Category: MLB

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Halladay, would he be so nice?

Toronto Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay is poised to collect a substantial payday. Preliminary indications are that Toronto will not attempt to resign the 32-year-old free agent to-be, whose contract is up after 2010. While a big team like the Red Sox, Yankees or Mets (or maybe the Dodgers or Angels) will gladly overpay Halladay, other clubs would be wise to steer clear. Here are a few good reasons:

  1. Halladay has spent his career, thus far, in the pitcher-friendly Skydome. Signing pitchers of this sort can be risky. Exhibit A? Mike Hampton. Exhibit B? Darryl Kile. The list goes on, and not all are just guys who went to pitch for the Rockies.
  2. Although Halladay will be 33 in May, he’s still likely to command $15-20 million a season for at least five years. The successful result of signing Halladay is that he collects another Cy Young award or two, pitches his new team to the playoffs year in, year out, and strengthens his future bid for the Hall of Fame. That being said, there’s also a chance that Halladay winds up at 37 as a No. 4 starter, with an 8-12 record and 4.40 ERA on a club that’s south of .500 (this mainly could happen if he goes to the Mets.) No matter what, he’s going to be expensive.
  3. Not only will Halladay cost a lot of money, he will also cost several good players. Since Toronto still holds Halladay’s contract, the best way to get him now would be through a trade, and I can’t imagine what that will take. I was in Geneva a few years ago and saw a Ferrari dealership that required prospective buyers to already own two Ferraris and be contacted in order to purchase the new one. I have to think Toronto’s negotiating strategy for trading Halladay will be somewhat akin.
  4. The track record is uneven for older pitchers who change clubs after playing most of their career with one or two teams. For every Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens, who kicks ass and wins multiple Cy Young awards, there’s a Catfish Hunter or Jason Schmidt or Kevin Brown, who has a couple good seasons, if that, and then is done. While I’m not sure if this a trend or an isolated case-by-case thing, I would think it wiser to commit more money to scouting and drafting quality players than chasing after big ticket items like Halladay.

That being said, someone will be paying hand over fist for Halladay before the winter is out, probably even within the next few weeks, mark my words.

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Tug Hulett and 10 other great baseball names

The news concerning the trade of Tug Hulett the other day prompted two reactions for me:

1) Who the hell is Tug Hulett?

2) Why haven’t I ever heard of a player with such a cool name?

Tug Hulett sounds like the name of a boat in an old Disney cartoon, a small, happy little vessel earnestly moving through choppy seas. Even if he doesn’t amount to much as a player — and at this point, he has 13 career hits — he could have a long career ahead of him in children’s programming, if he so chooses.

But I digress.

Tug Hulett is just the latest great name in baseball, a sport that over the years has seen some colorful monikers (like Tug McGraw.) Today, I offer 10 of those best names:

1. Van Lingle Mungo: My all-time favorite baseball name belongs to the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants hurler of the 1930s and ’40s. Sports columnist Jim Murray wrote that Mungo’s name seemed like something that could be sung by a sailor in the rigging of a banana boat. It also sounds like a dance step from the ’40s or a physical ailment or a new wave band from the ’80s.

2. Oil Can Boyd: A close second, Boyd got his nickname, according to Wikipedia, from his beer-drinking days in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, where beer is referred to as “oil.” He wins points for also having been bat-shit crazy, not that I’d expect anyone named Oil Can to be sane. I definitely wouldn’t want to come up against him in a street fight. The best man at his wedding was probably named Buckshot.

3. Kent Hrbek: The highest-ranking position player on this list, the stout Minnesota Twins first baseman had a name better-suited for WrestleMania or a children’s fairytale: “We tried to storm the castle but couldn’t overcome the Kent Hrbek.” Fifty years ago, he would have had a washing machine named after him.

4. Aloysius Travers: The hapless one-time Detroit Tigers pitcher makes this list as much because of his history as his name. A seminary student signed to pitch one game in the midst of a strike in 1912, Travers gave up 24 runs, the most in major league history and never played again. His name connotes the image of a school boy being pummeled by street toughs. You just don’t meet too many people named Aloysius anymore.

5. Yogi Berra: The only player to have a cartoon character named after him. I think.

6. Boog Powell: The Baltimore Orioles slugger comes from the Kent Hrbek school of having a name better suited for a 1930s strike breaker or “Flintstones” character.

7. Grover Cleveland Alexander: With probably the most regal name ever for a player, Alexander was dubbed for the president at his time of birth, Grover Cleveland. Baseball fan that I am, I get confused sometimes and think we had a president named Grover Cleveland Alexander.

8. Fernando Valenzuela: Like Van Lingle Mungo, this is another name that rolls off the tongue and echoes to be repeated. Just hearing the name makes me think of the Los Angeles Dodgers hurler twisted into a corkscrew position, a wild look in his eyes.

9. Rabbit Maranville: This sounds more like the name of a slick sports car than a baseball Hall of Famer.

10. Dummy Taylor: What makes this name so great is that Taylor, a New York Giants pitcher around the turn of the century, was actually deaf. Back in the day, there used to be all kinds of names like this: Frenchy, Whitey, Nippy. In our politically correct era, we just don’t see names like this anymore.

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The glory of these times?

I don’t much care for modern baseball. I rarely watch games on television anymore, and I gave the recent World Series only passing consideration. It just didn’t interest me that much. I’d rather read a book.

I used to worship the San Francisco Giants. Their teams of the late ’80s and early ’90s probably were nothing that spectacular, but even just thinking of guys like Will Clark, Kevin Mitchell and Robby Thompson puts a smile on my face. What I wouldn’t give to relive a game at Candlestick Park.

I don’t feel the same about the current generation of players, even the current Giants. Granted, I check ESPN.com nearly every day during the season, to keep up on statistics. But I feel apathetic whenever I contemplate turning on a game. If I do put one on, I quickly lose interest and change the channel to some movie on TNT or Comedy Central that I’ve already seen a hundred times. When in doubt, Boyz n the Hood trounces the Braves and Phillies every time.

Perhaps it’s easier to be nostalgic and re-envision something, forgetting whatever about it is unseemly, dull, or just plain ordinary, rather than to love it and accept it for whatever it may be, warts and all. Or perhaps my perspective has simply changed with age. Jim Bouton, the author of Ball Four, grew up rooting for the Giants, when they were still in New York. He wrote in one of his books:

I loved the Giants. I loved Alvin Dark and Dusty Rhodes and Sal Maglie. Even now, thinking back, I can remember exactly how I felt about these men. There is still that same rush of good feeling when I think about them and what they meant to me… But I think there are two Sal Maglies, two Alvin Darks, two Dusty Rhodes… So I think it’s possible that you can view people as heroes and at the same time understand that they are people, too, imperfect, narrow sometimes, even not very good at what they do.

With that said, the current game still seems lacking. Past generations had Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays. Talented though Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday and Mark Teixeira may be there really is no comparison. Greatness is about more than just gaudy statistics. After all, Don Baylor on steroids probably could have hit 50 home runs in 1998.

I can think of only a few current players with the combination of class and talent to compare to past greats. They are:

  • Joe Mauer
  • Ichiro Suzuki
  • Tim Lincecum
  • Derek Jeter
  • Ken Griffey Jr.

Mauer reminds me of Ted Williams, Suzuki of George Sisler, and Lincecum of Lefty Grove. Jeter and Griffey make the list for putting up fine career numbers without, presumably, using steroids.

Beyond that, this era is a real crap shoot. Then again, it’s not much worse than anything else in the past 40 years. And maybe baseball’s always been this way and I’m just noticing.

Still, I long for bygone eras.

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Something I didn’t know about JFK

With the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination coming up on Sunday, I coincidentally learned something interesting about our late president.

Turns out he could have been a baseball man, instead.

In finishing The Boys of Summer yesterday, I came upon a passage late in the book that described how Kennedy’s father, Joseph, nearly purchased the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, after the death of one of its major stockholders, John Smith. Team owner Walter O’Malley told author Roger Kahn about how he’d confronted his fellow shareholder Branch Rickey after hearing rumors.

“I said to Rickey, ‘What’s going on?”‘

“‘Well, with John Smith dead, I feel it’s time to sell. I told Mr. Kennedy you might disagree, but if he acquired my stock and Mrs. Smith’s, he’d have control. He’s got this son, John, who is brilliant in politics but has physical problems. Mr. Kennedy thinks running the Dodgers could be the greatest outlet in the world for John.’

“It might have been Jack Kennedy, president of the Dodgers, but Joe rejected the deal when he found he’d face an unhappy minority stockholder in myself. He didn’t buy, but if he had, Jack Kennedy could be in this chair and alive today.”

I like a little revisionist history as much as the next guy. Here are some other things to ponder.

Dwight Eisenhower played semi-pro baseball, George H.W. Bush played collegiately, and there’s an old rumor that Fidel Castro tried out for the Washington Senators. That never happened, though Castro did play baseball. Meanwhile, George W. Bush thought strongly, back in the ’90s, about becoming commissioner of baseball. The former Texas Rangers owner chose a different path, of course, though in some alternate universe, he got his dream, and Bud Selig instead became president and still found a way to cancel the All Star game.

Ronald Reagan got his start in show business in the 1930s broadcasting sporting events over the radio. Games were broadcast from a studio back then, as opposed to a press box at a ballpark, and the radio men recreated the action from a ticker and were allowed a certain amount of creative license. Apparently, the ticker went down one time for a Chicago Cubs game, and Reagan killed seven minutes of air time making up a story about how some fan caught a foul ball.

No wonder he wrote his own speeches years later.

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Classic book review: The Boys of Summer

After more than a year, I finally finished The Boys of Summer this afternoon.  Written by Roger Kahn and first published in 1971, the book is part oral history about the Brooklyn Dodgers and part recollection by the author of covering the team as a young reporter in the early 1950s.  I’ve read many baseball books.  This numbers among the very best.

To be sure, it is not quite perfect.  The latter two-thirds of the book, where Kahn interviews thirteen former Dodgers is plodding at times, a he-said-this, then-he-did-that style of writing that would lull were the subject matter not so historically compelling.  The book is also unabashedly sentimental, by Kahn, a Brooklyn native and lifelong Dodger fan.  At times, it feels overwritten.

Taken on the whole, however, the work is astonishing.  Overwrought though the emotional appeal may sometimes be, it is powerful again and again throughout the book.  Kahn captures a quadriplegic Roy Campanella in tears remembering past glories, the funeral for Jackie Robinson’s oldest son, killed in an automobile accident at 24, and in an epilogue written years later, Pee Wee Reese wheelchair-bound, cancer-ridden and close to death.  Perhaps the most moving passage captures the death of Kahn’s father:

I drove down dark streets at reckless speed.  The sidewalk was a rotten place to die.  Pebbled cement scrapes a twitching face.  A man deserves privacy at the end, and anesthesia.  Surely my father had earned that for a gentle life.

The historical contribution is also undeniable.  Even if the writing were abominable, and it’s not, I would be interested to read about the codas for men like Robinson, Campanella and Gil Hodges.  Kahn’s level of detail is also meticulous.  One of my college writing professors said a good writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.  Kahn’s book is layered with dialogue and asides, material I struggle to capture.  It’s much easier to tell than to show.  Kahn does the latter, admirably.

There are a lot of baseball books and many fade into obscurity after a short time.  Kahn’s work endures, a rare sports entry in the canon of Western literature.

__________________

Before I end here, I wanted to add two points, not significant enough to figure into a review but worth noting nonetheless.

Early on, Kahn reveals a small tell, probably unremarkable to most readers but glaring to a past sportswriter like myself.  Kahn writes on page four, “Beyond undertaking a newspaper assignment, I believed I was joining a team.  At twenty four, I was becoming a Dodger.”  Going through journalism school, I learned objectivity.  I covered many teams, from prep to pros and I was never a member of them, saved for the few school teams I actually competed for.

Late sportswriter Jimmy Cannon put it better when interviewed for a book on sportswriters, No Cheering in the Press Box. Cannon said:

Most of the guys traveling with ball clubs are more publicists than reporters. A guy might be traveling with the Cincinnati Reds, though it could be any team, and he refers to the ball club as ‘we.’  I’ve seen sportswriters with World Series rings, and they wear them as though they had something to do with the winning of the World Series.  Maybe they’re entitled to them.  Maybe their biased cheerfulness helped the club.  I wouldn’t know.  I would not wear a World Series ring.

Kahn, to his credit, does little to suggest objectivity, noting in the epilogue, “I was neutral all right.  Neutral for Brooklyn.”

A more stinging critique of Kahn’s style comes from a different breed of writer, Jim Bouton.  Where Kahn wrote dignity and grace and heroism, Bouton captured players as ordinary louts, pill poppers and womanizers in Ball Four, his playing diary about the 1969 season.  In I’m Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally, the follow-up to his bestseller, Bouton derided Kahn:

Not long ago Roger Kahn, a writer who did not like Ball Four, wrote in Esquire about a player who was losing his skills and knew it. ‘It is something to cry about, being an athlete who does not die young,’ Kahn wrote.   And all I could think was, bullshit.  Only a man who never played the game could have written that line.  It’s fake, like the men who cry when they can no longer play baseball are fakes.

While I doubt Kahn didn’t legitimately believe what he was writing, Bouton may have a slight point about the value of experience.  Regardless, I appreciate both of their perspectives.

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The senior days for Ken Griffey Jr.

Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote about the twilight of Willie Mays’ career in a 1973 column, when the future Hall of Famer was hitting .211 for the New York Mets. Murray wrote:

We all thought Willie Mays would just get younger. He was one of those touched individuals for whom time seemed to run backward. He was one of those guys in this life you smiled just thinking about him. You might have hated New York, the Giants, the rest of the team, the manager, or the owner. But you couldn’t hate Willie Mays. It was like hating a kid in a baby carriage, or Skippy, or Charlie Chaplin in his tramp costume on the lam from the cops. Willie Mays was everybody’s pal when he was in uniform and you were in the seats with a beer and a hot dog. Willie was Mr. Feelgood. Other people got old. Willie stayed 20.

By 1973, however, Mays was 42 and long-past effective. In fact, the image of him falling down in the outfield in his baggy Mets uniform, as if kidnapped from an Old-Timers game has become symbolic of the once-great athlete whose time has passed.

We see it often. Michael Jordan appeared mortal his final season, coming off the bench in a Washington Wizards uniform that never looked quite right (granted, washed up for Jordan meant averaging 20 points a game instead of 30.)  More recently, Barry Bonds found himself mercifully out of work at 43, a felony indictment keeping him from hitting below .270 for some unfortunate club. Meanwhile, Brett Favre seems to be defying the odds, mocking them almost, as he compiles big numbers for the Minnesota Vikings this fall at 40, though he could hit the geriatric stage within a year or two if he keeps playing.

The latest legend ready for pasture may be Ken Griffey Jr. The Kid turns 40 this Saturday and if he has sense, he’ll make this next season his last.

Gone are the days where Griffey averaged north of 40 home runs and played crack defense in center field for the Seattle Mariners. Signed in a sentimental move to return to the Seattle last season, Griffey hit just .214, the worst designated hitter in baseball, by far and a weak point in a Mariners lineup that must advertise for .228 hitters (I’d like to see that Craig’s List post.) I half-expected Griffey to quit quietly after this season, but he signed another one-year deal recently. He probably will not be an everyday player next year, though he does win points with the fans and among his teammates in the locker room. He’d be wise to consider coaching.

I remember a different Griffey, one I cheered for. I have family in Seattle, and a few times during my childhood, I visited the Kingdome, a veritable playground for a 20-something Griffey.  The last time I saw Griffey play, in June of 1998, he cranked multiple doubles to deep right center. He left Seattle for the Cincinnati Reds after the following season, and the rest of his career has been an injury-riddled mess. That being said, he’s still among the best of his generation.

Looking at pictures of Griffey this past season, I saw a weary, old man, not the ebullient, 25-year-old photographed under a dog pile of teammates, celebrating Seattle’s win over the New York Yankees in the 1995 divisional playoffs.

Then again, few people can stay 20.

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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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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.