani hammered the lefthander’s second pitch over the center field fence. After Jay Payton’s followup double, Young escaped when Edgardo Alfonso flied out to center field.

“Even though I gave up a grand slam, I still looked around and it’s like, ‘That’s Mark Grace right there. I’ve got Sammy Sosa in the outfield’,” said Young—found dead at home at 51 Sunday—to Fox Sports. “They patted me on the back and let me know it was going to be all right. I had a lot of the guys come to me and say, ‘Welcome to the big leagues.’ They were like, ‘Things like this happen.’ I should have gotten out of the inning. It was just nerves and knowing within myself that something was wrong.”

It took Young long enough to get to the Show in the first place. Drafted by the Astros at nineteen in 1990, he played for nine minor league teams affiliated to three major league franchises over the decade to follow before he finally made the Cubs after the turn of the century. He never complained about being drafted in the 83rd round, either.

“If I was a first-rounder,” he once told Fox Sports writer Sam Gardner, “I might not have made it, because I had a thirst and a hunger to make it because of where I was drafted. If they’d have set a million dollars down in my hand at that time, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. So maybe that was just meant to be my turn.”

He simply didn’t expect to be on the wrong side of history when he finally got his turn in a Cub uniform in Tokyo.

He knew he’d had control issues from the outset—in his first minor league season he struck 41 batters out in 32.2 innings, but he also walked 39—but he also knew he could learn plenty enough about the game he loved but knew too little about. “I struggled just because it was a new process for me,” he told Gardner. “I still had this fear of making a mistake and the coaches just thought, at the time, ‘This guy is just having a hard time picking this stuff up’.”

Before they released him to be picked up by the Pirates organisation, the Astros even tried as radical a class as they could think of: they hired Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, then working free-lance as a roving pitching instructor, to work with Young and with a kid named Billy Wagner in spring 1994.

Young had absolutely no idea who his new teacher was.

“Then I come to find out a couple years later,” Young said, “and people are looking at me like, ‘Dude do you know who you were with?’ I just didn’t know baseball, but they didn’t know that I didn’t know baseball. I just went out there and pitched.” Ever the gentleman, Koufax gave Young a signed ball that Young kept in a clear ceramic ball on a pedestal in his home.

“[I]t was overwhelmingly mind-blowing, the things that he knew about the directional part of pitching that I didn’t really grasp at first,” Young told Gardner of his Hall of Fame teacher. “And as I went along, it got better. I was a late bloomer, so I didn’t really understand the concepts that he was teaching me, but he taught me to find a comfort zone and how to tune out the crowd and what’s going on around me.”

The Pirates, too, remained as patient as possible as Young continued to struggle finding the comfort zone Koufax preached. As in the Astros organisation, Young tried everything he could think of, from changing deliveries and arm angles to changing speeds and back. Only when the Cubs picked him in the 1997 Rule 5 draft did Young begin to smell something close enough to success, or at least real major league potential.

He moved up the chain until he made the team in spring 2000. After Agbayani’s Tokyo blast, the Cubs returned Stateside and Young got into the next three straight games against the Cardinals. The first outing: two walks in two-thirds of an inning but no runs allowed. The second: a two-out double by Fernando Tatis, Sr. but another scoreless escape. Maybe Young was getting it at last.

The third: disaster—a pair of two-out walks, leaving a mess for his relief Brian Williams to clean up in the fourth inning, a mess that continued with a bases-loaded walk, a grand slam by J.D. Drew, and three runs charged to Young that he wasn’t on the mound to surrender himself.

The Cubs sent him back to Iowa after that. Young continued struggling until he finally spoke up further about an issue he’d felt in Tokyo, when he first mentioned to Mark Grace—after a pickoff throw that bounced to first—that he felt something wrong with his shoulder. It turned out his rotator cuff required major surgery, the first of five on the shoulder.

After 2000, Young retired from the game he’d never really had the chance to learn even rudimentarily in a Woodbury where baseball wasn’t exactly a well-taught sport. At least, not until Young returned home to spend the rest of his life raising his family and teaching and coaching the game to local kids.

“I played tee-ball, played Babe Ruth, played Dixie Youth Baseball and high school, but there was no real coaching,” he told Gardner. “And for the [coaches], that was no fault of their own. We hauled hay, we fished, we did whatever we did, and then we went out on the field and had fun. We had teams, but it wasn’t competitive. I mean, I ended up being a right-handed hitter because none of the coaches knew how to teach me how to hit left-handed.”

If only the Danny Young who went home to teach the game on his native ground had been available to the Danny Young who originally caught the Astros’ eyes, however deep in that 1999 draft. He might have had more to show for his long slog to the Show, and in the Show itself.

He never struck a major league hitter out, he walked six, he surrendered five hits, but he kept a big league attitude. For himself, and for his wife, Sarah, their six children, and their two grandchildren. The battler who surrendered this century’s first major league grand slam should only know peace and fulfillment in the Elysian Fields to which he was taken—cause unknown at this writing—too soon.