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The fab four?

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

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

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

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

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

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Coach McGwire

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

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

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

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

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

–and–

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

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

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Thoughts on the playoffs

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

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

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

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

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Back from the Bermuda Triangle

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

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

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

More will follow soon, I promise.

–Graham Womack

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What am I, the Barry Zito of sales?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nancy Bartlett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hello Mr. Penny, you’re in good company

Yesterday brought some good news for my San Francisco Giants: Two-time All Star pitcher Brad Penny cleared waivers Monday and is signing with the team.   The 31-year-old Penny has struggled with injuries the past two years, but won 32 games between 2006-07 with the Los Angeles Dodgers.  As a Number 4 or 5 starter for the Giants, I think Penny could thrive.  At the very least, he should make an adequate fill-in for an injured Randy Johnson.

Penny is far from the first veteran pitcher rescued off the scrap heap by the Giants for the stretch run.  Off the top of my head, here are three experienced hurlers they’ve brought in July or later:

  • Steve Carlton, signed as a free agent, July 4, 1986: This one didn’t work out so great.  The Giants signed Carlton two weeks after his release from the Philadelphia Phillies, for whom he’d won 241 games the preceding 15 years.  The 40-year-old Carlton went a meager 1-3 for the Giants with a 5.10 ERA and was released in early August.
  • Rick Reuschel, acquired in a trade with the Pittsburgh Pirates, August 21, 1987: This, on the other hand, worked out brilliantly.  Reuschel went 5-3 in helping the Giants to the 1987 National League Championship Series, then went on to win 36 games the next two years and start the 1989 All-Star Game at age 40.
  • Danny Darwin, acquired in a trade with the Chicago White Sox, July 31, 1997: The bigger names in this trade were Wilson Alvarez and Roberto Hernandez and the Giants gave up a slew of prospects, including Keith Foulke and Bobby Howry to get them.  Nevertheless, the trade helped them to the ’97 divisional playoffs (where they promptly fell to the Florida Marlins.)  Darwin also started 25 games the following year for San Francisco at age 42.
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An argument in favor of the Reserve Clause

I played golf with my dad yesterday and baseball’s Reserve Clause came up in conversation. We had two random men in our foursome, and I got to talking with one of them about sports. He mentioned about a football player he knew getting $75,000 many years ago as a first-round pick with the Pittsburgh Steelers and that seeming like a lot, even though athletes get tons more these days. I related how Tampa Bay Rays reliever J.P. Howell turned down an $850,000 signing bonus as a first round pick for the Atlanta Braves out of high school. He instead took his mother’s suggestion to go to college and wound up being drafted by the Kansas City Royals a few years later. That’s what happens when you listen to your mom.

This guy and I got to talking about all the money in sports, and I mentioned about the Reserve Clause and how I think what remains of it in baseball is a good thing. Allow me to explain. For many years, there was no free agency in baseball. Players remained the exclusive property of their teams for perpetuity under a so-called Reserve Clause, unless they were traded, sold or released. The constitutionality of this was naturally challenged, and in the 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court stunningly granted organized baseball an exemption to anti-trust laws. It took until the Seventies for the Players Union to finally win the right for free agency and for the Reserve Clause to be abolished. Now, the rule is that a player remains the exclusive property of the team he signs with for six years.

What’s happened of course is that in the last 30 years, baseball wages have skyrocketed. In 2008, the average annual salary topped $3 million. Teams like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers have assumed operating budgets higher than many third-world nations, I would guess, in throwing millions at stars like Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramierez and Mark Teixeira. Meanwhile, small-market teams have become holding farms for up-and-coming players and the majority of owners have gotten screwed.

Interestingly, it’s the mid-level teams, the Texas Rangers, Baltimore Orioles, and Toronto Blue Jays of baseball, and yes, even my beloved San Francisco Giants who seem to fare the worst in baseball’s current economic landscape. They have money, but never quite enough for the A-Rods or Mannys of the sport, and they instead wind up giving millions to second-tier veterans like Randy Winn and Milton Bradley. These teams’ payrolls often top $100 million annually, but it’s rarely enough to push them far beyond the middle of the standings. Fifteen years ago, it would have been like being a major film studio and trying to push a blockbuster with Jean Claude Van-Damme instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, to save a few bucks. It’s not going to work. Everyone knows Timecop sucked.

What I find particularly interesting, though, is that in this current baseball climate the best teams remain home grown, maybe padded with experienced cast-offs, like the Philadelphia Phillies last year, the Colorado Rockies in 2007 and the Florida Marlins in 2003. Even the Yankees put together their strongest seasons back in the mid-Nineties when they adhered to this principle, bringing in under-the-radar veterans like Paul O’Neill to partner with Yankee farm products like Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams. I don’t get the Yankee philosophy now of signing the most expensive three or four free agents each year and then demanding they win World Series. It’s completely inane and I feel good that they fail every year. Granted, the Red Sox pay through the nose and have won two championships in the past five years. Still, they rose to prominence by assembling a crew of discarded vets. I knew who David Ortiz was six years ago, but I doubt many others did.

What remains of the Reserve Clause has also helped teams like the Oakland Athletics stay competitive. For all of the team’s struggles with rebuilding in recent years, A’s general manager Billy Beane is still highly adept at finding young talent, milking it for a few years at low rates ahead of free agency and then trading for more young talent. Teams like the A’s, Marlins and Rays survive by successfully shooting these margins. And with the minimum salary currently at $400,000, it’s not like the players are getting screwed too badly, either.

So what am I suggesting? I’m not saying baseball’s old system of having its players be slaves for life was necessarily good. But the current allowance for teams like the Yankees to consistently inflate wages seems to widen the gap between rich and poor teams and make the field of competition less fair. It seems to hurt the game, not help it.

Anything to strike a better balance is good, in my book.

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Top Five All-Time Baseball Giveaways

The news that the Toronto Blue Jays jettisoned right fielder Alex Rios in a waiver wire deal to the Chicago White Sox for – well – nothing, has prompted some thinking on my part.  In that the Blue Jays got, again, nothing for Rios, save for relief from his $60 million contract, I got to wondering about the other top giveaway trades in baseball history.

Behold:

5. The city of Montreal gives the Expos to the city of Washington D.C. D.C should have at least made Montreal take Marion Barry in return.

4. The Boston Red Sox sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Technically, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee got $120,000 when he sold Ruth to the Yankees in the winter of 1920, big money in those days.  But it went to finance a Broadway musical for Frazee and the Sox failed to win the World Series for 84 subsequent years.

Really though, this is a stupid transaction regardless of Ruth’s involvement, and it reinforces an important lesson Major League Baseball was forced to learn in the wake of the deal: Ballplayers should never be traded for musicals (or shitty ’80s sitcoms as the Expos realized after the disastrous Andre Dawson for “Who’s the Boss?” blockbuster.  Wait that never happened.)  From a simple business and marketing perspective, there’s rarely a good rate of return in these sorts of trades.  And in my book, even Matt Williams past his prime would be too high a price to pay for “Miss Saigon” or “Rent.”

3. Minor leaguer gets traded for 10 wood bats. This got a lot less funny when the player in question, John C. Odom, died of a drug overdose thereafter.

But on a lighter note…

2. George Costanza gets traded by George Steinbrenner for some fried chicken. Need I say more?

1. A Negro Leagues sports writer attempts to give Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1937.  And never hears back. Gotta love that racist old time baseball.  Imagine how much that Pirates squad would have cleaned up during World War II.