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Wood Bats vs. Aluminum Bats: A Business Metaphor

A thought occurred to me on the BART ride home today.

As part of my job, I cold-call businesses.  It’s tough work, but gratifying, and I generally like the challenge.  I’ve been struggling lately, though, letting my nerves affect me and having a hard time focusing.

However, I turned a corner today, which lead to an epiphany.

We generally call two types of leads.  As we sell an Internet-based service, a good chunk of our calls are simply to companies listed in Google Maps– 10-box leads, as we call them.  A smaller percentage of our leads are people enrolled in Pay-Per-Click campaigns.  At first, I only called PPC leads, and I hit my stride somewhere around my fourth week, setting up nine trials.  Since then, I’ve mostly called 10-box leads and my numbers have been drastically lower.  My boss clued in on this this morning and instructed me to start calling the PPC leads again.  Right away, my numbers jumped.

Here’s what I learned: Calling on 10-Box leads is like trying to hit a baseball with a wood bat, while calling a PPC lead is like hitting with a metal one.  Pros may be able to hit with the wood bats, but I’m still learning on this job.  I can hit farther with aluminum.

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The All Iconoclast Team: How They Did

In October 1992, Sports Illustrated published all-time Dream Teams. Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan were on the basketball team, alongside Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. Vince Lombardi coached the football team. I don’t remember too much about the hockey team (who really remembers hockey?), except it featured Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr. The baseball team had Dennis Eckersley and Mike Schmidt rubbing elbows with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth.

It was an interesting concept and it’s given me an idea. I imagined a team full of characters, those ballplayers who defied comparison and blazed their own trail. I call it the All Iconoclast Team. Included are legendary drunks, cheats and Casey Stengel.

At starting pitcher, we have Satchel Paige, who had his own rules for staying young, a good thing since he’d be at least 103 if he were still alive today (109 if some sources are to be believed.) Paige believed in avoiding fried foods, because they “angry up the blood” and also said, “Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society— the social ramble ain’t restful.”

Paige used to bring his infield in, say he would strike out the side and do it. Here he has help. His catcher is Mike “King” Kelly, who inspired a rule change after substituting himself in mid-play to catch a foul pop. At second and third, respectfully, are Billy Martin and Pete Rose, the team leaders in beers drank and bets placed. Rounding out the infield are Jackie Robinson at first base and Alex Rodriguez at shortstop. Robinson of course breaks the team’s color barrier, while Rodriguez is the first openly gay hitter. I’m kidding, of course. Paige already broke the color barrier.

Backing up the infield, we have outfielders Ruth, Cobb and Jose Canseco. Cobb and Robinson discover an immediate, mutual animosity toward one another, each vowing to kill the other before the season’s end. Meanwhile Ruth inquires about going drinking with Martin and offers to take care of any fried foods Paige can’t handle. For his part, Canseco shakes up spring training by giving his new manager Stengel steroids. “Jose Canseco is going to make you young,” the former Athletics slugger tells the aged Yankee skipper as he injects him in a locker room toilet stall.

The following is a time-line of the team’s only season:

April 1: The season begins. Much like 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the Iconoclasts begin on a tear, knocking out their opponent 18-1. The Tampa Bay Rays vow never to take part in such an exhibition again.

April 18: After beginning 8-0, the Iconoclasts lose their first game. Owner George Steinbrenner makes the first of many overtures about firing Stengel and promoting Billy Martin to player-manager.

April 19: Stengel inquires with Canseco about how he can get more steroids.

May 7: Back winning consistently, the Iconoclasts are having difficulty finding teams willing to face them. They destroy a Japanese All-Star squad and request to face the winner of the upcoming Little League World Series. Paige announces that when that day comes, he will call in his entire field and strike out every batter. The request goes unanswered.

May 18: Mike “King” Kelly is distraught after learning he’s been dead for 115 years.

May 29: It’s Free Bat Night at the Iconoclast’s ballpark (Veteran Stadium.) Tensions flare when Cobb goes into the stands after a heckler and receives a brutal miniature bat beating. Further trouble strikes later when Cobb learns that his $10,000 annual salary is less than 1/1000th of what Rodriguez earns.

June 4: Stengel confuses Rodriguez by attempting to speak Spanish, telling him, “Oye como va, Jose?”  Rodriguez just glares.

June 21: In a special match-up against the All Hapless Team, Rose re-enacts the thrilling conclusion to the 1970 All-Star Game by barreling, once more, into catcher Ray Fosse. “Ah nuts, we lose again,” Hapless manager Don Zimmer says.

July 16: Ruth films his first beer commercial, with Martin standing by. “They didn’t have this back in the Thirties,” an ecstatic Bambino tells Martin.

July 31: Amidst the madness that is his team, Robinson has quietly put together an outstanding, albeit infuriating season. Hitting .330, Robinson fumes when the trade deadline passes without any takers, even after Steinbrenner explains that All-Time squads rarely make deals.

August 14: Paige decides the social ramble is restful and that he can handle a small amount of fried foods.

September 6: With the season winding down, Canseco announces he will be penning a tell-all book. “You write about me, I’ll kill you,” Cobb tells him. “You kill him, I’ll kill you,” Robinson replies.

September 25: The final game over, Stengel sits in a hotel bar with a sportswriter, nursing a Scotch. “Let me tell you something,” Stengel intones. “I got a shortstop, kid from Miami doesn’t speak a word of English. My catcher is 142 years old. Babe Ruth cares more about Pabst Blue Ribbon commercials than this team. Can’t anyone here play this game? How the hell did I get addicted to steroids?”

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Jerry Weinstein: The Best Baseball Coach I Ever Knew

When I was a kid, growing up in Sacramento, I went a couple of summers to a baseball day camp hosted at Sacramento City College. Designed for elementary school-aged children and led by the City College players, the camp let us focus on fundamentals, filming our batting stances, having us hit against pitching machines, and then showing us fine documentaries on baseball history at lunch. I was never a very good player (I look like I have my feet inside two buckets in the black-and-white photos we got of our batting stances) but I have positive memories from the camps. I also got to meet City College’s legendary coach, Jerry Weinstein.

At the time, Weinstein was in the midst of a remarkable 23-season run as City College’s coach. He guided his teams to an 831-208 record, 16 conference championships and one national title over the course of his tenure. He also helped develop a veritable assembly line of future Major Leaguers, including four-time All Star outfielder Greg Vaughn and former Atlanta Braves shortstop Jeff Blauser. Weinstein capped his career in Sacramento with the national title, in 1998, then left to take a job working with catchers in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization.

Our paths crossed again in 2003. I was a sophomore at Cal Poly and had just started covering the school’s baseball team when I learned that Weinstein coached the squad’s catchers and pitchers (he didn’t last long with the Dodgers.) We talked extensively on a feature story I did about Garrett Olson, a true freshman who had just cracked the starting rotation for Cal Poly and now pitches for the Seattle Mariners. Weinstein didn’t remember me from the camps, not that I blame him, though we hit it off. I told him how I had worked at an ice cream store in our neighborhood in Sacramento, and we talked at length about Bill Conlin, a sportswriter who spent over half a century at the Sacramento Bee. Weinstein chided me once for scribbling notes during an interview, telling me Conlin never wrote anything down.

Weinstein became my preferred quote among the Mustang coaching staff, much more talkative certainly than head coach Larry Lee, who was a fine manager but may as well have been deaf-mute. I even later advised a fellow writer to seek out Weinstein rather than Lee for a quote. The writer later came back laughing, saying that he and Weinstein had talked at length about Jewish ballplayers before getting to their interview. His story turned out great if I remember correctly.

Weinstein and I have both since moved on from Cal Poly. I graduated in 2005 and Weinstein now coaches the Class A team for the Colorado Rockies, the Modesto Nuts. I saw a story a few years ago that when the Rockies signed former All Star catcher Javy Lopez, who was attempting a comeback at the time, they “encouraged Lopez to visit Jerry Weinstein in San Luis Obispo, Calif.” The story made me smile, even if Lopez’s comeback didn’t work out.

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A Ricky Romero story you haven’t heard

I’ve mentioned on here before that I saw current Toronto Blue Jays starter Ricky Romero pitch a couple times in college, when he was with Cal State Fullerton.  Here’s a story about him that I doubt too many people know.

I saw Romero pitch for the first time his freshman year six years ago, when visiting Fullerton faced Cal Poly, a Big West Conference rival.  A prep product from Los Angeles, Romero started off torridly that day, hurling first-pitch strikes to the initial ten-or-so batters he faced, throwing shut-out ball.  His fortunes changed around the forth inning when a Cal Poly batter leaned too closely into a pitch and took a pitch directly in the groin.  To make matters worse, he wasn’t wearing a protective cup.

The batter collapsed into a writhing fetal ball and had to leave the game.  He then spent 45 minutes in the locker room, before going to the hospital to deal with the excessive swelling that occurred.  He  later told me his doctor was a former Cal State Fullerton pitcher, ironically.  I had just started writing a column called “Golden Graham” for the Cal Poly student newspaper the Mustang Daily at the time, and the batter made sure I wrote a disclaimer for any ladies that he was fine.

I approached Romero after the game, while Fullerton was preparing to leave, and the baby-faced 18-year-old expressed genuine concern for the fallen batter.  It had been apparent Romero was affected on the mound, as well.  After throwing first-pitch strikes to those first ten hitters, Romero struggled with his control after felling the Cal Poly hitter.  Fullerton held on for the win, but the perennial College World Series contenders looked mortal that day.

Eventually, Romero became a top pitcher for Fullerton and was picked sixth overall in the 2005 Major League Baseball draft.  He stayed in the minors for a couple of years, earning criticism for Toronto’s brass who passed on Troy Tulowitzki, Jacoby Ellsbury and Matt Garza, among others, to make the pick.  However, Romero debuted this season for the Blue Jays and has done well.  He recently got a positive mention in Sports Illustrated and is currently 4-3 with a 3.59 ERA after nine starts.  Far as I know, he hasn’t hit any more guys in the balls.

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Baseball saves the day. Again.

I am now in Week 4 at my new job, continuing to cold call businesses to pitch my firm’s service.  I was on the phone yesterday with a spa owner in Eureka Springs, Arkansas when a thought occurred to me.

Arkansas has long been famous for its natural hot springs, and baseball teams used to flock there for spring training, along with mobsters like Al Capone.  Babe Ruth ended a holdout one winter while at the baths with sportswriter Dan Daniel.  Daniel recounted years later in the memoir, No Cheering in the Press Box, about how he helped broker the deal between Ruth and Yankees owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert.  It was pointed out to Ruth that he made more than the U.S. president at the time, Herbert Hoover. “What the hell has Hoover got to do with it?” Ruth reputedly quipped. “Besides, I had a better year than he did.”

Anyhow, I was on the phone yesterday with this spa owner, a woman named Nicole, when it occurred to me to ask if Ruth had ever frequented her business.  As I’ve mentioned here before, I have this uncanny tendency to connect everything to sports.  There was Rick Burleson, the architect I called a few weeks ago who has the same name as a former All-Star shortstop.  One of my clients also has the same surname of a former Sacramento Kings backup (though she’s no relation, I checked.)  As for the spa owner, her business is also located inside a hotel that’s been around since the 19th Century so it made sense that Ruth may have come through at one point.  She wasn’t sure, though.  I told her I would do a quick Google search.

This picture turned up and I sent it to Nicole.  She signed up for a trial account of my firm’s service this morning.

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Oh, you’re not that Rick Burleson?

I recently started a new day job in Berkeley, California.  Unfortunately, I can’t make all my money as a baseball blogger/historian.  Thus, I pay the bills doing sales work and have recently begun a position as an account executive for an Internet start-up in the East Bay.  In a given day, I’ll cold call upwards of 50-60 businesses, pitching review services, and I get to talk with some interesting characters.   Occasionally, they have names I recognize.

One of my quirks, dating back to childhood, is that I have an encyclopedic brain.  Some people probably use this to become ace scientists or attorneys.  I simply clean up every time I go to bar trivia, pulling out the names of hit movies and politicians like I was a walking Wikipedia.  My knowledge base unfortunately doesn’t extend to much that has practical use, though I like to put on my resume that I know most World Series winners and the names of all the U.S. presidents from the 20th century– backwards.  If I ever figure out how to make money off this, I’ll be set for life.

I bring this all up because I recently called on an architect named Rick Burleson.  Some may know that there was also once a baseball player named Rick Burleson, who played shortstop for the Boston Red Sox and California Angels in the 1970s and ’80s.  I brought this up in my initial call with the architect and he laughed, telling me had Burleson’s baseball card.  We set up a follow-up call for this morning and to prepare, I did some research on-line on Burleson the Ballplayer, learning he’d been a four-time All Star and had finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting in 1974.  He even placed 13th in Most Valuable Player voting in 1975, when he hit only .252 at the plate.  His nickname was Rooster.

Unfortunately, Burleson the Architect didn’t have much time to talk when I reach him today.  I’ll be sure to tell him about how he once got traded for Carney Lansford when I next call.

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A bar I used to drink in

When I was a kid, growing up in Sacramento, I used to often visit a baseball card shop downtown.  It was two doors over from a building whose sign was a large, glowing baseball with the words, “Joe Marty’s” emblazoned over it.  I used to wonder what the place was.  As a baseball card junkie (I had a few thousand cards at one point), the ball caught my eye and as a kid, I once went in, thinking it maybe was a card shop.  The swaying drunks I encountered let me know otherwise.  Joe Marty’s was a bar.

Eventually, I learned Joe Marty had, in fact, been a real person, a ballplayer at that.  My senior year of high school, I did my final project on an old Pacific Coast League team that had played in my hometown, the Sacramento Solons.  As it turned out, Marty played for and managed the Solons back in the 1940s and ’50s.  Before that, he played in the major leagues, appearing with the Chicago Cubs in the 1938 World Series.  Injuries robbed him of a long big league career, though as a young man, he was once considered a better prospect than Joe DiMaggio.  The two came up together in the PCL with the San Francisco Seals and while DiMaggio missed the 1934 season with a career-threatening injury, Marty went to the Cubs for a large price.  In the end, though, as one old-timer told me, Marty returned to Sacramento, his hometown, and became his bar’s own best customer.  He died in 1984 at the age of 71.

Eventually, I drank in Joe Marty’s bar once or twice.  It had the coolest old black-and-white photos of famous players.  Sadly, fire gutted the place in 2005.  While the photos were reportedly saved from destruction, the bar hasn’t been open since.

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Before they were famous: Garrett Olson

I started covering baseball my sophomore year of college at Cal Poly and the first series I attended, a freshman southpaw making his debut drew my attention.  Pitching long relief against Loyola Marymount, the hurler was a bright spot in an otherwise forgettable game.  Before long, he earned a spot in the starting rotation and eventually, he became a compensatory first-round major league draft pick following his junior season.

The pitcher’s name?  Garrett Olson.

Now don’t get me wrong, my alma mater is no USC or LSU, producing assembly lines of pro athletes.  But every so often, Cal Poly has sent someone to the pros, from former All Star baseball players Ozzie Smith and Mike Krukow to current Philadelphia Eagles starting linebacker Chris Gocong.   Olson is one of the more recent Cal Poly alums to reach the ranks.

He’s no All Star yet, already on his third team in three years, having gone from the Baltimore Orioles to the Chicago Cubs (for whom he never played) to the Seattle Mariners.  Still, he’s showing signs of improvement.  Olson’s earned run average has gone from a “Horrific, don’t tell anyone” 7.79 in his rookie year to a “We’ll just keep this between you and me” 6.65 last season to an “Almost there, buddy” 4.68 in the current campaign.  He started the season in Triple-A Tacoma but has forged his way into the Mariners’ starting rotation, going five innings against the Angels in a loss on Sunday (he got lit up.)  I hope he stays.

My vested interest is that I knew Olson before he was famous.  Besides covering him in the home series against LMU, I wrote a feature on Olson later that year.  He struck me as a nice, shy kid as we sat outside his red brick engineering dorm, talking about how he’d trained with a former pro pitcher growing up in Fresno.  I spoke to his catcher and one of his coaches, who both raved about him.  “He’s the same if he surrenders a three-run bomb or strikes out the side,” the catcher told me in essence.  The coach likened Olson, with his pinpoint control, to another major league pitcher he’d coached in college, former Orioles pitcher Matt Riley.

Early on, talk like this is cheap.  Every athlete seems to think they’re a solid prospect and their agents are even worse bullshitters.  But Olson legitimized the hype, at least by the end of his time at Cal Poly.  His final season, I watched him against visiting top dog Cal State Fullerton, dueling with another potential first round pick that year, Ricky Romero, who now pitches for the Toronto Blue Jays.  Former major leaguers Carney Lansford and Robin Ventura were both onhand at Baggett Stadium that night and both gave me their approval about the pitchers.

Olson still has a long way to go before he’s entrenched as a major leaguer.  I’ll be watching, though.

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Ballplayers I have interviewed

I majored in journalism in college at Cal Poly, with an unofficial focus on sportswriting, and between my time on the campus paper and freelancing and interning for various publications, I got to talk to some pretty cool people. The following are baseball players I have interviewed:

Ozzie Smith: My first big interview, done my sophomore year at Cal Poly. Smith gave the morning and afternoon commencement speeches at graduation that year, as an alum of the university. I met Smith the day before graduation, when a statue of him was unveiled at the baseball field. I had researched Smith in the preceding weeks and learned he had mentioned his Cal Poly coach, Berdy Harr, in his Hall of Fame induction speech. As Harr died in 1987, I rhetorically asked Smith who he would have if he could have anyone at the statue ceremony. He almost teared up answering Harr. The following day, he gave two lovely commencement addresses and the outgoing student body president did a back flip in his honor.

Dom DiMaggio: I’ve recounted the story of this interview before, but to recap, I got to interview the Boston Red Sox great at the start of my senior year of college.

Nick Swisher: I interned for the Davis Enterprise in the summer of 2004 and part of my duties included covering the Triple A team for the Oakland Athletics, the Sacramento River Cats. Their best player that year was a jovial outfielder from West Virginia on the fast track to the majors, Swisher. I don’t know if I ever actually used a Swisher quote in print but I talked to him at least once or twice and the guy was pretty funny, always quick with a lighthearted quip.

Hideo Nomo: Another guy I interviewed for the Enterprise, Nomo came to Sacramento toward the end of his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers for an injury rehab start. Nomo only went a couple innings and needed an interpreter afterward to talk to reporters. He didn’t have much to say even in Japanese and the most interesting thing about this interview was the gaggle of Japanese media that was on-hand exclusively for Nomo and departed right after he was done.

Rollie Fingers: I also freelanced for the Enterprise in 2005 and got to interview the former A’s closer that summer, after he made a promotional appearance. I appreciate him giving me time and his handlebar moustache was cool, but Fingers seemed somewhat aloof, saying he had never heard of Huston Street who had just broken one of his records.

Jose Canseco: My most recent professional clip, I interviewed Canseco in April 2008, when he came to Oakland for a booksigning. I was worried I’d get blown off by the former Bash Brother, who has come across as something of a jerk over the years, but Canseco was surprisingly polite to me, answering all my questions (though he did mention in jest that I could take a bullet for him.) With that said, I asked a bunch of softball questions and wrote a pedestrian story. Thereafter, I kept reading shit about Canseco elsewhere that I’d missed: He was writing a book on cloning; his house was getting foreclosed; he was going to take part in a mixed martial arts fight; he thought he was addicted to steroids; he regretted writing his tell-all bestseller, Juiced. This was a good learning experience, I suppose. On a side note, Canseco is freaking huge in person.

(UPDATE: I remembered a couple more of these.)

Willie McGee: Technically, I didn’t interview McGee, but it’s worth a mention anyway.  The uncle, by marriage, of a former Cal Poly point guard named Kameron Gray, the St. Louis Cardinal great showed up at a Cal Poly game my junior year of college.  McGee didn’t agree to my interview request, saying something to the effect that he was just there for his nephew.  He had the droopiest eyes.

Carney Lansford/Robin Ventura: I group these guys together because I interviewed them at the same Cal Poly-Cal State Fullerton baseball game my senior year of college.  Lansford was at the game because his son Josh was playing third base for Cal Poly at the time.  In Ventura’s case, he grew up in the area, attending Righetti High in Arroyo Grande.  Both players graciously let me interview them during the game, though I had to fight back the urge not to ask Ventura about his infamous 1993 fight with Nolan Ryan.

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The Aloysius Travers of wiffle ball

On May 15, 1912, Ty Cobb went into the stands in New York after a crippled heckler and set up for the one of the more bizarre games in major league history.

As recounted in one of my favorite books, Ken Burns’ Baseball, the Detroit Tigers immortal earned a suspension from organized ball after going into the stands for Claude Lueker, who had taunted Cobb as a “half [racial epithet].” Georgia-native Cobb was a legendary racist, with longtime baseball writer Fred Lieb speculating in his autobiography Baseball As I Have Known It that the Tigers great moonlighted as a Ku Klux Klan member (Lieb also wrote that Rogers Hornsby, Gabby Street and Tris Speaker told him they were members.) A disabled newspaper reporter, Lueker commonly berated Cobb at games, but when he shouted the racial epithet, in the third inning of a Highlanders-Tigers game, Cobb had enough. Page 109 of Baseball captured what ensued:

Cobb vaulted the railing, knocked down his tormentor, and began stomping him with his spikes. When someone shouted that the man was helpless because he had just one hand, Cobb answered, “I don’t care if he doesn’t have any feet,” and kept kicking him until a park policeman pulled him away.

(For his part, Lueker may have gotten off light– toward the end of his life, Cobb reportedly told biographer Al Stump that he killed a would-be mugger in the street that same season.)

Following the assault on Lueker, American League President Ban Johnson suspended Cobb without a hearing. However, the rest of the Tigers sympathized with Cobb because of the nature of Lueker’s taunt, given that it was 1912, and what followed was the first player’s strike since 1890. Detroit management scrambled to fill a roster to avoid a forfeit for its May 18 game. According to the 20th Century Baseball Chronicle, among those recruited were amateur players, former major leaguers and even some fans.

For a pitcher, Detroit turned to a seminary student named Aloysius Travers, who would go down in the record books. Travers set major league marks that still stand for runs and hits allowed as the Tigers lost 24-2 to the Philadelphia Athletics. Subsequently, Johnson reinstated everyone, including Cobb, and just like Moonlight Graham in “Field of Dreams,” Travers’ career ended after one game.

So why do I bring this all up? This past weekend, I got to be Aloysius Travers.

One of my good friends is getting married in June and for the bachelor party, we went camping this weekend. I suppose a lot of bachelor parties involve strippers, gambling and drunken debauchery. We played sports. On Saturday, my friend’s best man organized a day of games that began with soccer, kickball, and ultimate frisbee. We started around 10 a.m. and by 3 p.m. everyone was pretty beat, including yours truly. Thankfully, by this point, we were onto our final game, wiffle ball, and because we had an odd number of players, I volunteered to serve as all-time pitcher.

When I played Little League, one of my dreams besides hitting a home run was to pitch. I got an idea this weekend of why that dream never came to pass. Over the course of seven innings, I probably allowed 20 runs between both teams. In vain, I experimented with several different wind ups, debuting the wiffle ball equivalents of Juan Marichal (kick windup), Hideo Nomo (back to the mound) and Dan Quisenberry (submarine), among others, to no avail.

My dad used to do a great job of this kind of pantomime in epic, front driveway wiffle ball games we had when I was a kid. He had a whole lineup of players he impersonated, including the sluggers Mail Murphy and Mickey Mammoth, the all-purpose spray hitter Tito Fuentes, the soft-tossing pitcher MacGregor and my nemesis, the flame-throwing hurler Nelson (for my part, I came up with Silly Mays.)  I often whiffed against Nelson’s overpowering fastball, though my dad was sometimes merciful and kept his star pitcher out of games with the excuse he was in jail.

I wasn’t nearly as menacing this weekend, and my friends teed off on just about everything. In fact, my more elaborate offerings seemed to be belted deeper into the outfield. I honestly didn’t know wiffle balls could go as far as some went. Granted I struck out a few guys, including the groom-to-be (which is kind of messed up, come to think of it.) Still, the next time we play ball, I reckon I’ll be back in the outfield where I spent the bulk of my Little League career.

Either that or, just like Travers, it’s off to the seminary for me. I’m just glad none of my friends chose to impersonate Ty Cobb.