Baseball Stumper Makes the Memories Kick In

7/29/2014

LaRussa, Cox and Torre at Cooperstown

There is nothing quite like baseball coincidences. (I won’t call them trivia, because there is nothing trivial about them.)

Dixie Walker was a teammate of both Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.
Jimmie Reese was a teammate of the Babe and a coach for Reggie Jackson.
Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, 1826. (That’s baseball, isn’t it?)

They’ve been at this game so long, every day for seven months, that eras merge, people turn out to have overlapped, even if momentarily.

The other day, Shaun Clancy, the proprietor of Foley’s, the oxymoronic Irish Baseball pub on W. 33 St. in Manhattan, told my friend Curt Block that one major-league player had competed against, or was managed by, all six people inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame last Sunday -- Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre, the managers, and Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas, the players.

Shaun promised to tell us later this week when a bunch of old Hofstra athletes (and me) get together at Foley’s.

I was stumped and went to the Web, trying to match careers, but that is a job for a computer, not an addled baseball-fan mind. Then another friend sent me a link to a nice article by Tim Kurkjian on ESPN.com, revealing that the player was pitcher Steve Karsay, a major-leaguer from 1993 to 2006. That ended the suspense, but my memory was already in gear because of the three managers, whom I remember as players.

I knew Cox best because he showed up with the Yankees in 1968 as a minor-league third baseman with bad knees. He had spent a night or two in his car on the Fort Lauderdale beach, waiting for camp to open. He was hungry enough to squeeze 220 major-league games out of the gristle in his knees. Later Ralph Houk recommended him for coaching and minor-league managing jobs.

Cox never forgot that Vic Ziegel of the good old New York Post and Steve Jacobson of Newsday and I were friendly with him. When he became a major-league manager, pennants and ejections and all, he greeted us with a smile whenever we showed up. We knew him when.

I remember LaRussa as a marginal player with Charlie Finley’s A’s – an intense guy who didn’t play much, 132 games total in the majors, but often seemed to be looking around, paying attention.

Joe Torre came to our attention in New York as the chubby kid brother of Frank Torre, the smooth first baseman for the Milwaukee Braves. As Joe became a star catcher, the verbal Brooklyn side of him made him a pleasure to interview. I remember him enjoying the New York Italian pun about “Chicken Catcher Torre.” Guys like Sandy Koufax, Tommy Davis, Willie Randolph and the Torres never lost their inner Brooklyn. Joe batted .297 in 2209 games.

The three managers earned their chances, as baseball lifers. You never know – the player you spot in batting practice or skulking around the dugout just might wind up managing his way to the Hall of Fame in the next wave of baseball coincidences.

charlie vincent

7/29/2014 01:35:31 pm

George, it has always been my hope (though now, apparently, a failed one) that Alan Trammell would be a great manager because he is a great guy but in my judgment -- like the driver of the car who is cut off at the railroad crossing by the lowering warning arm -- just short of making it across to the other side as a player.

George Vecsey

7/29/2014 03:47:25 pm

Charlie, more than a few players in that category. Imagine how much fun it is to tell the very nice and respectful sons of Roger Maris and Gil Hodges that I thought their fathers fell just thismuch short of Hall of Fame. Maris had two of the best consecutive seasons I have ever seen a player have, and Hodges was a superb 1B for my team in Brooklyn. But...
Great to hear from a colleague like you...G

Mendel

7/29/2014 06:09:36 pm

Surely not trivial. What makes you think they are coincidences?

George Vecsey

7/30/2014 01:27:50 am

Good point. You mean that Jimmie Reese was meant to be able to compare the Babe with Mr. October from first-hand experiences.

Baseball is a great teacher that decades and generations happen fast. Mickey Mantle could not believe that his manager, Casey Stengel, had actually played the RF wall in Brooklyn's Ebbets Field as a player. To him, 35 years earlier was an eternity. GV

Mendel

7/30/2014 06:00:27 pm

Baseball does funny things to time. That such a slow game can impart "generations happen fast” is precisely its charm. My Ralph Kiner autographed baseball, which he signed when I knocked on the door of his booth in the mid-80s, is for me a precious representation of that lesson.

George Vecsey

7/31/2014 01:11:39 am

Right. Ralph Kiner played for Branch Rickey.

One of my favorite chains in baseball goes like this: Christy Mathewson of the NY Giants tutored young Dolph Luque from Cuba, who tutored Sal Maglie in the Mexican League. When Maglie came over the Brooklyn, he tutored young Don Drysdale, who had an impact on young LA pitchers.

GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Baseball Stumper Makes the Memories Kick In

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