“They think you’re supposed to win running away”

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

“After awhile, you just get tired of answering questions.”—Dusty Baker.

The Yardbarker headline says, “Dusty Baker blames surprising source for retirement.” Then, citing his interview with The Steam Room podcast hosts Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley, they note the “surprising source” is “bloggers and tweeters” Baker deemed unfair. Baker is not necessarily wrong.

“We had a lot of success here, Ernie and Charles, and then the last couple of months here weren’t very pleasant, because we weren’t ten games ahead,” Baker said of his Astros, whom he managed to a seventh American League Championship Series game this year and in pan-damn-ic short 2020, plus a 2021 World Series loss in six but a 2022 World Series ring—also in six.

You spoil people. They think you’re supposed to win this every year running away and it’s not like that. Every year’s different.

There was a whole bunch of criticism from 30-year-olds and bloggers and tweeters that I’m not doing this and I don’t know that, and I told my wife, ‘You know, I’m kind of tired of this and tired of the scrutiny and if I could go manage and show up at say 6:30 for a 7 o’clock game and leave 30 minutes after the game, don’t do the (pregame and postgame interviews), I could manage for another four or five years.’ You know what I mean? After a while, you just get tired of answering questions.

God and His servant Casey Stengel only know success can soil and spoil. In certain ways, the 74-year-old Baker and his Astros were actually fortunate. Their run of sustained success is comparatively recent. Astro fans actually have time to reconsider, reflect, and remind themselves that sustained success may not always live long. Their own franchise history might be a fine place to start.

They might look to those longtime American League ogres who carried slightly more than half a century worth of pennants and slightly more than a quarter century worth of World Series titles into the current century. Yankee fans are nothing if not spoiled rotten enough to believe a) the World Series is illegitimate without the Yankees in it; and, b) they are as entitled to Yankee success as the Yankees themselves.

They might look to the National League West owners, too. Those Dodgers who’ve won ten of the past eleven NL West races, including eight straight before 2021 and the past two consecutive, and who had considerable success in the second half of the 20th Century. Starting with winning six pennants (including two pair of back-to-back flags) and Brooklyn’s only World Series in eleven years; continuing with four pennants and three World Series rings within their first nine years in Los Angeles.

Dodger fans are almost as spoiled as Yankee fans these days. And, almost as frustrated. They may not yet think a World Series is illegitimate without the Dodgers in it, but they can’t fathom any more than the team itself how the Dodgers could win ten of eleven NL West titles with only one pennant and Series ring to show for it.

If Baker (once a Dodger player himself) thinks bloggers and tweeters were rough on his Astros this year, he may not have seen how rough they were on the Yankees and the Dodgers. That roughness almost makes any hammerings on the Astros for not running away with the AL West this year seem like love taps.

Baker also may not have seen how much rougher than that were lots of blogging and tweeting fans of other teams upon whom atomic expectations fell at the season’s beginning but upon whom atomic deflations fell almost as fast. Met fans of the past several years have come to believe a season lost upon one bad inning—in April, never mind when big moves became big falls.

Don’t get me started on Cub and Red Sox fans, even if the former finally broke its long World Series drought almost eight years ago and the latter have more World Series rings this century (four) than anyone else. Or Cardinal fans, priding themselves as the best in the game but guilty of unnecessary roughness when the Redbirds finished at the bottom of the weak-enough NL Central this year after a decade of nine first or second place finishes in eleven seasons. Or Braves fans, respoiled by recent success after the comparative drought following that protracted NL East ownership of the 1990s-early Aughts.

Baseball is about rooting and caring, but too many fans take protracted defeat and failed high expectations personally. There may never again be the Yankees’ 20th Century dominance. God willing, the Yankees today won’t succumb to the temptation too many of their fans still ask: What would George do? More fan bases than just the Yankees’ base see lack of success and wish their teams had that kind of owner. Not so fast, folks.

There may take several if not many years before the next small dynasty comes out to play. Nobody guarantees that a solid club of Rangers who just won the World Series in five thrilling games can do it again, and again, and again, consecutively or at least consistently. Nobody guarantees the Astros’ success run will continue indefinitely.

The advent of the blogosphere and social media makes fan frustration seem about a thousand times more intense than when all we had was the morning paper, the evening news sports reports, and assorted retrospective books by which to go. Interviewers asking foolish or even stupid questions didn’t begin with Xtwitter.

Brutal fan attacks didn’t end with the letters to the editor sections. Death threats, even, didn’t end when Roger Maris (single season) and Hall of Famer Henry Aaron (career) finished knocking the Sacred Babe to one side in the arguable two most hallowed pages of the record books.

Baker’s hardly the only manager who ever got fed up with the witless who come forth worse than whatever mis-step they’re criticising. He may be the first to retire over it. Some of us think we should consider ourselves fortunate if certain players don’t retire when the social media universe attacks them without knowing the possible wherefores behind what they’re attacking.

Questioning mediocrity is one thing. But when once-glittering star players decline when they’re not exactly old men just yet, the social mediaverse seems to prefer hammering first and asking questions later. Even when it sees those players among the walking wounded on the injured list, the social mediaverse is only too prepared to dismiss them as fragile goldbricks still.

Go ahead and say Baker finally couldn’t stand the heat so he walked out of the kitchen at last, if it makes you feel good. But ask yourselves, honestly, how many of you would really be willing to go to work when it’s before five-figure audiences in a ballpark and seven figure audiences watching television, listening to radio, watching online, Xtweeting as they watch, or all the above.

That’s what I thought.

Death threats be not proud, continued

Posted on September 7, 2021 by Jeff Kallman

MLB umpire Don Denkinger needed FBI protection after threats on his life over his 1985 World Series mishap. In the social media era, it wouldn’t take just radio people blasting his address and phone number around the world for further such threats.

What does it tell you, when almost the first thing on the mind of a professional athlete who loses a contest isn’t what a tough loss it was but how many death wishes or death threats are liable to show up in his or her direction on social media? It ought to tell you how brain damaged too many sports fans are.

Shelby Rogers got waxed in straight sets by Britain’s Emma Raducanu in round four of tennis’s U.S. Open Monday afternoon. The 28-year-old told a press conference after the match she expected “nine million” social media death threats afterward. That’d teach her to draw the spotlight after she flattened number one-ranked Ashleigh Barry in the third round.

“Obviously we appreciate the spotlight in those moments,” Rogers told the conference, “but then you have [losing to Raducanu] today and I’m going to have nine million death threats and whatnot. It’s very much polarizing, one extreme to the other very quickly.”

She wasn’t alone. Former Open winner Sloane Stephens lost this time, Angelique Kerber beating her in three sets after she took the first set. Stephens says her Instagram account was flooded with a few thousand abusive messages some of which went from mere swearing and racial insults (she is black) to downright threats of death and sexual abuse.

“This isn’t talked about enough,” Stephens posted, “but it really freaking sucks.”

It really freaking should be talked about more than enough. I’ve done it. I don’t want to minimise what Rogers and Stephens now deal with, but baseball and other sports people have put up with that kind of vile nonsense for decades. Just not so instantly as today.

Long before there was such a thing as social media, hapless umpire Don Denkinger found himself on the wrong end of a harassment campaign after his blown call in the ninth inning of 1985 World Series Game Six helped cost the Cardinals a win they should have been two, not three outs from consummating.

Back then, about the worst that could happen beyond snarky newspaper columns was a radio disc jockey obtaining and airing your home address and telephone number. Two St. Louis disc jockeys did just that to Denkinger. He received death threats by mail for a couple of years to follow and, at one point, needed MLB to ask the FBI for help.

The fact that the Cardinals still had three defensive outs to play to nail that Series, or still had a seventh game to play if they lost Game Six, escaped the slime contingent. Denkinger being rotated to calling balls and strikes for Game Seven didn’t mean the Cardinals should implode in that game escaped them, too.

At least Denkinger waited until after that Series for the full brunt of his mishap to happen. Phillies reliever Mitch Williams had no such fortune in the 1993 Series. Thanks to a few death threats from enough indignant Phillies fans, the hyperactive lefthander spent a sleepless night or two with a shotgun in his lap after blowing a Series save . . . in Game Four.

Williams went on to throw the pitch Joe Carter belted to win that Series in the bottom of the ninth in Game Six, of course. His stand-up post-game performance may have saved his life otherwise. But he shouldn’t have had to spend a night cradling his weapon instead of his wife.

I’ve said it until I’m blue in the keyboard. Don’t ask what would have happened if Denkinger, Williams, and members of the long, sad roll of sports “goats”—the Bill Buckners, Ralph Brancas, Gary Andersons, Roberto Baggios, Wrong-Way Marshalls, Fred Merkles, and Andres Escobars—had had their moments of horror in the social media era.

Horror, or death: Colombia’s goalkeeper Escobars inadvertently put the ball into his own net in soccer’s 1994 World Cup tournament. That night, he was out with friends when a car pulled up, an argument broke out, and he was shot to death.

Denkinger at least had FBI help until the idiocy passed. What defense or protection do you have against social media, even if you leave it? Rogers says she doesn’t like social media but she’s forced to make a presence there because of her sport’s marketing. Maybe her sport and all sports need to re-think that a little.

Mets relief pitcher Edwin Diaz walked himself into trouble and a Mets loss in Washington Monday. All that did was throttle the Mets’ pennant race recovery a little. It didn’t blow up the subway during rush hour.

Diaz is known as much for his mound struggles as his mound triumphs. Maybe that protects him from death threats. Or maybe we don’t know that he’s received them, or how many he’s received. The Mets’ administration seems to care more about their players replying to the boo birds than whether the boo birds might graduate to threatening their players’ lives.

Remember Indians reliever Nick Wittgren—battered for five runs in the ninth, his wife and family subject to social media death threats. Wittgren said it was said that such is now the pro sports norm—and that 90 percent of players he knows personally have received them. If you need me to tell you what’s wrong with that picture, you have problems I’m not qualified to solve.

Social media contends with the shouting-“fire”-in-the-movie-house dilemna. It thrives on free speech, but it also has to draw certain lines that, often as not, refuse to be drawn organically. The sports goat business stopped being funny a long time ago. The sports death threat business needs to be put out of business even faster, if possible.

The law says you can’t threaten the lives of the president of the United States or any public official. The law also says you can’t send threatening snail or e-mail to someone. A professional gambler faces five years in federal prison for Instagram threats he sent the lives of players in a 2019 game the Rays lost to the White Sox in extra innings.

It shouldn’t stop there. Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms should think seriously about not just banning such scum contingent from their platforms but arranging such charges against as many of them as possible regardless of whether or not they have money on the table.

Games are not life and death. The fate of what’s left of the free world doesn’t hang in their balance. Mortal men and women in an entertainment try their best and fail. It doesn’t make them cowards, chokers, or moral degenerates when someone on the other side is just that hair’s breadth better in the biggest of the big moments.

Yet people are prepared to perform massacres upon the defeated in sports while letting far more grave misbehaviour die on the proverbial vine. This is above and beyond mere fan passions. It shouldn’t be enabled.

You wish for openers that people were at least as outraged over New York’s mishandlings of the pan-damn-ic (it took a sexual harassment scandal to do what that malfeasance didn’t and rid the statehouse of Andrew Cuomo) as they might be over Shelby Rogers losing a shot at winning the U.S. Open, or the Mets losing a shot at the postseason.

Fringe benefits

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Noah Syndergaard, giving J.D. Davis a high sign after Davis’s staggering fourth-inning catch Thursday night. Syndergaard had two answers for Tribal trolling . . .

It seems like ancient history to talk about it now. But once upon a time there was no social media for baseball people to troll each other. They had to settle for trolling by way of print or broadcast interviews. But they still learned the hard way that the flip side to “don’t feed the trolls” is “don’t poke the bear.”

David Cone ignored it at his peril during the 1988 National League Championship Series. The Indians ignored it to their peril Thursday.

Writing a (presumably ghosted) running NLCS commentary for the New York Daily News, Cone started tripping the Dodgers’ triggers when he said the Dodgers’ Game One starter, Orel Hershiser, “was lucky for eight innings.” Actually, eight and a third: Hershiser surrendered Darryl Strawberry’s one-out RBI single, pulling the Mets back to within a run.

But then Cone teed off on Dodgers’ closer Jay Howell.”We saw Howell throwing curveball after curveball,” Cone went on to write, “and we were thinking: This is the Dodgers’ idea of a stopper? Our idea is Randy [Myers], a guy who can blow you away with his heat. Seeing Howell and his curveball reminded us of a high school pitcher.”

Myers did bring heat and lots of it, never mind that he retired the Dodgers in order in the bottom of the ninth on a line out, a ground out, and a pop fly out, to save the 3-2 win. It was nothing compared to the Dodgers chasing Cone early in Game Two with five runs in two innings, en route a seven-game Dodgers triumph.

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit in the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with the team that’s trying to pin your ears back in either a pennant race or in a League Championship Series. It’s to shudder what would have happened if Cone had teed off on Hershiser and Howell while that NLCS was played in the Internet social media era.

Cone learned the hard way in 1988. (It’s a shame Gene Garber wasn’t there to remind him of the uses of breaking ball-heavy relief pitchers, considering Garber’s breaking repertoire put an end to Pete Rose’s 44-game hitting streak a decade earlier.) So did the Indians Thursday night.

For a team that once had Hershiser on its own pitching staff (1995-1997) and went to a pair of World Series with him, the Indians didn’t exactly have a sense of trolling history when their social media people went off on the Mets Thursday afternoon. And it’s not brilliant to think about trolling a team that just took the first two of a three-game set from you, in their playpen or otherwise.

“It’s a long season. We didn’t erase an 11.5-game deficit to roll over,” came the tweet from the Indians Thursday midday. “We split a series with one of the best teams in MLB at their home ballpark. We lost the last 2 to a fringe postseason team. We understand your frustration. Get it out here, but let’s renew the perspective.”

Noah Syndergaard, the Mets’ scheduled Thursday night starter, didn’t just feed the Tribal trolls, he cleaned, stuffed, and mounted them.

First, he he pinned the Indians’ ears back with six and a third perfect innings en route a rain-delayed, rain-short-ended Mets win, 2-0. Then, he replied with his own tweet: “We got some FRINGE for you right here, we call it a SWEEP in NYC. #LFGM.”

Leaning away from his customary pure power game and throwing as much of an array of off-speed breakers and changers as heat, Syndergaard was on such a roll, even after he turned aside first and second on a pair of singles in the sixth, that the only thing that could have stopped him was the two-hour plus rain delay that struck in the bottom of the sixth.

Married to whipping winds around the park, the rain which began about an inning earlier finally prompted the umpires to pull the teams off the field, as Mets catcher Wilson Ramos was at the plate with two outs and Michael Conforto aboard with a base hit. The winds were fierce enough that the Citi Field grounds crew needed to pin the tarp to the infield themselves until the weights could be brought out to hold it.

The Indians were pretty brassy to think about trolling a team who’d beaten them on their own fielding lapse Tuesday night and bludgeoned their bullpen to win the night before. But their rookie righthanded starter Aaron Civale was actually close to Syndergaard’s effectiveness—his only blemish hitting Pete Alonso with a pitch in the first—until he ran into trouble in the bottom of the fourth.

That’s when Joe Panik, a late Mets acquisition after his release by the Giants and very effective as a Met since, opened with a line single to right. One out later Conforto high-hopped a ground rule double over the high side fence down near the end of the left field line, before Ramos extended his hitting streak to sixteen games with a clean two-run double down the right field line.

The Indians even got sloppy in the field again Wednesday night, with the lone saving grace being that this time it didn’t cost them a ball game.

After play resumed and Mets reliever Jeurys Familia worked a scoreless seventh, Mets third baseman Todd Frazier grounded weakly up the first base line. Indians reliever Tyler Clippard, himself a former Met, fielded but threw the ball straight over first baseman Carlos Santana’s head.

The ball sailed into foul territory near the seats as Frazier rounded first and neared second, as right fielder Yasiel Puig scampered in to retrieve the ball. As Frazier rounded second Puig—whose arm is powerful but not always calibrated properly—threw across to third and right past the pad as Frazier arrived safely.

Clippard’s mistake might have been snaring the ball with his glove before getting a less than firm grip with his throwing hand. A barehanded grab might have put the ball into a better grip and he might not have sailed it above Santana’s attic.

The Tribe was lucky they had Tyler Naquin—who ended Syndergaard’s brief perfect game bid with a one-out single in the sixth—catching Ramos’s arcing line drive in perfect position to throw Frazier out at the plate by three feet. Consider it a small payback for what Mets left fielder J.D. Davis did to them in the fourth.

With one out, Indians center fielder Greg Allen sent one that looked like it was going for extra bases until Davis, on his thoroughbred running back on an angle to his left, extended his glove and made a Willie Mays-like one-handed, over-the-shoulder, slightly over his head basket catch. The Citi Field ovation was so thunderous Davis had to tip his cap under it.

“Just a crazy catch,” Davis told reporters after the game. “I don’t know how to describe it.”

The Indians thought they knew how to describe the Mets before the game. Except that the Mets are now 12-5 lifetime against the Indians in interleague play. And while the Indians did yank themselves back from the dead, once as far as eleven and a half back of the Twins in the American League Central, the Mets didn’t exactly yank themselves back from a little slump, either.

The lowest point for the Indians this season? Eleven and a half behind the Twins on 2 June. The lowest for the Mets? Fourteen and a half out of first in the National League East on 14 July. Low enough and tattered enough, it seemed, that the trade deadline run-up was almost dominated by speculation as to whether Syndergaard himself, or Zack Wheeler, would change addresses on or before the deadline.

Since the All-Star break? The Indians: 24-16. The Mets: 27-10. And even if interleague play continues making hash of pennant races, the Mets play in a far more tough division. Now the fringe contender is also only a game and a half out for the second National League wild card and nine out in the East.

And they also have a far tougher schedule the rest of the season. Except for another pair of sets with the Twins and one each with the Phillies and (ending the regular season, strangely enough) the Nationals, the Indians get a lot more bottom-dwelling competition the rest of the way than the Mets.

The fringe contenders just swept the Indians in three, helping to put or keep them three and a half behind the still AL Central-leading Twins, and leaving the Indians with a 2-5 record for their now-finished New York trip. The best thing about the trip was the Indians not having to change hotel reservations to meet the Yankees and the Mets.

Let us renew the perspective indeed.