Author: Graham Womack

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Let’s play What Ifs

I just finished re-watching the 1999 documentary, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about the Detroit Tigers Hall of Fame first baseman, when the thought occurred to look up Greenberg’s career statistics.  Greenberg is an interesting case.  Juxtaposed against our current era, where everyone except Omar Vizquel seems to rack up 500 career home runs, Greenberg made it to Cooperstown with 331 home runs, playing just 10 full seasons.

A book I have on the Hall of Fame suggests Greenberg would have added 100 home runs to his career mark if not for losing four seasons to World War II.  In fact, looking at his career averages, it is not unreasonable to assume Greenberg could have reached 500 home runs, were his career not interrupted near its prime.  This has got me thinking.

The record books today cannot be taken at absolute value.  An entire generation of players from the Thirties to the Fifties lost multiple seasons to either WWII or the Korean War.  Ted Williams served in both conflicts, losing a staggering five years of his career.  He still managed 521 career home runs.

What if players had been exempt from military service?  Here’s a rundown of things that probably would have happened:

  • Williams would have closed out his career with close to 700 home runs and well over 3,000 hits.
  • Willie Mays, who lost nearly two seasons serving during Korea, might have been the first to break Babe Ruth’s record of 714 home runs.  Mays closed out his career in 1973 with 660 home runs.  With the lost time accounted for, it would have been more like 720 homers.
  • Bob Feller would have won 300 games.
  • Warren Spahn probably would have won 400.
  • Joe DiMaggio would have reached the end of the 1951 season with around 2,800 hits as opposed to 2,214.  Perhaps this would have been motivation enough for him to keep playing for another couple years to reach 3,000 hits as opposed to retiring at 36.
  • For that matter, Joe’s brother Dom would most likely have added enough seasons to his career to merit a Hall of Fame induction.
  • World War I generally receives less attention than other major conflicts that baseball served in.  However, it’s worth noting that a number of future Hall of Fame inductees enlisted, and unlike later wars, many players saw combat.  Ty Cobb and Grover Cleveland Alexander fought, as well as the retired Christy Matthewson.  Alexander came back from the war shell-shocked and badly epileptic, nevertheless finishing his career with 373 wins.  Without the war, he likely would have been another 400 game winner.  Meanwhile, Matthewson had his lungs seared by poison gas and died just seven years later.  Cobb got off comparably light, merely missing out on getting 4,500 career hits and keeping Pete Rose from the hits record

More interesting, perhaps, would be to consider all of the players who would have gone from having All Star careers to Hall of Fame ones, with the lost time made up, but that again is material for another time.

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Connie Mack Stadium: Ghost Park

As I have alluded to before, I have been amassing a small library of baseball books since childhood. With everything from books of trivia to memoirs to baseball literature, I have enough reference material on the sport that I often go to my bookshelf when writing posts here, seeking quotes or anecdotes. In fact, each of my last two offerings has included a reference from my personal library.

Today is no exception.

One of the earliest additions to my collection was a fine book by Lawrence Ritter, The Lost Ballparks. As the title would suggest, the book is devoted to bygone stadiums, places like the Polo Grounds and Forbes Field that have long since been torn down. Each chapter of the book is devoted to one or two ballparks and feature a chronology, with notable events listed. Often, demolition photos are even included, as well as pictures of what stands present day on the former sites (for instance, as of 1991, there was an auto dealership where Seals Stadium used to be in San Francisco.)

One of my favorite photos in the book shows Tony Taylor, a second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1960s and ’70s, standing amidst weeds in an abandoned, desolate Connie Mack Stadium. He has a bat on his shoulder and a sad, vacant look in his eyes, as he stands near second base, the old scoreboard behind him. Opened in 1909, the stadium was last used by the Phillies in 1970 and sat derelict until being torn down in 1976. Taylor was photographed in 1974, three years after a fire severely damaged the deserted park.

As someone who minored in history in college, I find material of this sort fascinating. My grandparents own a ranch near Tracy, California with several buildings on the property that date back to the 1930s and before. Growing up, I used to often explore these empty dwellings, structurally unsafe as they’d become. One of the units from a Depression-era worker’s barracks even still has furniture inside from the late 1960s or early ’70s (the woman on the box of Tide has a beehive hairdo.)

Anyhow, I was recently re-reading Ritter’s book and after seeing the photo of Taylor yet again, I decided to see what else I could find online. I found the following on a website called Ballparks of Baseball. Here are links to three cool photos of Connie Mack Stadium, reposted with permission, and how the stadium looked during the half decade it awaited demolition:

Shibe Park 1

This shows the grandstands after the 1971 fire. Note the jungle growth on the former playing field.

And next, more desolation:

Shibe Park 2

Finally, we have a shot from a different angle.

Shibe Park 3

Seems a little strange that old ads were left up– kind of makes me want to drink Coke.

Connie Mack Stadium was finally torn down at the All-Star Break in 1976 and today a church sits on the site. For whatever reason, these historical stadiums never seem to be saved. Demolition wrapped up less than two months ago at Tiger Stadium, which had opened in 1912, and structural demolition began on old Yankee Stadium last week. Hopefully, the same fate will not eventually befall Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.

Related posts: A former Pacific Coast League owner dies at 100 with a warehouse of old baseball memorabilia

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Hall of Fame: Fred McGriff, yes. Honus Wagner, no?

I ended my post yesterday with a joke about baseball creating a B-Level Hall of Fame where lesser candidates could be lionized. It could be located some place like Cleveland, feature a statue of Paul O’Neill or Kevin McReynolds in its promenade and celebrate perennial close-but-not-quite teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and early ’50s or the Atlanta Braves of the ’90s.

Well, I have learned that such a place exists.

The Ted Williams Museum at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, features a Hitters Hall of Fame. To be sure, it includes most of the greatest players the game has ever known: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays and Williams himself, among many others. It also features a couple of players who for all intents and purposes also belong in baseball’s other Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, Pete Rose, Joe Jackson and Dom DiMaggio, who I once interviewed.

Curiously, though, while the Hitters Hall of Fame honors a number of players with slim to no Cooperstown prospects, including Dwight Evans, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy and Fred McGriff, it currently excludes several Hall of Famers, chief among them Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie and Jackie Robinson.

This made me curious. McGriff had a beautiful left-handed pull swing, no doubt, and broke the heart of my San Francisco Giants with his work for the Braves in the 1993 pennant chase, but Wagner had 3,415 career hits and a lifetime batting average of .327. Lajoie had a similar number of hits, a better batting average, and routinely went head-to-head with Cobb for the annual batting title (Cobb got a new car for prevailing one year.) Robinson is honored in the museum itself, but didn’t meet the center’s criteria for inclusion in the Hitters Hall. One knock against Robinson, a lifetime .311 hitter, could be that he had a relatively short big league career, but then, so did Dom DiMaggio. In fact, looking through an old book I have on the Hall of Fame, I was able to count player after player not in the Hitter’s Hall. There are probably dozens.

Granted, being in enshrined in Cooperstown doesn’t automatically equal being an outstanding hitter. Rabbit Maranville, a shortstop from the Deadball Era, made it in with a .258 lifetime clip. Also, I wondered if Williams had only wanted to include players he had personally seen hit and could vouch for, but then, what to make of the inclusions of Cobb, Ruth, and Jackson, among others?

Curious, I looked up the phone number for the museum and reached the cell of the executive director, Dave McCarthy. He explained that save for the top 20 hitters that Williams himself had selected, the criteria for induction was that a player had to be alive and able to attend an induction ceremony and that the museum was limited by having only 10,000-square feet. McCarthy also said the museum was much for fans, which could explain the presence of McGriff, who spent much of his later career in Tampa.

The policy made sense from a business perspective, and I’m happy that nice guys like Murphy could be honored. Murphy belongs in a Hall of Fame somewhere. Also, if I were Ted Williams, I’d probably have anyone I wanted in my Hall of Fame. Will Clark anyone? All the same, the baseball purist in me is a little confounded, even as McCarthy told me there were plans in the works to induct players like Wagner.

Related posts: Other times I’ve written about the museum

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The fab four?

Yesterday brought the news that four former managers are on the Veteran’s Committee ballot for the Hall of Fame.  They are: Gene Mauch, Danny Murtaugh, Whitey Herzog and Billy Martin.  They all managed in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s and each had good, though not spectacular careers.  If I had to offer a baseball metaphor, which I am apt to do, each was like the Joe Carter or Jack Morris of his time: Good, probably even All-Star quality,  but not Ken Griffey Jr. in his prime and certainly not a Hall of Famer.

Looking over the list of 24 managers in Cooperstown, it is comprised of names like Connie Mack, John McGraw and Casey Stengel — in short, legends.  Currently, there are four enshrined managers who did their best work in the era of Mauch, Murtaugh, Herzog and Martin: Walt Alston, Sparky Anderson, Earl Weaver, and Dick Williams.   The first three seem like logical choices, near institutions as managers in their respective cities, each winners of multiple World Series.  On the other hand, Williams strikes me as someone who just happened onto a great situation with the powerhouse Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s.  He’s probably still more qualified than any of the four new candidates to be in the Hall.

The feeling here is that Herzog will probably be enshrined.  He made a couple of World Series as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals back in the ’80s.  Moreover, the Veteran’s Committee is made up of former players and tends to be soft on likable, establishment-friendly candidates.  Late, great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray probably put it best, in a 1978 column: “To get into the Baseball Writers’ wing of the Hall of Fame, you better be Babe Ruth.  Or better.  To get in the veterans’ wing, all you have to be is a crony.” And Herzog is a baseball man if there ever was one.  He even titled his autobiography You’re Missing a Great Game (I’m titling mine Ask Me a World Series Winner From Any Year. I say this all the time to people that I meet, even at job interviews.)

Now granted, if there were a Hall of Fame for legendary characters of the sport, Martin would be a first ballot inductee.  But the Hall is about results, first and foremost, and Martin managed too many different teams and was always good, but never great.  Like Williams, he did his best work for another hugely talented team — the New York Yankees of the late ’70s — that probably could have been managed by just about anyone.  And Martin had too abrasive of a personality to make an attractive Veteran’s Committee pick.  Something doesn’t feel quite right here.

It will be interesting to see who makes the Hall of Fame out of the current crop of managers.  My money is on Joe Torre, Tony LaRussa, and Bobby Cox.  Lou Piniella  could be a Veteran’s Committee pick, as could the retired Tom Kelly, though even that seems a slight stretch.  On the other hand, there are a number of Mauchs and Murtaughs managing today.  They are the Bruce  Bochys, Dusty Bakers and Bud Blacks of the sport.  Competent? Likable? Long-tenured?  Yes.  Future Hall of Famers?  Probably not.  They could probably feature prominently in some kind of B-Level Hall of Fame but that’s fodder for another post entirely.

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Coach McGwire

Yesterday came the news that Mark McGwire will be joining the St. Louis Cardinals as their new hitting coach.  Much of the news centered around ongoing – and very probable – speculation that McGwire used performance enhancing drugs during his career.  But hey, as Big Mac would say to Congress, I’m not here to talk about the past.  That’s because I was more struck by a different aspect of this story.  What interested me is that McGwire is yet another great hitter gone on to coach. Based on what I know of baseball history, more times than not, this doesn’t seem to work out.

The feeling here is that the best coaches are generally not former star players.  For instance, the most-successful hitting coaches I can think of, Rudy Jaramillo of the Chicago Cubs and the late, great Charley Lau, who coached George Brett with the Kansas City Royals had only marginal professional careers.  Meanwhile, there’ve been a myriad number of former stars, who’ve tried and failed to coach.  Granted, there have been some isolated success stories.  Ted Williams turned the expansion Washington Senators into a brief contender in the late 1960s, Rod Carew did good work with the Angels, and Don Baylor parlayed a couple of coaching stints into a managerial career.  But I can compile a far lengthier list of failures.  They include:

Babe Ruth: Hired as a first base coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938, Ruth’s job was more to hit home runs in batting practice.  He lasted one season.

Yogi Berra: The story I heard with Berra seems to be an issue common to lots of former stars: He could do the work himself better than he could teach it, and it frustrated him to stop and try explaining what came so natural to him.

Reggie Jackson: Jackson became a hitting coach for the Oakland Athletics, after he wrapped up his playing career with them.  The job went so well that Jackson chose to wear a Yankees hat for his Hall of Fame induction in 1993, two years after the A’s fired him.

–and–

Bobby Bonds: Bonds was hired more as a favor, after the San Francisco Giants signed Bonds’ son Barry prior to the 1993 season.  The elder Bonds did get some commendable results with Matt Williams, having the Giants slugger hitting at a .336 clip in 1995, before he went down injured.  But that was Bonds’ high-water mark as the Giants hitting coach.

I hope for McGwire’s sake that it goes well.  While he clearly did steroids, in my book, he seems like a nice enough guy who mearly got caught up in something that was endemic in the game at the time. Regardless, though, McGwire’s looking a challenging situation here.

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Thoughts on the playoffs

Ah, the playoffs.  Baseball’s annual fall rite of passage. Typically, the postseason is something to look forward to.  This year’s been a little different, though.

Usually, there’s a team or two I like gunning for the World Series, but the offerings have been a little slim this fall.  Trying to choose a team to root for has somewhat like picking a favorite Backstreet Boys song or member of the Brady Bunch or McDonald’s Value Meal selection: No matter what, they’re all sort of off-putting. I guess if I had to say anyone, it might be the Philadelphia Phillies, but they’re little more than the best of a weak bunch.

As for the Anaheim Angels and New York Yankees, I wish there was a way they could both lose the American League Championship Series and we could be done with this thing now.  The Yankees spend more than the GDP of Estonia on salaries each year, and while the Angels can be admired for having a batting lineup that pretty much hits .300 to a man, they also have perhaps the most irritating, vacuous fan base in professional sports.  I remember hearing a story back in ’02 how a so-called Angel’s fanatic didn’t know who David Eckstein was.  And to think my Giants fell to Anaheim in the Series that year.

I suppose I’ll be curious to see who winds up winning this year, but I don’t think I’ll be waiting with baited breath.

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Back from the Bermuda Triangle

Late, great sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote after an extended absence:

I feel I owe my friends an explanation as to where I’ve been all these weeks. Believe me, I would rather have been in a press box.

In Murray’s case, he had been temporarily out of work because he had had to have one of his eyes surgically removed, due to a detached retina.  The experience produced one of his most poetic, touching columns.  My reasons for not posting here in a month aren’t nearly as noble.  Mostly, I’ve just been consumed with work.  But I intend to start posting again soon.  With the playoffs underway and the start of free agency only a few weeks out, there is certainly plenty I can write about and I miss the pace of regular posts.

More will follow soon, I promise.

–Graham Womack

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What am I, the Barry Zito of sales?

I have been pleased to see that Barry Zito has put together some strong outings as of late, including a 7-inning effort in the San Francisco Giants 10-2 win over the Colorado Rockies last night.  It certainly hasn’t been a smooth ride for the former Cy Young Award winner the past few years.  One minute he’s an ace.  The next minute he’s struggling to stay in the Giants’ starting rotation. It always seems to be an uphill battle for Zito.  Every spring, he pitches himself into a hole, compiling a win-loss record of something like 1-6 with a 7.26 ERA to start June.  He then spends the remainder of the season trying to get right.  In general, he’s a much better second-half pitcher and tends to have a string of strong performances late in the season, though it’s usually not enough to push his winning percentage over .500, get his ERA under 4.00 or live up to his $126 million contract.

I don’t think Zito fails because of mechanics or effort.  I think his problems generally boil down to nerves, a lack of confidence.  I know this because I experience the same sort of struggles on my job.  I work in sales, for an Internet startup, and I spend my days cold-calling businesses, pitching my firm’s service.  One minute, I am on fire, getting through to lots of business owners, setting up free trial accounts and closing deals. However, if I go a few days without a trial or a closed account, my pitch quickly goes to shit.  My anxiety spikes every time I get a live person on the phone, I speak faster, stammer when given objections, and sigh when they invariably hang up the phone on me.  It can be pitiful to listen to.

I tend to easily forget that I’ve been successful before in my job, that everyone is rooting for me to succeed and I have all the tools to make this happen.  My guess is that Zito has a comparable inner monologue.  Still, I know how reassuring it is for me when I start succeeding again.  Zito must be feeling pretty good today.  I hope he keeps up the good work.

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Brett Favre: A few times this has been done in the baseball world

I’ve been watching with mild disgust these past few weeks as the latest iteration of the Brett Favre saga has unfolded.  The future Hall of Fame quarterback recently came out of retirement, for the second time in as many seasons to play for the Minnesota Vikings (he previously did this with the New York Jets.)  Twice now, Favre has finished a season, retired, said he’s 99% retired and then come back on the eve of the next season.  He’ll probably qualify for Medicare before he finally retires for good.

Favre is certainly not the first athlete to do this.  In baseball, the practice of retiring and then coming back is practically an art form.   Here are a few ballplayers who’ve had a hard time walking away:

Roger Clemens: The undisputed king of the un-retirement game.  Football has Favre.  Basketball has Michael Jordan, and to a lesser extent, Magic Johnson.  In baseball, there is Clemens.  At last count, he has retired three times, and only reason the 354-game-winner has stayed put this time is because of the ongoing rumors about his steroid use.  Somewhere, he and Barry Bonds are probably holed up in a bunker together, waiting for this thing to blow over.

Rickey Henderson: Henderson made more stops than the circus in his Hall of Fame career.  At the end, at age 44, he played independent league ball with the Newark Bears in hopes of making it back to the big leagues.  It worked.  He’d probably still be playing today if someone would give him a job.

Arky Vaughan: A lesser known name than Clemens or Henderson, Vaughan was a star in his own right during his prime in the 1930s and ’40s.  An All-Star shortstop, Vaughan walked away from baseball at 31, in the midst of a Hall of Fame career, due to a dispute with his manager with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Leo Durocher.  Vaughan spent time on his ranch in California and did not play ball for a total of three years, before returning for the 1947 season.  He played two final seasons as a reserve and then retired for good.

Jim Palmer: The Baltimore Orioles pitching great retired following the 1984 season and then attempted a comeback in the spring of 1990.  He didn’t make it out of spring training.

Jim Bouton: It was easy for Bouton to retire from baseball just past his 30th birthday, following the success of his bestselling 1970 book, Ball Four. However, he got the itch to play again a few years later and spent a couple seasons in the minors before returning with the Atlanta Braves in the fall of 1978.  He wrote about the experience in a postscript to Ball Four.

Bo Jackson: Give Bo credit for trying, though this was a sad sight to see.  A two-sport star with the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Raiders, Jackson was never the same after blowing out his hip in a Raiders playoff game.  He played baseball again, but not as the star he was before.

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Nancy Bartlett

I got a sad phone call recently. The mother of my childhood best friend Devin had died after an illness. Her name was Nancy, and she deserves credit for getting me into baseball.

I met Devin the summer before kindergarten. I was out with my family one evening walking our dog and saw Devin outside, around the corner from our house. We were fast friends. Two months apart in age, we did everything together: Had sleepovers, went to the same barber, shopped for Christmas presents at the 98-cent store (where else do you shop when you’re seven?) Our moms even arranged for us to get chicken pox at the same time.

Both Nancy and my mom were recently removed from divorces when Devin and I met. My mom had remarried, though Nancy stayed single for the remainder of my childhood. She never had easy circumstances, raising Devin and his younger sister Kenna in a duplex near government housing and driving used cars. She was a tough lady, though and could silence me by saying she would tell my dad about however I was misbehaving. It made me cry at least once.

Nancy had a sense of humor, too. On her wall, she had a picture of Tom Selleck which a friend had autographed. Being young, impressionable and a fan of Magnum P.I., however, I thought the autograph was real and Nancy did little to dissuade me. Another time, at an amusement park, she told Devin and I to be extra careful on the bumper cars and not hit anyone. We did exactly as she said.

I have a small library of baseball books today, and in one of my books about the San Francisco Giants, a fan offers this quote:

“I have always loved baseball. I moved here 16 years ago and naturally started coming to games. I think the Giants are a good team because they just don’t give up. There won’t be a generational bridge, though. My kids are hopeless A’s fans.”

Devin and I started playing Little League baseball in the spring of 1989, kindergarten for us. It was the year of the Battle of the Bay, when the Giants and Oakland A’s faced off in the World Series, and Devin and I had matching posters of Will Clark and Mark McGwire lording over the San Francisco Bay. It could have been easy for Devin and I to become A’s followers, fanatics of McGwire, Jose Canseco and Rickey Henderson. Instead, Nancy steered us right.

Nancy was a Giants fan. Through Nancy, I learned of Giants stars like Clark, Brett Butler and Kevin Mitchell, who, Nancy told me, had gotten a double off a check-swing. She also taught me about nondescript yet valuable role players like Robby Thompson, Jose Uribe and Terry Kennedy. I don’t know if we simply learned intrinsically that the A’s were soulless and evil, while the Giants were working class, blue collar and therefore good, but Nancy at least deserves credit by proxy. I think the team was a reflection of her values, which she tried to instill in us.

The picture of Selleck wasn’t the only fake Nancy displayed. There was also a photo of Devin standing in front of Clark. It looked real enough to me, and I envied Devin after hearing the story of how he met Clark. I eventually learned the truth: It was a display at Candlestick Park, where fans could have their pictures snapped for a fee. Devin and I got to have our pictures taken there, but because our families were poor, our moms took the pictures off from the side with their own cameras. The photos of Devin and I standing arm-in-arm, smiling on wooden boxes with obvious cardboard figures propped up behind us are some of my favorites from childhood. Even thinking of them just now made me smile.

After a few years, Nancy moved to a better neighborhood several blocks away, and I began to see less of Devin, until he was just a peripheral figure in my group of friends. We still keep up, but as friendly acquaintances, not childhood best buds. I last saw Nancy three years ago, when Devin got married. She had finally remarried by this point and seemed happy when I spoke to her, at the reception. I don’t know if we talked much baseball, or if the new Giants appealed to her. I know part of my childhood ended after Clark signed with the Texas Rangers following the 1993 season.

I don’t know how many people there are out there like Nancy, people who struggle through life, their labors long, joys fleeting and ephemeral. But I know that baseball at its best can provide a measure of hope and happiness to these people. I know it made Nancy happy. As a result, it made me happy, too.

(Editor’s Note, 11/12/09: I have changed the title of this post, after seeing information in my Google Analytics account which leads me to believe that people searching for porn were coming upon the old title, “My Best Friend’s Mom.” I thought it was clever when I first wrote it and would get me more hits.  I see the error of my ways.)