Tag Archives: Pittsburgh Pirates

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.

Frank Thomas, RIP: The needling and the damage done

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Frank Thomas

Frank Thomas, signing autographs in the Polo Grounds as an Original Met. As a Phillie, his 1965 fight with Dick Allen accelerated Allen’s undeserved war with Philadelphia racists.

Baseball’s best known Frank Thomas who isn’t the Hall of Fame bombardier died Monday at 93. The good news: That Thomas had a colourful history as one of the Original Mets, for whom he played from their 1962 birth through August 1964. The bad news is that he had a terrible history involving a teammate of colour on the 1965 Phillies.

It soiled a respectable major league career as a power-hitting outfielder/corner infielder, a three-time All-Star with the 1950s Pirates, and an Original Met who was grateful to have been remembered when the Mets reinstituted Old Timers Day last year and he fought through a neck injury to appear.

Thomas survived nasty contract battles with Branch Rickey, then running the Pirates, whose genius as a baseball thinker and courage as baseball’s colour line breaker in signing Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers was countered by his often devious and insulting penury when it came time to pay his players reasonably.

He also prospered somewhat with and survived the Original Mets, that expansion troupe remembered best as baseball’s version of . . . well, they really did have Abbott pitching to Costello with Who the Hell’s on first, What the Hell’s on second, You Didn’t Want to Know’s on third, and You Didn’t Even Want To Think About It at shortstop.

Thomas became the Mets’ first home run king, hitting 34 in 1962, a team record that stood until Dave Kingman smashed it by two in 1975. He also factored in one of the most typical of the inadvertent sketches that, perversely enough, endeared his Mets to a generation of New Yorkers bereft of the Dodgers’ and Giants’ moves west and drowning in a couple of generations of Yankee dominance and hubris.

Center fielder Richie Ashburn, eventually a Hall of Famer based on his long career with the Phillies, despaired of collisions between himself and shortstop Elio Chacón on pop flies to short left center and despaired of how to call Chacón off. Teammate Joe Christopher knew enough Spanish to tell Ashburn to holler Yo la tengo! (I got it!) Sure enough, the next such short pop to short left center had Chacón steaming out from short and Ashburn rumbling in from center.

Yo la tengo! Yo la tengo! Ashburn hollered. Chacón caught the drift at once and stopped dead. Ashburn was saved for about five seconds. Thomas had also come steaming in from left. He crashed into Ashburn and the ball fell safe. Someone forgot to hand Thomas the yo la tengo! memo.

(The pull-hitting Thomas also spent so much time trying to hit the “o” on a Howard Clothes sign on the Polo Grounds’s left field wall—because the New York clothier promised a luxury boat to the Met who hit it the most at season’s end—that manager Casey Stengel finally hollered at him, “If you want to be a sailor, go join the Navy!”)

That season proved Thomas’s final truly solid year at the plate. After a somewhat down 1963 and a 1964 that saw him in and out of the lineup with a few nagging injuries, the Mets traded Thomas to the pennant-contending Phillies that August. He hit respectably enough until he fractured his thumb on a hard slide into second base, ending his season just before the infamous collapse that cost the Phillies a pennant with which they seemed to be running away.

But now age 36, Thomas started too slowly in 1965 before the 3 July pre-game incident that ended his Phillie days in ignominy. Should-be Hall of Famer Dick Allen, the Phillies’ superstar in the making and the National League’s 1964 Rookie of the Year, was taking grounders at third while Thomas was in the batting cage and Phillies center fielder Johnny Callison came out to third to chat with Allen.

According to Phillies historian (and eventual Allen biographer) William C. Kashatus, in September Swoon, Callison suggested to Allen they give Thomas the business over a strikeout following three failed bunt attempts during a plate appearance the night before. In the batting cage now, Thomas took a big swing and miss. “Hey, Donkey!” Callison hollered. (Thomas’s nickname was the Big Donkey; he was also known as Lurch.) “Why don’t you try bunting?”

“Instead of responding to Callision,” Kashatus wrote, “Thomas glared down the third base line at Allen and shouted, ‘What are you trying to be, another Muhammad Clay, always running your mouth off?'”

Insulted by the comparison with Cassius Clay, the colourful but controversial heavyweight boxer who had recently changed his name to Muhammad Ali, Allen charged the cage, and the two players went at each other. Allen hit Thomas with a left hook to the jaw, sending him to the ground. When he got to his feet, Thomas was wielding a bat and connected with Allen’s left shoulder. By now the rest of the team was at home plate trying to restrain the two players.

In his memoir, Crash, Allen remembered Thomas knowing it was Callison who’d taunted him but aiming his return fire at Allen, wrongly.

The Muhammad Clay remark was meant to say a lot. It reminded me of how Frank would pretend to offer his hand in a soul shake to a young black player on the team. When the player would offer his hand in return, Thomas would grab his thumb and bend it back. To him, it was a big joke. But I saw too many brothers on the team with swollen thumbs to get any laughs. So I popped him. I just wanted to teach him a lesson. But after he hit me with the bat, I wanted to kill him.

Callison said hard feelings between Thomas and Allen were building well before the “Muhammad Clay” remark. One of the brothers to whom Allen referred was young outfielder Johnny Briggs, whom Kashatus quoted as saying Thomas “often made racially inflammatory comments.” But Kashatus also quoted Briggs as saying of Thomas, “Thomas agitated everybody on the team. He was just as abusive to the white guys. But the press turned that fight into a racial issue and refused to let up.”

The game that followed the ugly brawl included Allen slashing a three-run triple and Thomas hitting a pinch home run in the next inning. The Phillies lost 10-8 to the Reds . . . and Thomas was put on release waivers afterward. This, Kashatus noted, was despite Allen intervening on behalf of not letting Thomas go, pleading with manager Gene Mauch not to let it happen out of regard for Thomas’s wife and eight children. (Dolores Thomas died in 2012; one of his children, his daughter Sharon, also died before her father.)

Mauch’s fatal mistake otherwise was ordering one and all involved in the Thomas-Allen fight to keep their mouths shut or face fines: $1,000 each, except for $2,000 for Allen. That only enabled that capricious Philadelphia sports press of the time to help make life as a Phillie more miserable for Allen than the city’s racists already began making it, until he finally got the trade he’d been trying to force for long enough.

With Thomas’s release, Kashatus wrote, the veteran wasn’t bound by Mauch’s edict, and appeared on a Philadelphia radio show that often had him as a guest. “I’ve always tried to help him,” Thomas insisted. “I guess certain guys can dish it out, but can’t take it.” Said Tony Taylor, the Phillies’s talented Latino second baseman, “Since Dick was black and Thomas was white, [the Philadelphia writers] made it into a racial thing and gave Dick the label of trouble-maker. It wasn’t fair.”

“Thomas was going to go anyway,” Mauch eventually admitted about his further-fading veteran. “I should have shipped him sooner. Instead, the press came down on [Allen’s] head. If he did one little thing wrong, they would see it as so much worse because, in their heads, he was a bad guy.”

The Phillies dealt Thomas to the Astros, where he was further unhappy from knowing his baseball aging wasn’t going to reverse itself. (He’d move to the Braves and then the Cubs from there but retire in 1966.) “I would not say I enjoyed my time there,” he told an interviewer in 2017, “but not because of the city or the players.”

I was just in a bad place personally. I was an old fogey. When you reach your thirties in baseball, you’re an old man. Expendable. But I loved the guys in Houston. Joe Morgan, Rusty Staub, and my favorite Jimmy Wynn. I once got Wynn with the hidden ball trick. He was so angry with me. But what I remember most is that I hit two home runs and then they traded me! My last at-bat in Philadelphia was also a home run. I guess I just needed to stop hitting them!

Let the record show that Thomas spoke affectionately there of two black players, Hall of Famer Morgan and Wynn. Let it show further that, when the black Frank Thomas was inducted into the Hall of Fame, the first, white Frank Thomas—once one of four consecutive Braves to hit home runs in an inning, along with Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, plus slugging first baseman Joe Adcock—was invited to join in the fun and accepted happily.

“I was the original, but he was better,” Thomas once said of his namesake. “We hold the record for most home runs hit by two players with the same name.” (Thomas is right: the two Frank Thomases actually combined for 25 more home runs than Ken Griffey, Sr. and Hall of Famer Jr. did.)

“I was told that his father was a fan of mine and named him after me,” he continued. “I have met him several times and I love him. I told him that I used to be The Big Hurt, but after meeting him I know that I was just The Little Hurt.”

Between those, and more than a few stories I’ve seen saying Thomas and Allen eventually buried the hatchet together, my better angel wants to believe that that 1965 fight and its immediate aftermath jolted the Big Donkey into a permanent awakening about human relations.

The squirrel and the blowout

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PNC Park squirrel

This little fellow (or gal, who knew?) cops a proud squat on the PNC Park left field grass before leading three groundsmen on a warning track chase in the bottom of the second—and the Pirates into blowing out the Cubs Monday night.

Believe in the power of the Rally Squirrel? After Monday night’s doings, the Pirates may want to think about it. Hard.

The bushy-tailed rodent showed up to run around the PNC Park outfield and warning track as the bottom of the second got under way. After he disappeared at last, the Pirates dropped three in that inning, four the next, five in the seventh, and a 12-1 smothering of the further-sputtering Cubs.

For too long the Pirates have lived in the place where the nuts hunt the squirrels. It was lovely to see them upend things for an evening.

With Daniel Vogelbach on first, nobody out, and a 1-1 count on Michael Chavis against rookie Cubs starter Caleb Kilian, the bushy-tailed rodent scampered out onto the field from somewhere in the region of PNC Park’s third base seats.

The creature galloped toward the left field corner in a jagged route with three grounds crew in hot pursuit. One of the groundsmen carried a large washing bucket. A second carried a net whose weave was big enough to allow a human suspect to escape the moment it might be dropped over him.

The squirrel himself (or herself, who knew?) wasn’t exactly a model of precision running at first. Certainly not as swift or sure as the one who ran down the third base line as if stealing home in Coors Field eight years ago.

“[W]hat was his sprint speed?” Pirates manager Derek Shelton asked of the PNC squirrel  after the game. “We had to get that in the Statcast era. Definitely one of the worst rundowns I’ve seen. And I’ve seen a couple bad ones.”

After the three groundsmen chased him toward the deepest left field corner, the squirrel ran back and forth from the foul line to the mid-left field piece of the warning track, finally making for a passway under the center field seats’ edge and into the Cubs bullpen with the bucket man in hotter pursuit.

The Pirates in their dugout watched with bemusement. The Cubs’ relief corps looked uncertain as to whether the game was going nuts. Little did they know.

Chavis walked on five pitches. Touted Pirates rookie Oneil Cruz, all 6’7″ worth of him,  reached on a fielding error to load the pads. Fellow rookie Bligh Madris ripped a two-run single to right and stole second before Tyler Heineman struck out, but Hoy Park sent Madris home on a long sacrifice fly.

One inning later, the Pirates struck a lot more swiftly, loading the pads on Kilian with nobody out (back to back walks and an infield hit) before Kilian wild-pitched Bryan Reynolds home. Chavis waited out a four-pitch walk before Cruz sent a three-run double to the absolute rear of center field.

That ended Kilian’s evening but not the Cubs’ miseries. After the Cubs managed to sneak a run home in the top of the seventh on back-to-back singles, then an RBI single which followed back-to-back strikeouts, the Pirates got squirrely again in the bottom of the frame: a two-run double (Vogelbach), an RBI single (Cruz), an RBI double (Heineman), and a sacrifice fly (Park again).

Madris swung his way into the Pirates’ history books with his three-hit evening, the first Pirate to do it in his Show debut since Jason Kendall did it in 1996. He also became the first Pirate since Andrew McCutchen (2009) to debut with a hit, a run batted in, and a stolen base in a single game.

“That was a lot of fun and everything I could ask for,” he grinned postgame. “With [batting practice] getting canceled today, when I stepped in the box, it was really my first at-bat in the big leagues. The game threw a little bit of everything at me today. Thankful for the opportunity. It was awesome.”

Cruz, already the tallest shortstop in major league history, and ranked the Pirates’ number three prospect, got called up from Indianapolis (AAA) with Madris Monday. Madris has nothing but good to say about his Indy teammate, who poked his nose out of his hole at last season’s end and hit a home run almost from his knees.

“The guy’s unreal,” Captain Bligh told reporters. “He has tools that come around once every 100 years. He can hit pitches out of the ballpark that some guys are lucky to get out of the infield. Being here now is going to propel him to greater things.”

“What I can promise you,” said Cruz before Monday night’s game, “is you’re going to see it a lot more frequently. You’re going to see a lot of balls hit hard and a lot of balls traveling very far.” He kept the promise, too—his double was estimated to fly 112.9 mph off his bat. But he also has a howitzer of a throwing arm, throwing one grounder over to first at 96.7 mph.

Players like these are what the Pirates need to continue wrenching themselves out of tank mode and navigate the rash of injuries and illness that’s struck them of late. Not just because of their skills and prospective production, but because of . . . shall we say . . . no, let Chavis say it, as he did before Monday’s game.

“The quality guys that we’ve called up has been pretty significant,” the first baseman told reporters. “We’re not having those, um . . . we don’t have those assholes. There’s no better way to say it. You don’t have a guy with an attitude problem. Guys come up, ask questions, try to be good, stay out of the way of the older guys and are just happy to be here. I can’t say enough about all of them.”

For a team that’s just followed a ferocious nine-game losing streak by winning their next three of five including Monday’s massacre, that’s as large a light as you can ask to see facing the still-elongated end of their tunnel.

Just in case, though, the Pirates might not want to let the squirrel escape too soon. If at all.

The Cincinnati Dreads

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Hunter Greene

Hunter Greene (here) and reliever Art Warren combined to keep the Pirates hitless—and the Pirates still found a way to win with a little help from the Reds themselves.

“Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets,” their original manager Casey Stengel liked to crow about his 1962 theater of the absurd. “I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.”

Reds manager David Bell isn’t that quick with a quip. Whatever his other virtues, he won’t occupy half the space in the quote anthologies that Stengel does. The Young Perfesser he ain’t. His team’s as funny as the eastbound end of a westbound horse.

Today’s Reds are compared a little too often to those embryonic Mets for futility. When the Original Mets won their very first game after nine straight life-opening losses, “Break up the Mets!” became a prompt wisecrack. These Reds have actually been 6-4 in their last ten games, but their 9-26 record hasn’t inspired such cracks as that. Red fans may yet just crack.

But even those Mets never figured out a way to no-hit the opposition and lose. This year’s Reds figured that out all by themselves in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Against the Pirates, who aren’t exactly out of the tank yet but have at least won in double digits by now. The franchise whose past includes a Big Red Machine have now become the Cincinnati Dreads.

The 1962 Mets (ha! you thought I’d avoid saying it again) had Abbott pitching to Costello with Who the Hell’s on First, What the Hell’s on Second, You Don’t Want to Know’s on third, and You Don’t Even Want to Think About It at shortstop. These Reds don’t even have the understudies for My Mother, the Car.

Those Mets finished their tragicomic maiden season with their first owner  insisting, as she entered 1963, “Let’s hope it is better this year. It has to be. I simply cannot stand 120 losses this year. If we can’t get anything, we are going to cut those losses down. At least to 119.”

This year’s Dreads have a team president who listened to his fan base’s lament over purging five key players on the threshold of Opening Day, thus leaping from competitiveness to tanking in a single bound, and replied, “Well, where you gonna go?”

Let’s start there. I mean, sell the team to who? I mean, that’s the other thing, I mean, you wanna have this debate? If you wanna look at what would you have this team do to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists, it would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. And, so, be careful what you ask for. I think we’re doing the best we can do with the resources that we have.

Joan Payson had a wry sense of humour and a realistic assessment of her embryonic Mets and the unlikely, almost countercultural affection they stirred among New York fans bereft of two storied National League franchises, left with nothing but the smug hubris of a Yankee fan base spoiled by incessant success and blind to the Original Mets’ earthy appeal.

Phil Castellini thinks he can afford to be smug in a one-team baseball city, but he hasn’t learned that buying what you can afford doesn’t always mean you should buy it at all. Especially when you all but admit that the common good of your team and its game is nothing more than showing profit and making money for it.

Mrs. Payson—formerly the lone stockholder voting against the New York Giants moving west—became New York’s empathetic favourite grandma. Mr. Castellini, the son of the Reds’ owner, seems more like Cincinnati’s unapologetically distant, carping, authoritarian father.

Those Mets were a newborn team plucked from the flotsam and jetsam of the National League, in the league’s first expansion draft. These Reds may not even be that good. And that doesn’t stop at what might yet prove to be this year’s won-lost record.

Those Mets and their fans learned to laugh, like Figaro, that they might not weep. These Reds may have to learn to laugh that they might not fall to the temptation presented to 1988 Orioles manager Frank Robinson, late in that team’s season-opening 22-game losing streak. Robinson showed an empathetic reporter a button he’d been given saying, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.”

It hasn’t been lovely for this year’s Dreads, but their fans have to scream now, anyway. The boss all but threw them under the proverbial bus. Among several major league fan bases about whom you can say frustration is a way of life, none of them are as rightfully frustrated as Red fans now.

Last year’s Reds finished third in the National League Central with a winning enough record and continuing hope for another solid race. Then Castellini’s general manager Nick Krall either sent or allowed to walk Nick Castellanos, Sonny Gray, Eugenio Suarez, and Jesse Winker. For the moment I struggle to remember the last time any team effected a fire sale on the threshold of Opening Day.

Castellanos signed with the Phillies and is having a solid season thus far. Gray is solid enough in the middle of the Twins’ starting rotation after his trade there for a spare bolt. Suarez and Winker have opened sleepily in Seattle for the most part, but the Reds could probably have received more in return than a middling pitcher and a few washers.

But nothing seems more telling about this year’s upended Reds than touted rookie howitzer Hunter Greene plus relief pitcher Art Warren combining to no-hit the almost-as-moribund Pirates but still losing, 1-0 Sunday. Thanks to the rule that proclaims no-hitters official only if the no-hit-pitching team throws nine no-ht innings, this one doesn’t even count—except as one further entry into the 2022 ledger of Reds roughing.

What a difference half a century plus eight years makes. On 23 April 1964, the Reds were no-hit by Ken Johnson (a former, very brief Red) and the Houston Colt .45s, but they won, 1-0 . . . and Johnson retains credit for a no-hitter. The game was played in Colt Stadium—about which Original Met (and Hall of Famer) Richie Ashburn observed, “This is the only park in the league where the women wear insect repellant instead of perfume.”

Thus did Johnson have to face the Reds in the top of the ninth. That’s where he lost the game but not the no-hitter. Johnson himself threw Pete Rose’s one-out bunt for a hit wild, allowing Rose to second. Rose took third on a ground out but scored when Hall of Fame second baseman Nellie Fox—approaching the end of his playing career—booted Vada Pinson’s grounder. Johnson retired Hall of Famer Robinson on a fly out to left for the side, but Reds pitcher Joe Nuxhall finished the shutout he started in the bottom of the ninth.

That was then, this was now. (Four other teams between 1964 and Sunday have thrown no-hit baseball but lost.) For Sunday’s eventual stinker, the good news was Greene striking nine out in seven and a third innings and 118 pitches. The bad news was Greene walking five while three Pirates pitchers kept the Reds to four hits and two walks. The worse news was Greene walking the next two men he faced after getting rid of Pirates right fielder Jack Suwinski on an eighth inning-opening ground out.

Exit Greene, enter Warren, who promptly walked Pirates left fielder Ben Gamel to load the pads before third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes grounded into a run-scoring force out. Warren managed to induce an inning-ending infield pop out, but the Reds disappeared in order in the top of the ninth.

There wasn’t a Little Tramp, a Keystone Kop, a Marx Brother, or a Stooge among them, either.

By dint of their postgame comments, these Dreads don’t exactly have among them a Shelley Berman, a Lenny Bruce, a Godfrey Cambridge, a George Carlin, or even a Chester A. Riley. What a revoltin’ development that is.

And that single most frustrated fan base in the Show can only shrug, shake its heads, and not so much lament but accept, while quoting an ancient black spiritual that might yet become the Reds’ 2022 epitaph: “Were we really there, when this happened to us?”