Author: howard

Editor’s note: I apologize for the lateness of this week’s edition of “Any  player/Any era.” I’ve gotten behind in my writing recently and will work to maintain a regular posting schedule in the future.

What he did: Part of the triumvirate of New York Yankee aces in the late 1940s and early ’50s with Allie Reynolds and Vic Raschi, Lopat figured into an interesting passage of David Halberstam’s classic, Summer of ’49. Halberstam wrote of Lopat, “He was a converted first baseman who had become a pitcher in the minor leagues during the war. His friend Reynolds thought, and he did not mean it pejoratively, that if not for the war years, Lopat would never have made it to the majors. He did not throw particularly hard, and in normal times he would have been weeded out for lack of a fastball.”

It’s an intriguing idea, though I don’t know if I agree. Halberstam made note of Lopat’s intelligence (“like having an additional pitching coach”) and use of a slow curve ball that he learned from Hall of Fame pitcher Ted Lyons, attributes that seem like they would serve Lopat well in any generation of pitchers. And junk ball hurlers have long had their place in baseball from Lyons to Gaylord Perry to Barry Zito. I’d like to think Lopat could have had another ticket to the majors besides World War II.

Era he might have thrived in: Lopat, Raschi, and Reynolds may have been the Zito, Mark Mulder, and Tim Hudson of their time, another trio of hurlers instrumental in helping non-elite offensive teams into the postseason, so we’ll substitute Lopat for fellow slow-tossing southpaw Zito. At least statistically, his converted 1951 season where he went 21-9 with a 2.91 ERA might approach Zito’s 2002 American League Cy Young campaign.

Why: I don’t know if any era in baseball history would maximize Lopat’s talents, but Oakland in 2002 would offer much of what worked for him. For one thing, he’d be going from one great club to another, seeing as the ’51 Yankees went 98-56, scoring 798 runs and allowing 621, while the 2002 A’s were 103-59 with 800 runs scored and 654 allowed. He’d once again be in a pitcher’s park, playing under savvy management (both teams exceeded their Pythagorean win totals.) I’m also guessing Oakland would be willing to consider an unconventional, older pitcher like Lopat, who made the majors at 25, given its penchant for drafting college hurlers.

That being said, I’d be curious to see how Lopat would do playing in the Moneyball system. For all the talk of those A’s being masters of on-base percentage (though Moneyball was about much more than that), the ’51 Yankees carried a slightly better club OBP, .349 to .339. Neither team was renowned for its offense. Both clubs hit in the .260 range with a couple outstanding hitters, Eric Chavez and 2002 American League MVP Miguel Tejada for the A’s, and 1951 AL MVP Yogi Berra on New York. Other than that, it’s a wonder either team scored as many runs as it did with such nondescript casts.

The stat converter has Lopat giving the 2002 A’s a 16-10 record with a 3.25 ERA, which seems conservative for his 1951 numbers. Whatever the case, though, he’d have a deserved place in baseball.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a player might have done in an era besides his own.

Others in this series: Albert Pujols, Babe Ruth, Bad News Rockies, Barry Bonds, Bob Caruthers, Bob Feller, Bob Watson, Denny McLain, Dom DiMaggio, Frank Howard, Fritz Maisel, George Case, Harmon Killebrew, Harry Walker, Home Run Baker, Ichiro Suzuki, Jack Clark, Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Wynn, Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Frederick, Josh Hamilton, Ken Griffey Jr., Lefty O’Doul, Matty Alou, Michael Jordan, Nate Colbert, Paul Derringer, Pete Rose, Prince Fielder, Ralph Kiner, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, Sam Thompson, Sandy Koufax, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, The Meusel Brothers, Ty Cobb, Wally Bunker, Willie Mays

Despite every effort during the off season, the Pittsburgh Pirates couldn’t trade catcher Ryan Doumit probably because of his 2011 $5.1 million contract. Although Doumit started last year, the Pirates midseason acquisition of Chris Synder relegated him to part time where he may eventually slip into oblivion.

I’m surprised no American League team bid for Doumit. He’s a switch hitter who has some pop, can catch a little (although is nickname is No-Mitt) and play the outfield in an emergency. Since the Pirates are desperate to dump Doumit’s salary, I’m sure they’re willing to deal.

Even if it may mean the rest of his career as a backup, Doumit should be happy to back his bags. With luck, Doumit could become this generation’s Charlie Silvera.

From 1948 through 1956, Silvera backed up Yogi Berra as the New York Yankees’ second string catcher.

Silvera, during 10 major league seasons, appeared in only 227 games and racked up a paltry 482 at-bats, less than a typical season’s worth for Berra. In 1950, Silvera didn’t bat until June 17, two months into the season. And though his lifetime batting average was .282, the San Francisco native hit only one home run.

Most years, however, Silvera cashed Yankee World Series checks.

Opposing players ribbed Silvera mercilessly, calling him, among other names, “Jesse James, the payroll bandit.” They asked if his paychecks came gift-wrapped.

To Silvera, all the ribbing was wonderful. Looking back on it, Silvera laughed. “They’d say, ‘Do you use anything on the bench to keep your fanny from getting sore?’ I had a lot of fun with it.”

He jokes about his career because perhaps no bench warmer in baseball history enjoyed a more interesting 10-year run than Silvera who played for Yankee teams that won a record five consecutive World Series championships from 1949 to 1953.

The Yankees reached the World Series in seven of Silvera’s eight full seasons in New York, winning six times.

During the last three seasons, Doumit has seen his teammates shipped off to the Yankees, the Braves, Red Sox, Giants, Cubs—all contenders. Wouldn’t the 28-year-old Doumit like to be in the hunt at least once before he’s done? Isn’t playing in the post-season every player’s goal?

That’s not like to happen with the Pirates during what remains of Doumit’s productive years. Even if the Pirates finally break the .500 mark, the team is unlikely to seriously contend for five years.

Since Doumit’s 2005 rookie season, the Pirates finished sixth, fifth, sixth, sixth and sixth. Another sixth place looms this year. The constant losing, with years of more defeats on the horizon, weighs heavily on players and adversely affects their performance.

A part-time role on a winning team may be good for Doumit’s soul. Think of it this way: if you were a commissioned salesman but management never provided you with a product good enough to make any sales, wouldn’t you consider changing employers?

Silvera didn’t mind his secondary status. Now 84 and scouting for the Chicago Cubs, the only other team he played for, Silvera looked back and said: “I had a wonderful career. I couldn’t have scripted it any better.”

Editor’s note: Before I provide this week’s links, there are a few things to say. First, I apologize for missing this link post last week. I have gotten behind in my writing schedule and will work to ensure I don’t miss posts in the future. In that vein, this week’s edition of “Any player/Any era” should go live sometime Saturday. Thanks, and enjoy the links.

• It’s been an awesome week for Joe Posnanski who, since Saturday, has written a fantastic rebuttal to some idiocy, come out with a massive Sports Illustrated piece on the 32 best players for 2011, and been named Sportswriter of the Year by the Baseball Bloggers Alliance (I definitely voted for him.) The BBA is planning to name the award after Posnanski starting next year– I’ll be honored if I ever win anything named for Poz.
• One of my favorite baseball writers, Josh Wilker offers a starting lineup of his favorite authors. Good to see Anton Chekhov and Denis Johnson in there, though I’m surprised Wilker didn’t include Tobias Wolff, who he said helped influence his 2010 memoir, Cardboard Gods. Wolff bats third and capably handles third base on my team. I’ll provide a full lineup for Monday.
• Rory Paap offers a breakdown on Tim Lincecum’s Opening Day Velocity.
• Last June, I wrote about an obscure Negro League and semi-pro great named John Donaldson. One of the people I interviewed for the post, a scout named John Klima has written a far more expansive feature about Donaldson for Yahoo.com which, as we speak, has gotten over 700 comments. It’s good to see Donaldson getting some much-deserved mass exposure, and Klima offers an impressive amount of detail, as always.
• Pretty sure this is an April Fool’s joke

In February, New York University president John Sexton invited me to lecture his undergraduate class, “Baseball as a Road to God,” about the role the sport played in helping immigrants from the early 1900’s assimilate. The subject is one near and dear to my heart. My own Sicilian grandmother was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan. As I spoke to the students, I told them my grandmother’s tale as well as the story of how thousands of Pittsburgh immigrants became Pirates fans and eventually Americans.

As part of its Opening Day coverage, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published my column about “Baseball as a Road to God” here.

For more details about the class including an interview with Mr. Sexton and its comprehensive reading list, go here.

In this space Saturday, Joe Guzzardi discussed the troubled life of his former prep school classmate and friend, Joe DiMaggio Jr. The only son of the Yankee legend never came close to his father’s success, bouncing through life, abusing drugs and alcohol, and dying a miserable death in Antioch, California in 1999. One of my friends was homeless in Antioch off and on for a number of years. It’s a bleak place to bottom out, one of the armpits of the San Francisco Bay Area.

DiMaggio Jr. wasn’t unique. Children of baseball Hall of Famers often struggle to compare to their parents, seemingly forever cursed with the expectation their genetics should make greatness easily attainable. It’s not that the kids are failures or bad people or any more mediocre than countless other individuals who get to fall short in obscurity. Children of top ballplayers have tough standards to live up to. If anything, their struggles reinforce the greatness and rarity of their fathers.

“I think there’s a jinx with sons of famous athletes,” Ty Cobb’s son James told sportswriter Ira Berkow in 1969. “None of them ever topped their fathers. Look at Dick Sisler and Big Ed Walsh’s son. They never did make it real big. And I understand Stan Musial’s son was a very good baseball player. But he gave it up.”

Here are a few more famous examples, good and bad:

Mickey Mantle: Mantle built a Hall of Fame career around drinking and carousing and had four sons, all alcoholics. His namesake Mickey Mantle Jr. had a token run in the minor leagues in the 1970s, with one coach remarking in Jane Leavy’s recent Mantle biography, The Last Boy, “He showed skills. Mostly he showed he didn’t play a lot.” Mantle Jr. died of cancer in 2000, five years after his father passed, and today, two of the sons are alive and, at last report, sober.

Ozzie Smith: The son of the St. Louis Cardinals shortstop famous for turning back flips on field must have inherited his father’s showmanship– Nikko Smith took ninth place in the fourth season of American Idol.

Ted Williams: Williams’ only son, John Henry was controversial with his doting care on his father in the final years of his life and wound up in a legal battle with his sister after having Williams frozen following his death in 2002. John Henry himself passed not long after of leukemia in 2004 at 35. It’s worth noting that like Mantle Jr., John Henry also had a brief, unsuccessful baseball career, playing in the minors and independent circuit in 2002 and 2003.

Pete Rose: Like father, like son. Both Roses played in the Reds organization, the younger Rose mostly as a long-tenured minor league player, and both men had legal problems, Rose for tax evasion and his son for dealing steroids to teammates.

Babe Ruth: Ruth and his first wife Helen adopted a daughter, Dorothy in 1921, who was rumored to be the Babe’s biological child with a mistress. Dorothy married twice, raising Arabian horses and three children, and not long before her death in 1989, she came out with a memoir, My Dad, the Babe.

Welcome to part three. It seems likely that a part ad infinitem would be possible with Bud running the show but let’s continue with some more likely scenarios for the 2011 major league baseball season. If you’ve been able to follow thus far, congratulations. As with part two, I am continuing from the point I left of previously.

13.   Chicago Whitesox manager Ozzie Guillen insists that there are too many Latin players and managers in baseball and asks his son to twitter President Obama arguing that Ozzie doesn’t know what he is talking about.  The message arrives censored and therefore blank to a confused CIA operative in the White House who immediately assumes that the twitter has something to do with the movie “The Wizard of Oz”.  Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour is contacted but he is on vacation on the dark side of the moon.  Ozzie later explains that what he really meant to say was that the Cubs will never win and that there are too many Latin players and managers in major league baseball.

14.   The Kansas City Royals continue to stock their farm system with what many scouts have deemed, the best system they have ever seen.  Not wanting to ruin what he has built up over the past few seasons, Royals GM Dayton Moore refuses to promote any of his prospects to the majors, insisting that to do so would disappoint the many thousands of minor league baseball fans throughout the Kansas City organization and down grade their No. 1 ranking with Baseball America.  It would also lessen the chances of high draft picks in the future, potentially weakening a top notch farm system. His trade of Zack Greinke was deemed necessary as Greinke was embarrassing the rest of the less than mediocre Royals pitching staff and his striving to be a major league star simply did not allow him to fit into the Kansas City clubhouse mentality.

15.   The Topps baseball card company are forced to issue a disclaimer concerning the 2011 San Francisco Giants team set.  A staffer at the company mixed up several of the player’s names and statistics with the ZZ Top rock and roll legends card set.  He claimed that with every Giants player now sport a beard and long hair, only manager Bruce Bochy is recognizable. Even then there was some confusion between the clean shaven Bochy and clean shaven ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard. Confusion continued to grow as guitarist Billy Gibbons pitched the ninth inning of a recent home game while San Francisco closer Brian  Wilson sang Sharp Dressed Man instead of the national anthem before the game.

16.   In an act of sympathy for owner Frank McCourt, all Los Angeles Dodger players filed for divorce and gave half ownership of their positions to their wives.  The wives will play innings three, five, seven and nine and will be allowed to wear their husbands’ uniforms and gloves.  Bullpen bbqs are not part of the arrangement and the wives are not obligated to appear on field unless uniforms are spotless and the new flowers on the infield are watered and protected from sliding and/or diving runners and fielders.  There is also to be no spitting or cursing and any wife arguing with an umpire will automatically be deemed winner of said argument. There is still no crying in baseball although manager Don Matingly will be exempt in certain cases.

17.   The Montreal Expos continue their undefeated streak, now stretching from 2006 but because of an odd quirk in the rulebook, have been declared ineligible for post season play each of the past six seasons.  Their Triple A farm club, the Washington Nationals, continue to struggle and Les Expos have yet to promote a single player from the team.  Despite claims by the Toronto Blue Jays, (who have shortened their name to the Rays), Montreal are and always will be Canada’s team.

The Expos also remain undefeated on the tennis courts of old Jarry Parc and are once again accepting bids for a new and functional roof over Stade Olympic.  Team mascot Youppi continues to moonlight as cheerleader for the National Hockey League Montreal Canadians and various heavy metal groups have been assigned the playing of both national anthems before each game.  Metallica front man James Hetfield was heard to complain, “I only know two chords and neither one is in those darn anthems, especially the French chords.”

There you have it – my fearless predictions for the 2011 Major League baseball season.  Not scientific I suppose but sometimes ya gotta go with your gut.

Graham Womack’s review of Jermone Charyn’s new book Joe DiMaggio:The Long Vigil reminded me of a friendship I had with DiMaggio’s only child, his son Joe, Jr.

During the 1960s, young Joe and I were classmates at a New Jersey all-boys preparatory school. Interestingly, DiMaggio never talked about his father. Not until long after we graduated did I learn that Joe and his father had a stained and often hostile relationship.

After DiMaggio divorced his first wife Dorothy Arnold, Joe  (called Joey D. by his family) was sent to several military academies, summer camps and the prep school where I met him. Joe, the mirror image physically of his father, neither spoke of DiMaggio nor touched a baseball bat. Instead, Joe played varsity football. An outstanding athlete, Joe made the All New Jersey team as a center and kicker. But even though Di Maggio lived in nearby Manhattan, he never came to his son’s games or to visit on Parent’s Day.

At the time, none of Joe’s friends fully realized the wisdom of his decision not to play baseball. What chance would he have had of even coming close to his father’s extraordinary success?

Joe entered Yale University but at that point his life, already troubled, unraveled. After a year at Yale, Joe dropped out, returned to his native California, worked menial jobs and then entered the United States Marines. After completing his Marines’ commitment, Joe married a 17-year-old San Diego girl. Their union lasted only a year.

More odd jobs followed before Joe moved to Boston to work for his Uncle Dom. Joe met and married Sue Adams, a divorcee with two daughters. This led to Joe’s happiest days with his father who doted on his stepdaughters.

But Joe felt that he could never totally please his father. Gradually, he fell into drug and alcohol abuse which caused vicious battles with Adams that left her battered and bloody. In 1974, they divorced.

Two years later, Joe was in a serious automobile accident that resulted in the removal of a portion of his brain. The surgery left Joe more emotionally unstable and drug dependent than ever. 

Knowing the short and long-term effects of substance abuse will help you understand better the trouble that a drug addicted friend or loved one is in for without addiction treatment.

Although Joe didn’t visit his father during DiMaggio’s final days battling cancer, he was a pall bearer at the funeral.

Five months after DiMaggio’s death, Joe entered the bleakest, final days of his life. His drug usage escalated, he had periods of homelessness, worked at a junkyard, and had minor scrapes with the police. At age 57, Joe was living in a trailer. On August 6, 1999, Antioch police found Joe’s nearly lifeless body on the street. Despite resuscitation efforts, Joe died shortly after arrival at the Sutter Delta Medical Center. His ashes were scattered at sea.

DiMaggio’s ex-wife Sue summed up Joe’s tortured life: “They threw the man away.”

Joe’s happiest days may have been those that he spent with Marilyn Monroe. One early fall day, just as we all had returned from our summer vacations, Joe told of his stepmother Marilyn making his breakfast and serving it to him.

Usually, when teenagers recount their vacation adventures, gross exaggeration is the rule. But we knew Joe’s story about Monroe was true. How envious we were!

By most accounts, Joe was among the last people to speak to Monroe before she died.

Joe’s few brief and carefree days with Monroe hardly compensate for the decades that DiMaggio ignored him. Even in death, DiMaggio dismissed Joe by leaving him a token sum in his will, the smallest amount of any of his heirs.

Opinions differ about DiMaggio’s character. But what’s clear is that DiMaggio was, at best, an indifferent parent. In the early 1980s, when I lived in Seattle, I got into an elevator at the Washington Athletic Club. DiMaggio was the only other passenger. I extended my hand, introduced myself and told him that I was Joe’s classmate. DiMaggio didn’t utter a word.

DiMaggio was so cold and insensitive to Joe’s filial needs that he denied his son what could have been a productive life and instead helped put him in his early grave.

What he did: Here’s a name I didn’t know. I began research for this post with an idea: Find a hurler buried on a great team in the Year of the Pitcher, 1968, with the idea that even a good pitcher might be out of options on a team like the Tigers, Cardinals, or Dodgers but might thrive transported to a different era. That led me to Wally Bunker, who was effective when the Baltimore Orioles let him pitch in 1968, going 2-0 with a 2.41 ERA and a 1.028 WHIP, though he was essentially a non-factor and was closer to the end of his career than the beginning. This for someone who was all of 23 in 1968.

Bunker debuted in September 1963 as an 18-year-old just done with his first year in the minors. Known for a sharp sinker, he led the Orioles with 19 wins in 1964 but hurt himself in a late-season game, telling the Baltimore Sun in 2009, “I thought somebody had shot me in the shoulder with a .22 rifle. That was the beginning of the end.” He topped 200 innings just once more and was older than his years by 1968. Baltimore won 91 games, carried a 2.49 ERA, and offered little hope for Bunker. He went to the Kansas City Royals in the expansion draft for 1969 and had one more good year before retiring in 1971 at 26.

Bunker didn’t need an expansion draft. He needed an entirely different time than the one he played in– an era where he could be more ably handled as a young pitcher, afforded better medical care, and allowed to stay in the minors longer. There’s no time like the present, or even close to it, for this kind of thing.

Era he might have thrived in: As with Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax, we’re making Bunker an Atlanta Brave in the early 1990s, where with fellow young hurlers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz he might forge a Hall of Fame career.

Why: Maddux came to Atlanta as a free agent coming off a Cy Young year, though Glavine and Smoltz were very much products of their environments. Say what you will about Glavine having the talent to play hockey or Smoltz being a high-enough regarded prospect to be dealt by the Tigers for veteran Doyle Alexander straight up in 1987, but both Glavine and Smoltz and even Maddux became more successful pitchers as Braves. They likely owe much to what they learned in Atlanta, and one has to wonder if their cases for Cooperstown would be so strong had they played for lesser clubs– or in Bunker’s time.

The 1960s might have produced some awesome pitching numbers, but it was a terrible time to be a pitcher, particularly a young one, when heavy workloads, a longer season, and less-evolved medical care wrecked guys before their time. Koufax is a famous example, Denny McLain less so, and I doubt Bunker is remembered by too many modern fans. There are almost certainly others lost to baseball obscurity. I’m guessing it was a brutally competitive time for pitchers, too, when there was always the knowledge an ERA above 3.00 could mean a pink slip.

Bunker could breathe a little easier in Atlanta, and he’d also probably thrive in its farm system, which has produced more good if not great hurlers including Jason Schmidt, Jason Marquis, and Kevin Millwood. Bunker would have the chance to be something more than a name I only learned in writing this post.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a player might have done in an era besides his own.

Others in this series: Albert Pujols, Babe Ruth, Bad News Rockies, Barry Bonds, Bob Caruthers, Bob Feller, Bob Watson, Denny McLain, Dom DiMaggio, Frank Howard, Fritz Maisel, George Case, Harmon Killebrew, Harry Walker, Home Run Baker, Ichiro Suzuki, Jack Clark, Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Wynn, Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Frederick, Josh Hamilton, Ken Griffey Jr., Lefty O’Doul, Matty Alou, Michael Jordan, Nate Colbert, Paul Derringer, Pete Rose, Prince Fielder, Ralph Kiner, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, Sam Thompson, Sandy Koufax, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, The Meusel Brothers, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays

I’m close to walking away from baseball. I’ve done it before and came away none the worse for wear. During the various work stoppages twenty years ago, the 1985 cocaine scandal and the more recent steroid ugliness, I turned my back on baseball completely. I didn’t miss it much. If I’m given the choice between spending three hours watching my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates play the Houston Astros or rereading The Glory of Their Times, I’ll take the book ten times out of ten.

Not that I would completely abandon baseball. Since it deals a lot with Pirates’ history, I’d keep my summer job as a PNC Park tour guide. And I’d continue to take in the local high school game, a surprisingly satisfying substitute for major league baseball. Then, there’s also the College World Series that I always watch where the players actually know how to successfully put down a bunt and throw to the cutoff man. Maybe I’ll coach my neighborhood Little League team.

What’s pushed me to the brink is ESPN’s March 14^th Monday night game featuring the Boston Red Sox against the New York Yankees. Judging from the three weekly games that ESPN broadcast last year, I’ve concluded that the network is unaware that 28 other teams, including the World Series champion San Francisco Giants, play baseball, too.

Announcers Bobby Valentine, Sean McDonough, Buster Olney and Orel Hershiser talked almost exclusively about players’ multimillion dollar contracts and how many millions, this one, that one and the other one earn.

How many tens of millions, the broadcasters wondered, will it take to sign Adrian Gonzales to a long term deal? Will the $142 million the Red Sox paid to Carl Crawford put Boston on top of the American League? By how many more millions will Albert Pujols’ new contract exceed the quarter of a billion dollar deal Alex Rodriguez has in his pocket? When Felix Hernandez becomes a free agent, how many hundreds of millions will the Yankees have to shell out to convince him to leave Seattle? Can Derek Jeter find happiness is his 30,000 square foot Florida mansion?

If I were an ESPN producer I’d advise Valentine, et al to cool it with that line of chatter. Not to bum you out but America has 20 million unemployed workers and 50 million without health insurance. I’m sure the baseball fans among them don’t find a rehashing of players’ inflated salaries entertaining.

The story ESPN should tell is how much money the owners squander on totally unproductive players and how their poor judgment drives up your cost to see a game. Why should you or I subsidize the owners’ failures and stupidity by buying tickets?

Cases in point: the New York Mets and its washed up duo, Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo. The Mets will pay Castillo $6 million to buy out the final year of his bloated $24 million deal. And Perez, also released, will set the Mets back $12 million for his final year—$36 million in total since they signed him in 2009 in exchange for the three games he won. Castillo and Perez represent $60 million down the drain. Think about it—$60 million to which a match might as well have been set.

When I go to a major league game, at significant personal expense, I’m sanctioning the owners’ madness and at the same time encouraging more of it. For zero dollars, I can check out The Glory of Their Times from the library, take it with me to the high school game and save the aggravation of watching overpaid, under-skilled, ungrateful players one of whom spent his off-season in a Super Bowl luxury box being hand fed popcorn by bleach-blond Hollywood starlet.

To think—once ballplayers worked in the offseason just like you and me.