Author: Graham Womack

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My favorite baseball player, 2009

As a child, my favorite baseball player was Will Clark.  No question.  In fact, if asked who my favorite player is these days, I might still say Clark (Rickey Henderson and Pete Rose also merit consideration, with their similar, throwback style.)  There aren’t a whole lot of players in the current baseball landscape that stroke my imagination, not as Clark did anyhow.  I don’t know if it was his sweet swing, the eye black smeared on his face, or simply the fact that I was in Little League and Clark played for my favorite team, the San Francisco Giants.  Whatever the reason, the first baseman nicknamed Will the Thrill was it for me from ages six to nine.

Following the 1993 season, the Giants chose not to resign a declining Clark and he left to join the Texas Rangers.  By this point, I had already shifted my loyalties to the superstar outfielder the Giants signed the year before, Barry Bonds.  When it comes time to determine whether Bonds gets into the Hall of Fame, I wonder if it will be considered that there are multiple versions of Bonds, just as there are for someone like Michael Jackson. When I think of Jackson, I want to remember the hip, young guy who recorded Thriller, moonwalked and made Pepsi commercials, not the sad, frightened creature shown in the mug shot from his 2003 arrest (look up deer in headlights in the dictionary and that photo of Jackson is there.)  The same holds true for Bonds.  I fondly remember the five-tool athlete who played like the second-coming of his Godfather, Willie Mays.  I liked the Bonds who looked like Arsenio Hall, not the one who in later years resembled the Michelin Man.

If I had to choose a favorite current player, it’s probably Tim Lincecum, though it’s a lukewarm choice.   Sure, Lincecum has won back-to-back Cy Young awards, is the best player, hands down, on my favorite baseball team, and I’ll probably pay to see him pitch at some point.  It’s an experience that probably should be had for anyone who claims to be a baseball fan.  Still, I don’t feel as strongly about Lincecum as I did about Clark or Bonds.

Then again, to echo a theme I bring up commonly here, maybe I’m just getting older.

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Former Sacramento Solons owner, Fred David, dead at 100

A pioneering member in Sacramento sports history, Fred David died on October 17, at the age of 100.

David once owned a Pacific Coast League baseball team from my hometown, the Sacramento Solons, and I did my senior project in high school on it. I interviewed a number of former players and people associated with the club, including David who was 91 at the time. David first worked in the concession stand for the Solons at the age of 15 and became a stockholder in the team in 1944. He bought it ten years later at a time of uncertainty for the club, starting with $1,000, as he told me, “to keep baseball in Sacramento.” David owned the Solons from 1954 to 1960, when they moved to Honolulu. Their ballpark Edmonds Field was torn down in 1964, and a Target sits today on the site, with a plaque in the parking lot marking home plate.

A number of relics from Edmonds Field wound up in a warehouse David owned in downtown Sacramento at 10th and R Street for his primary business, The David Candy Company. David let me go inside the warehouse at the time of our interview and even gave me a score book from 1957 that I later got autographed by another interview subject, former Solon and Chicago Cubs catcher Cuno Barragan. Inside David’s warehouse was old seating, PA and scoreboard equipment. I gave David a list of written questions, asking among them why he still had so much of the memorabilia. “After we sold the stadium, I salvaged what I could,” David wrote. “It was a great memory.”

I learned recently from David’s niece, Diana Thomas of Santa Barbara, that he died 16 days after turning 100. He had wanted to make 100, Thomas explained, and after achieving this, his body went downhill rapidly. He was lucid up until the end. She said the warehouse is still in the family, which calls it The Building, and it hasn’t been gone through yet. An estate sale is pending.

Retired baseball scout Ronnie King, 82, knew David as a kid, before either man got into baseball. King last spoke with David about 15 years ago and learned of his passing through a mutual friend.

Asked if David made a meaningful contribution to Sacramento sports, King told Baseball Past and Present, “Oh, sure, sure. In fact if he didn’t buy it (in 1954), they probably would have left then, because there was a couple other cities that wanted the Solons.”

Another Sacramento franchise, the Monarchs of the Women’s National Basketball Association folded on November 20, seven weeks after David died. King didn’t hold back when asked what David would have made of the decision.

“I think he would have been a little shook up about it, because I think he always thought that sports did something for the city,” King said.

When I interviewed David in 2001, I asked him how the candy industry, which he worked in for much of his life differed from baseball. “Business is business– work,” he wrote. “But I loved baseball. I guess I was a good fan.”

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I even dream in baseball

I was supposed to go for a long run with a friend early this morning, but as it’s cold, wet and rainy where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I stayed up late last night, writing, I called my friend five minutes prior, left a meek, apologetic voice mail and surrendered back to bed. From there, I proceeded to have one of the most vivid, odd dreams I’ve had in quite some time.

I dreamed it was 1945 and I was watching the pennant race, as baseball returned from World War II. That was the year where, leading up to the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago Cubs, someone asked Chicago sportswriter Warren Brown who he thought would win and he replied, “I don’t think either of them can.” Baseball suffered from 1942-45, while the bulk of its stars went in the military. For some reason in my dream, I knew this; I caught a foul ball that, for reasons my dream didn’t explain, had quotes from sportswriters on it (this never happens in real life, ever.) I looked for Brown’s quip, but it wasn’t there. Someone sitting next to me in the stands instructed me to throw the ball back, so I kissed it and threw it back.

In early childhood I developed an ability to know when I was dreaming. It took awhile to hone the skill (most of first grade, if I remember correctly) but eventually, I could do fun things like ride my bicycle in the middle of an intersection and tell off people that irritated me. Had I been on my game this morning, I would have made myself one of the ballplayers in my dream, but in recent years, my brain has developed a sense of propriety. It rarely lets me dream in things I can’t do in real life.

What I have retained, for the most part, is this sense to know when I’m dreaming, or at least to be aware that something in it is not as it should be. This morning, it took the form of having Don Newcombe as an essential member of the Tiger pitching staff. It made sense at first (and the idea of letting blacks play prior to 1947 should have made sense to owners of that era, dream or no) but I later became aware that my dream was set before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

I awoke shortly thereafter.

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Baseball cards

I’m not certain of the first time I ever got a pack of baseball cards, but it may have been Christmas of 1986. I would have been three. I received an assortment of cards, which I know were dated that year, as a holiday gift from a family member (I want to say my dad, who played third base in high school.) I got players like Jose Canseco, George Brett and Von Hayes, and the cards quickly became dog-eared, ridiculously bent up. If they had any value, it depleted almost instantaneously. Goes without saying, I was hard on toys as a kid.

The summer before kindergarten, I became friends with Devin, a kid my age who lived around the corner. Devin was raised by a single mom, Nancy who loved the San Francisco Giants and passed this love down to her son. As a result, Devin had cards, lots of them. I visited often in those early elementary school years and looking at cards was pretty much what we did. We got in trouble once, and Nancy took away the large cardboard box full of cards, so we hid a few under his bedroom carpet. Nancy found those too.

I was forever pushing Devin to let me sort his cards. As Devin remembered it years later, I would come over, dump out his cards all over his floor and then promptly fall asleep. I don’t have much recollection of doing this, but I remember being enthralled that Devin had players like Jesse Orosco and way more 1990 Topps than I did, maybe three times as many. I became someone who collected cards, almost obsessively, and in time I had something like 5,000.

At first, my friends and I had no concept of value. It was all about obtaining specific players: Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell, and Canseco, among others. Guys like Omar Vizquel were righteously shunned, even before the episode of The Simpsons, where Bart tells Milhouse, distracted with a schoolyard crush, “I’ll trade your Carl Yastrzemski for my Omar Vizquel.” It seems funny now that Vizquel is probably bound for the Hall of Fame, unlike Clark, Mitchell or Canseco. That being said, I’d still take Clark’s card before Vizquel’s, if offered. My values haven’t changed all that much.

In time, Devin moved away, I learned of a magazine where I could look up the value of cards, and I stopped having as much fun with them. The minute I started calculating value, a part of my childhood ended. I also began to collect football and basketball cards, and my grandfather used to tell me I could make good money in the stock market if I studied it as hard as I studied cards. I would tell my friends that my large collection was how I intended to pay for college, though that never happened.

I quit collecting around the time I started high school, after realizing one day that I’d grown out of the hobby. Cards simply no longer held their spell over me. I’ve bought a couple packs in the past few years for the sake of nostalgia, though it feels a little strange since I’m in my twenties.

All of my heroes are mortal now.

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Attack of the mediocre pitchers

ESPN is awash in news today of several pitchers changing teams.  In the past 24 hours or so, the following transactions have materialized:

  • The Milwaukee Brewers committed $37 million to Randy Wolf and LaTroy Hawkins, which connected with a bigger news story: Michael Jackson is alive and he’s got a new job as their free-spending general manager.  I’m looking at the man in the mirror and asking him to change his ways, his overpaying-for-aging-crappy-pitchers ways.
  • Not to be outdone, the St. Louis Cardinals gave a $7.5 million one-year deal to Brad Penny, which must have been left over from the Jeff Weaver Fund, after that signing crashed and burned.
  • In probably the smartest move, thus far, of the baseball off-season, the Texas Rangers paid the Baltimore Orioles to take Kevin Millwood off their hands.
  • In a less savvy move, the Rangers are said to be looking at Rich Harden as a replacement for Millwood.  Harden has always struck me as overrated.  If he were a basketball player, he’d be Kevin Martin of the Sacramento Kings, someone with definite talent but also a lock, pretty much every year to come down injured.
  • The Cubs, for their part, are looking at J.J. Putz who’s coming off an injury-beset, disappointing year with the New York Mets.  Putz.  The name says it all.
  • Meanwhile, Andy Pettitte quieted resigned with the New York Yankees.

Such an unfettered barrage of mediocrity can boggle a sports fan’s mind.  Somewhere, there’s a Washington Nationals uniform waiting for each of these guys.

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A Grander vision for the Yankees

News out of New York this evening is that the Yankees are on the verge of a three-way trade for Detroit Tigers center fielder Curtis Granderson. New York will apparently have to give up little beyond a small assortment of prospects and spare parts to obtain the 28-year-old All Star. This trade couldn’t have cost the Yankees less if it had been brokered in a Wal-Mart.

Such news comes as little surprise to me, as I had long heard rumors that Granderson could matriculate to New York. And while I would sooner ingest napalm or attend a Backstreet Boys reunion concert or endure a multi-level marketing seminar than cheer the Yankees to yet another pennant, I like this move. Granderson belongs in New York– the thought of him in pinstripes just seems to make sense to me, for some reason. Together with Nick Swisher and someone like Matt Holliday, who could easily wind up a Yankee this winter as well, Granderson could help comprise the most formidable outfield in baseball.

Granderson has many reasons to look forward to the move, starting with his batting average. The Tigers’ home field, Comerica Park, boasts spacious dimensions (420 feet to center, no shorter than 330 to any fence) that I figured would be perfect for Granderson’s blend of offense, allowing ample room for him to crank 20 triples a year. Granderson always struck me as a throwback player, someone who would have been perfect in the Major League of the early twentieth century when owners deliberately had 500-foot playing fields to encourage inside the park home runs. Not so, I found.

Looking over Granderson’s career splits, he generally hit about 20 points lower at Comerica than on the road. This past year, he hit .230 there, leading to just a .249 overall batting average. The new Yankee Stadium has shorter distances to the fences, and Granderson will also be in arguably the strongest lineup in baseball (I could probably hit .330 with Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira guarding me.) Expect Granderson’s batting average to improve, markedly too. The Bronx could see the second coming of Alfonso Soriano with Granderson, not that’s necessarily a reason to get ecstatic.

The benefit for the reigning World Series champion Yankees is clear. Quite simply, it looks to be a case of the rich getting richer. While the aging Hideki Matsui and Johnny Damon likely get their walking papers, the Yankees solidify their outfield for the next half decade, minimum. Yankee fans get a reason to cheer. Meanwhile, all us normal folk get yet another reason to hate the team.

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The shame of Marvin Miller

The 2010 Hall of Fame picks for managers, umpires and executives were announced today, and while Whitey Herzog got the call (I told you so), Marvin Miller did not. The retired Major League Baseball Players Association executive director is 92 now and has come close a few times in the past decade, but never gets quite enough votes from the Veterans Committee for induction. He received seven votes this year from the 12-person committee, two shy of what he needed. Miller had the same number of votes as Jacob Ruppert, who can be remembered for employing Babe Ruth, and one less than a former Detroit Tigers executive named John Fetzer. Who exactly is John Fetzer?

In another few years, Miller could join Dom DiMaggio and Buck O’Neil, other baseball greats overlooked by Cooperstown in their lifetimes. Such an outcome would be a travesty.

Much has been written about Miller elsewhere, so I’ll simply repeat what I read today on ESPN.com. In his sixteen years heading baseball’s labor board, starting in 1966 when the minimum salary was $6,000 a year, Miller introduced collective bargaining, did away with the Reserve Clause and helped players win the right to free agency. Coming from a labor organizing background, not an athletic one, Miller probably did more to ensure the welfare of athletes than any other person. I’ve written before that I don’t think the end of the Reserve Clause is necessarily a good thing for baseball’s mid-level teams. I’m also not predisposed to electing baseball labor executives. Donald Fehr will never be in any Hall of Fame that I champion. All the same, I have to respect Miller’s contributions to the game and having visited Cooperstown once as a kid, isn’t that what the place is all about?

With all this said, it doesn’t look good for Miller. As I’ve written before, the Veterans Committee is notoriously conservative, preferring establishment-friendly candidates. And while what Miller did was great for players, it wreaked absolute havoc for owners, introducing never before things like player’s strikes and million dollar contracts to baseball. Just as Walter O’Malley reputedly fined Brooklyn Dodgers employees a dollar for mentioning Branch Rickey’s name after he left the team, what’s being done to Miller right now can be deemed payback, pure and simple.

Committee member and Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver put it well, to Jerry Crasnick of ESPN.com.

“I agree with the process, but I don’t agree with the result regarding Marvin,” said Seaver, who voted for Miller. “I think we probably have to have a couple more players [on the panel] to have a balance in that meeting. That’s the thing I’m going to suggest. This is not about your feeling on Marvin Miller. This is about the history of the game of baseball. It’s a no-brainer for me.”

It should be for everyone.

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Pedro Martinez, Hall of Famer?

An Associated Press story on ESPN.com is reporting that Pedro Martinez is eager to pitch for the Philadelphia Phillies next season.

Martinez is no stranger to this space.  I wrote in July that any team considering signing the veteran three-time Cy Young award winner should proceed with caution. Martinez proved me wrong, going 5-1 with a 3.63 ERA in the regular season and pitching effectively in the National League Championship Series (though he went 0-2 in the World Series and helped the Phillies lose to the Yankees.)

Regardless of whether the Phillies want Martinez back — and I’m guessing they probably do — the question I’m wondering is whether Martinez has adequate credentials for the Hall of Fame.  It may be a close call, and if he does get in, I doubt it will come on the first ballot.  At 219-100 with 2.93 ERA lifetime, he has more career wins than Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax or Dizzy Dean, but then, so does David Wells (read: Not a Hall of Famer.  Sorry, Boomer.)  Most other Hall of Fame pitchers have more wins and stronger cases.

Martinez probably garners the strongest ammunition for his future candidacy with his seven-year run of dominance from 1997 to 2003.  Were I a general manager assembling a contender between those years, Martinez would be my first pitcher, if not the first player I would want.  In that span, he captured his three Cy Youngs and was pretty much a lock year in, year out to win 17-18 games, record 250 strikeouts or more and maintain a sub-2.50 ERA.  Few other pitchers in baseball history have been in a class all their own for such a stretch.  Not to mention Martinez probably accomplished everything he did at the height of the Steroid Era.

From there, Martinez’s bid gets a little murkier.  He left the Boston Red Sox after a back-to-earth year in 2004, when he went 16-9 with a 3.90 ERA.  Since then, he has had just one full season and has looked mortal, broken down and just plain old.  It seemed as if no team would sign him last year, before the Phillies mercifully gave him a chance (the city of Philadelphia seems to take some kind of abject pity on unwanted veterans– look what’s happened for Allen Iverson, not to mention Michael Vick.)  Of course, Martinez is hardly the first great pitcher to follow this path.  Dean, Drysdale and Koufax were all effectively done around age 30, as was another Hall of Famer, Catfish Hunter. Even Juan Marichal did nothing special past 33.

If the 38-year-old Martinez succeeds in pitching for a couple more years and gets his career win total in the 230-250 range, he’ll probably have no problem getting inducted into Cooperstown.  That being said, I’d probably vote for him regardless, perhaps not first ballot, but at least at some point and definitely before guys like Bert Blyleven or Jack Morris.

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A note on baseball movies

I finally got around today to watching Major League: Back to the Minors, a movie I put off for years.  The original Major League, from 1989 is one of my all-time favorites, and its 1994 follow-up stunk something fierce.  Major League II, along with Speed 2: Cruise Control taught me never to trust sequels to films I love.

Good baseball movies are usually corny, funny and moving, all at once.  Some of my favorites include Bull Durham, 61* and Field of Dreams, and I might like Major League the most.  I still watch it almost every year.  About a Cleveland Indians team designed by its owner to finish last, the film is built around oddball characters.  Ex-con Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn  (played by Charlie Sheen) informs teammates he last played in the California Penal League.  Another rookie Willie Mays Hayes (played by Wesley Snipes) shows up to spring training uninvited and is then kicked out in the middle of the night.  Security carries him out in his cot, sleeping, and he wakes up outside the next morning.  “I’ve been cut already?” a confused Hayes surmises, practice going on behind him.  He then charges into a sprinting drill, barefoot and in his nightgown, and blows past two other players.  He gets a uniform and the scene pretty much sums up the entire movie.  It builds to a climatic final game and I always feel elated after Hayes scores the winning run with a hook slide and the Indians celebrate.  I’m a man of simple pleasures.

Omar Epps replaced Snipes for the sequel and little else about that movie seems right.  The PG rating robs the sequel of the blue humor of its predecessor and the script isn’t nearly as sharp or biting.  The net result feels overly orchestrated, commercial and, moreover, cynical.  We learn in the sequel that after the Indians won their division in the first film, the Chicago White Sox swept them in the playoffs.  Accordingly, the sequel leaves off with the Indians topping the White Sox in the playoffs, leading one to surmise that the third installment would say the Indians lost the subsequent World Series and now needed redemption.  Had the sequel not flopped at the box office, we might have gotten this.  Instead, we have Major League: Back to the Minors.

When it arrived in 1998, it looked rank from a distance.  The team depicted had changed from the Indians to the Minnesota Twins, for no discernible reason.  Most of the original cast had departed, save for Dennis Haysbert, Corbin Bernsen, Bob Uecker and Steve Yeager.  And the movie was set in the minors.  A girl in my high school went to see the movie with some friends as a joke and she said that save for one family, they were the only people in the theater.  I stayed away.  However, I’ve had Netflix for a couple months now, and a man can only go so long waiting for The Hangover to become available until running out of picks for his queue.  Which brings me to today.

I watched the third entry in the Major League series and it wasn’t terrible.  The story of a struggling minor league team that takes on its parent, the Twins, the film moves at a smooth clip.  Granted, there is plenty to criticize.  It isn’t cheerfully vulgar, hilarious, or inspiring like the original.  In fact, it feels nothing like that movie, connected in name only.  I also didn’t feel any suspense in the story buildup and its plot points could be spotted coming from a neighboring county.  Additionally, it made no reference whatsoever to the Indians, no explanation as to why Bernsen’s character Roger Dorn left that organization to own the Twins, which seemed odd.  A little exposition never hurt anyone, particularly in a film series.  Still, I found the film pleasant, certainly easier to watch than the overblown sequel.  It wasn’t anything remarkable, but I’ve found worse ways to kill an hour and a half.

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The Oakland Athletics: A team of firsts

I have been reading Bash Brothers, a book about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco and came upon an interesting passage today.  It seems the A’s were the first baseball team to have a comprehensive weightlifting program.  A trainer for the team, Ted Polakowski is quoted on page 92, describing the reaction from the baseball world:

“We were very criticized.  In those years, that was our forte; no other teams were doing it.  While a lot of those practices are accepted now, weight training wasn’t accepted back then.  It was almost a taboo.”

The Athletics’ organization has long been a forerunner for innovative ideas.  Most every sports fan has heard of Moneyball, which A’s general manager Billy Beane popularized, as ubiquitous for a time as the West Coast Offense in football or the Pyramid of Success in basketball.  Long before that, the organization pioneered a few other concepts.  The A’s may not have been the first team to dismantle a contender with a fire sale, but they’ve done it at least five notable times in their history: Twice under Connie Mack, again with Charlie Finley in the 1970s, then after the Canseco-McGwire years in the ’90s and to a lesser extent, in the last decade.  Under Finley, they were also among the first teams to use promotional gimmicks to attract fans, though in fairness, Finley was probably no greater a showman than Bill Veeck.

Small-market clubs need every trick available to remain relevant.  Now that Moneyball has faded in significance, one has to wonder what Oakland will demo next.