Baseball: Past and Present

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.

I was three years old the first time I got a pack of baseball cards, four when I went to my first game, five when I started Little League. I began to read about baseball history a few years later, and for most of my childhood, I idealized the game. I read its stories, saw my favorite players as icons and was mostly unaware of their flaws. I connect a lot of the innocence of my youth to how I felt about baseball, how it played into my relationships with friends and family, how those memories still make me feel today. It’s one reason I love the game.

I still love baseball, though somewhere between the 1994 strike, the subsequent steroid scandal, and my own coming of age, I began to see ballplayers and people in general as human. Today, I know that some of my favorite players from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Pete Rose all had their flaws as human beings. And that’s fine. Personally, I find these types of players easier to relate to.

I mention this all because a book debuted on March 8, Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil by Jerome Charyn. It’s only the latest work on the Hall of Famer (and not even the only one that came out on March 8, given Kostya Kennedy’s book on DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak) though Charyn takes a new tact, seeking to repair the tattered image of his hero.

Ostensibly, Charyn’s book is a response to Richard Ben Cramer’s 2000 biography, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life which was controversial in its portrayal of DiMaggio as a cold, calculating loner. Cramer wasn’t the first writer to offer a less-than flattering look back at a player who was lionized if not deified by the press during his career. Gay Talese broke rank with his landmark 1966 feature in Esquire magazine, capturing DiMaggio alone in San Francisco, mourning the death four years prior of ex-wife Marilyn Monroe, and telling a well-wisher and fan, “I’m not great. I’m just a man trying to get along.”

Then there’s David Halberstam’s classic 1989 book on the 1949 American League pennant race between the Yankees and Red Sox, Summer of ’49. Halberstam wrote in an author’s note of being rebuffed by DiMaggio for an interview, saying the only time he reached him on the phone, he “spoke to a very wary former center fielder.” Halberstam continued, “He said he would see me, and thereupon avoided all further entreaties. So be it; if there is a right under the First Amendment to do books such as this, there is also a right not to be interviewed. I’m sorry he didn’t see me; he still remains the most graceful athlete I saw in those impressionable years.”

Like Halberstam, Charyn portrays DiMaggio as a uniquely gifted player, though he does so with more poetic license. I’m not sure if all the literary devices work. The phrase idiot savant is used multiple times to describe DiMaggio the player, as if describing some Rain Main in pinstripes. Charyn also repeatedly refers to DiMaggio as Jolter, only clarifying on his final page that the nickname comes from a poem by famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, An Ode to the Jolter. It got a little grating. Still, Charyn writes gracefully enough to forgive the occasional awkward metaphor, and at 146 pages, the book can be read in a sitting. I found myself drawn in early on.

The book’s title refers to DiMaggio’s long period of mourning after Monroe’s death. Charyn writes of DiMaggio, who had roses sent to Monroe’s grave three times a week for 20 years, as the one person close to Monroe who never tried to use her. He also said DiMaggio was deeply impacted by her death, writing:

Did the Jolter really survive Marilyn Monroe? He lived another thirty-seven years with the trappings of success…. [but] the Big Guy was unconscious half the time, going through the motions without the least spark of fire. It’s no accident that Richard Ben Cramer in his biography of the Jolter skips over the years from 1963 to 1998 with the knowledge that nothing internal happened to the man; the mark of these years on him was as minimal as the diary he would keep, whether he visited the White House or was waiting in an airport lounge. It would get even worse as he went from memorabilia show to memorabilia show that was a peculiar kind of hell; he was a performer in his own living death and never even knew it. He’d been mourning Marilyn all along, in spite of his little flings and fixations on former Miss Americas. He missed Marilyn beyond reason. He couldn’t repair himself.

It’s a bold take, and I’m not sure I go for it. I don’t know if I see DiMaggio as a victim or a tragic figure, but I also don’t fault him for being something short of the image people expected of him or even one he cultivated for himself. Jim Bouton wrote in a follow-up to Ball Four, “Why can’t Mickey Mantle be a hero who has a bit too much to drink from time to time and cries into his glass that he will soon be dead, like his father and his uncle? Why do our heroes have to be so perfect and unflawed?”

They don’t.

Last week we revealed six major league baseball events likely to occur sometime during the 2011 season. With the passing of another week, and the regular season that much closer, I give you part two beginning where I left off last week.

7. Carl Crawford refuses to play in Boston home games.

He cites the following reasons: There is no roof on Fenway Park, there are more than 2,000 fans attending each and every game and this funny turf is making his uniform dirty and grass stained.  He attempts to renegotiate his contract to include provisions for dry cleaning and limiting home attendance to 2,000 for each home game. He also wants to be called Mannyland Crawford and insists on a port-o-potty with a full sized vanity and shower being installed in front of the now referred to as the Jolly Green Monster. He, as a way of making peace with management and fans, offers to buy one lucky fan a hot dog each game (does not include condiments).

8. In a sympathetic gesture spanning two major sports, LeBron James, after befriending Zack Greinke, breaks two of his ribs playing a pickup game of baseball.

Greinke takes to wearing a LeBron James/Cleveland Cavalier t-shirt on days he pitches and a Pittsburgh Steeler hat during Brewer home games.  A fan in Cleveland explains to Greinke the significance of wearing a Lebron James/Cavalier t-shirt but Greinke answers that he’s never even been to Miami, let alone played for the Dolphins.  He insists on continuing to wear his Steelers hat explaining that they came in second at the Super Bowl.  Lebron James insists that he is the best player in pickup baseball after which Willie Mays comes out of retirement to challenge him.

9. In a move that owner Tom Ricketts claims is meant to instill a fighting spirit in the Cubs, he fires Mike Quade after three innings of the first regular season game with the Cubs leading 5-0 and appoints Carlos Zambrano and Carlos Silva as co- managers.

Continual fighting in the dugout between both co-managers proves successful as opponents, instead of concentrating on hitting, pitching and fielding, stop to watch the action and allow the Cubs to score at will.  Baseball rules are changed for Cubs games, allowing both Zambrano and Silva to pitch at the same time.  Alphonso Soriano is moved to DH even though that position, in the National League, doesn’t officially exist.  He becomes the first DH to make three errors in one game and is traded to Houston where he becomes their No. 1 catcher.  Zambrano claims his 0-20 record is due to the distraction of the ivy at Wrigley field and insists that his outfield be allowed to stand on Waveland Ave. when he pitches. Silva demotes himself to Triple A but refuses to report.

10. Bud Selig accepts an offer to become Czar of Russia.

He immediately outlines his plan to return Russia to its days of fiefdom where the rich were incredibly so and the poor had nothing.  He cites his revenue sharing plan for major league baseball as an example of how rich ownerships can work together to own everything and plans a major drug testing initiative for local peasants and their families.  He plans to resurrect the statue of the founder of communism, John Lennon, and replaces the Russian national anthem with the founders number one hit, Help in B flat minor. He also insists that various government agencies hire more blacks and grants the FOX network exclusive rights to broadcast state executions.  He insists that everything is fine uttering the immortal words, “Let them eat $10 hot dogs.”

11. Roy Halladay goes 100-0 while the other members of the big four combine for a 0-62 record.

Halladay throws 90 complete games but is forced to pitch left handed during the months of August and September to save wear and tear on his right shoulder. Phillies manager Charlie Manuel reacts angrily to the media who compare him to Dusty Baker in his overuse of certain pitchers.  Manuel exclaims that there is no legitimate comparison as he is not from California.  Manuel goes on to explain that he saw no reason that Halladay couldn’t use both arms as that was what God gave him.  Phillies GM Ruben Amaro Jr. said that he was totally unaware of any situation and blamed Jimmy Rollins for not hitting 50 home runs even though Philadelphia won the National League East.

12. After surveying the new Marlins ballpark, owner Jeffery Loria insists that it be moved to downtown Montreal and that a significant portion of Marlins home games be played in Puerto Rico.

He also decides that beginning next season the Marlins will move their Spring Training site to Disneyland in Anaheim so as to be able to better compete with the Atlanta Braves. Andy Petite agrees to a contract with the Marlins but will pitch only on weekends and only for the New York Yankees.

Loria insists that he is now willing to spend money on the team and to prove it offers his players McDonalds food vouchers worth $5, charging players only $10 for each one. He also offers to supply his players with city bus passes for all away games at a cost of only $200,000 each.

Next week, the third and final part.

Editor’s note: Joe Guzzardi wrote this article, but I agree wholeheartedly. At least for me, the magic of baseball is in its history. Statistics tell only a part of the story.

_______________

I consider myself a middling baseball fan. Outside of the three teams I root for, the San Francisco Giants, the Oakland Athletics and my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates I really couldn’t tell you much about the 27 others. A possible exception would be the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox with which ESPN has a fawning, almost nauseating addiction to.

When pressed, I like to call myself a baseball historian who is much more engrossed in the sport’s rich past and its vital role in American culture than I am in the dry, day to day statistics. I never warmed up to Sabermetrics, and while acknowledging that it has a place, I candidly confess that I never made the slightest attempt to fathom it.

Accordingly, I was encouraged when baseball’s new official historian John Thorn recently admitted that he too finds the stories more compelling than the stats.

Think of it this way. If you and I are visiting on my front porch, which is more entertaining—a debate about linear weights as a measure of batting performance (I’m still not totally sure what that means) or my recounting the time I saw Mickey Mantle hit a 400 foot single? In a game against the Washington Senators, Mantle hit a ball off Chuck Stobbs so hard to center field that it hit the wall like a rocket that Whitey Herzog played it on the bounce before firing the ball to second baseman Pete Runnels.

This is not intended to disparage the creative and important analysis that many of my SABR colleagues have done and continue to do. But my interests lie elsewhere.

I’ll offer two reasons why I haven’t jumped on the Sabermetric bandwagon. First, my head doesn’t work that way. All those stats remind me of my college economics classes—you know, the Dismal Science.

But more importantly, for more than six decades I’ve watched a lot of baseball. I’ve seen teams that are long gone like those in the old Pacific Coast League or the Puerto Rican Winter League. And I’ve seen hundreds of Hall of Fame players who have passed.

You may not have seen them or possibly never heard of them. I like to think that my oral history may spark an interest in you to put the stats aside, at least for a while, to dig into the past.

I can imagine retelling my grandchildren my Mantle story. But I can’t for the life of me picture us sitting around the old hot stove while I reminisce about 2010,  the year Felix Hernandez won the Cy Young Award because he had the American League’s best Sabermetrics.

Many apologies for this week’s link post being late. Here is some stuff worth reading:

• The series Bill Miller and I are doing on good players for bad teams continues. I wrote the latest installment, on Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Philadelphia Phillies of the 1910s (link should be active at some point Saturday) and Bill wrote last week about Graig Nettles, who I never realized played a few early years with the Cleveland Indians.
• Speaking of Bill, he wrote an open letter to controversial, former New York Times writer and current blogger Murray Chass and got a response. The exchange is worth checking out.
• Something I’ve been meaning to mention: I’ve started doing a podcast. Fellow SABR member Paul Hirsch and I are doing a show each Sunday for Seamheads.com called “Baseball by the Bay.” The show runs 7-7:30 p.m. PST though it can be listened to anytime here. We mostly focus on the Giants and A’s, though we’ll be comparing all-time Bay Area lineups this week and discussing the pending demise of Cal’s baseball program. At some point, we’ll start having guests, too.
• Joe Posnanski writes about players who went through a season without an intentional walk. Who’d have thought it would include Roger Maris when he hit 61 home runs in 1961 or Alex Rodriguez?
• Interesting anecdote from a new Babe Ruth biography: Apparently the idea of a designated hitter was proposed in 1930, under the name Ten-Man Baseball, a full 43 years before Ron Blomberg became baseball’s first DH.
• Standing Tall: Slim Love’s Rise from Bar Room to Big Leagues. I’m pretty much always impressed at the caliber of writing and research from this blogger and his original, quirky, historical topics, speaking as someone who generally aims for that here.

What he did: In 1957, Ted Williams defied logic and baseball history up to his time. At 38, and nearing the end of his storied career, Williams almost had his finest season, hitting .388 with a slugging percentage of .731 and an OPS+ of 233. All three were American League bests, and Williams just missed his career highs from 1941 when he hit .406 with a slugging percentage of .735 and an OPS+ of 234. Williams used a heavier bat in 1957 than he’d wielded as a leaner, younger man and, whether for this or other reasons, he performed in stark contrast to other Hall of Famers. At 38, Babe Ruth was in decline. Hank Greenberg, Jimmie Foxx, and Joe DiMaggio were retired. Lou Gehrig was dead.

Ballplayers in general don’t peak or revitalize at so late an age, though it’s happened more in recent years, perhaps because of steroids. One need only look at Barry Bonds’ run from 2001 to 2004 when he hit 209 home runs with a .349 batting average and his four highest OPS+ scores. Rumors of Bonds’ chemical enhancement aside, I see at least a few parallels between him and Williams, what with their sometimes surly personalities, otherworldly talent, and unusual late career transformations from skinny young ballplayers to bulky sluggers. It makes me wonder how Williams might have fared at Bonds’ home in later seasons, AT&T Park.

Era he might have thrived in: We’re moving Williams to his native California in a time where he’d receive greater medical care, conditioning, and a ballpark seemingly built to let the left-hander pull home runs into the cove beyond the right field fence like no player besides Bonds. Williams would also get the chance to do something no one’s ever done– hit .400 just shy of age 40. Bonds may have been unreal in later seasons, but Williams wouldn’t be far off.

Why: Bonds probably has the edge in power, since he hit a record 73 of his 762 home runs in 2001, though he did it with a .328 batting average, below his career best clip the following year of .370. That’s excellent, of course, though because Williams hit .388 in 1957, a rather ordinary year for hitters, he’d do even better in the translation to 2001. The stat converter has Williams hitting .391 with 41 home runs and 89 RBI. His OPS of 1.269 would trail Bonds circa 2001 at 1.379, though differentiating those scores is like choosing between a Porsche and a Lamborghini.

San Francisco isn’t even the peak option for Williams in 2001. In Fenway Park in Boston, the hitters pinball machine Williams played in all his years in the majors, his 1957 season converts to a .412 batting average with 44 home runs and 101 RBI. Williams would have the opportunity to serve as a designated hitter in the modern American League, getting him out of left field where he didn’t fare much better than Bonds in later years. He’d also probably be an upgrade over Boston’s DH the majority of 2001, Manny Ramirez. His projected stats are certainly far better.

Still, for our purposes, I like San Francisco, and it would be a great challenge for Williams, enough of a fighter to serve in two wars and battle the Boston media in between.

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, The Meusel Brothers, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays

The Los Angeles that I grew up in during the 1950s was a place so beautiful that I can hardly believe it ever existed.

So few people lived in Los Angeles that it could easily be called a small town. The beaches were unspoiled and empty. Slightly inland, orange grove and eucalyptus trees were everywhere.

Today Los Angeles is ruined, killed by too many people and too much cement.

As beautiful as Los Angeles was back then when my family wanted to vacation in a truly magnificent spot, we went to San Diego.

I’ve always associated the Padres not with the current version but with the San Diego team that played in the old Pacific Coast League and challenged my beloved Hollywood Stars.

Ted Williams was the premier Padre.

In his contribution to a wonderful collection of essays published 1995 by the Journal of San Diego History, Williams shared his recollections about the early days of his Padres’ career from 1936-1937 before he was called up by the Boston Red Sox.

Williams as quoted in the article “This Was Paradise,”

I remember my first at-bat for the Padres. The manager, Frank Shellenback, sent me in to pinch hit and I took three strikes right down the middle. Didn’t even swing. Then he sent me in to pitch one night and I got hit like I was throwing batting practice. But that first time I pitched I also hit — and I hit a double, I pitched two innings, and the next time up I hit a double. And then I was in the lineup. I went over to Lefty O’Doul one day and I said, ‘What do I have to do to be a good hitter?’ He said, ‘Kid, don’t ever let anybody change you.

That 1937 team was a good composite team: young, old, former big league players, good leadership under Frank Shellenback (the nicest man I ever met in baseball). Why we didn’t win it I don’t know. There was no friction. Did we win the playoffs in ’37? (Editor’s note: Yes!)

Lane Field was an old wooden ballpark, nice park for a lefthanded hitter, and the ball carried pretty good. We played a lot of day games. I enjoyed  guys like Herm Pillette (the old pitcher), Howard Craghead, Jimmy Kerr (the catcher), George Myatt, Bobby Doerr . . .

There was no particular pressure on me playing in San Diego. I didn’t know what pressure was. I was nervous–not because I was born there, but because it was a whole new experience playing before crowds, professional baseball. San Diego was the nicest little town in the world. How the hell was I to know it was the nicest town in the world? I’d never been anyplace.

Readers interested in learning more about the Pacific Coast League should sign up for Richard Beverage’s Pacific Coast League Historical Society. Annual membership dues of $15 includes a subscription to the “Potpourri” newsletter. Write to Richard Beverage, PCLHS, 420 Robinson Circle, Placentia, CA 92870 or email him here.

1. Hot Dogs: Hot Dogs never taste as good as when you eat them at a ball park.

2. Girls: I have noticed that there often a surprising number of good looking girls at ball games.  By the middle innings of a game on a hot summer afternoon, they are often barefoot, scantily clad, and sweaty.  This is where sex and baseball come together, an unbeatable combination.

3. Camaraderie: Sitting in a pub with a ball game on, striking up a conversation with the guy sitting next to you.  You’ve never met before, but you form an instant bond over the fact that you both think Johnny Damon looks like a hairless monkey and throws like a girl.

4. Strategy: Sitting (I do too much sitting) along the third base line, or on my couch at home, explaining to my son why the shortstop is cheating over towards second base with a runner on first.  Or why the sacrifice bunt is for losers.

5. Babe Ruth: Only baseball could have produced the Sultan of Swat.  Hercules, P.T. Barnum and a scruffy, profane street kid all rolled up in one.  If he’d never actually existed, we would have had to pay Studs Terkel big bucks to invent him.

6. Countdown to Opening Day: My kids have the twelve days of Christmas (actually more like 45) to build up the anticipation of their favorite holiday.  My countdown to Opening Day begins as soon as the first snow hits the ground.  Then, as Rogers Hornsby said, I just stare out the window and wait for spring.

7. Baseball Cards: I don’t buy as many as I used to, but I still get the same rush of anticipation every time I open a new pack.  The contents of most packs are pretty standard and predictable (Derek Lowe, Astros Team Checklist, Joe Girardi manager card,) but once in a while, you find a real gem.

8. Baseball Movies: I wait for those hot July summer nights, crack open a beer, and watch The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, or whatever baseball movie I’m in the mood for. They’re all more than a little corny (and I don’t think the definitive baseball movie has yet been made) but they help top off the baseball rapture in my soul.

9. Box Scores: I love those little bastards.  They say so much by saying so little.  An entire game reduced to little rows of numbers about the size of a paragraph.  Halladay:  9 IP – 2 H – O ER – 0 BB – 7 K’s.  Just beautiful.

10. Playing Catch: Tossing the ball around, hitting fungoes, watching my kid rope a vicious line drive into the parking lot for a ground rule double.  This is as good as it gets for a middle-aged American male.