Ed Charles played only 279 games for the Mets but he touched New Yorkers – really, everybody who met him – with his humanity. This was apparent on Monday at a farewell celebration of Charles in Queens, his adopted home borough. People told stories about him, and I kept thinking of all the ways, Zelig-like, he popped back into my life. His 1969 Miracle Mets teammate Art Shamsky told how he and Charles and Catfish Hunter and Jack Aker were making an appearance at a boy’s camp “up near Canada somewhere” and how Ed Charles drove – “one mile below the speed limit, always. Ed never went fast. That’s why they called him The Glider.” When they finally got there, the players elected Ed to speak first to the campers. After 45 poignant minutes, Shamsky said they had learned never to let that charismatic man speak first. Everybody smiled when they talked about Charles, who died last Thursday at 84. His long-time companion, Lavonnie Brinkley, and Ed’s daughter-in-law, Tomika Charles, gave gracious talks, and his son, Edwin Douglas Charles, Jr., made us smile with his tale of playing pool with his dad, and how the old third baseman never let up, in any game. A retired city police officer alluded to Ed’s decade as a city social worker with PINS – People in Need of Supervision – and how Ed reached them. People talked about barbecues and ball games and fantasy camps with Ed, how it was always fun. As sports friends and real-life friends at the funeral home talked about Ed’s long and accomplished life, I thought about how we connected over the years, in the tricky dance between reporter and subject. ---The first time was between games of a day-nighter in Kansas City, on my first long road trip covering the Yankees for Newsday, August of 1962. Old New York reporters were schmoozing in the office of Hank Bauer, the jut-jawed ex-Yankee and ex-Marine with two Purple Hearts from Okinawa. Ed Charles, a 29-year-old rookie – kept in the minors because of race and bad luck – came to consult the manager, maybe about whether he was good to go in the second game. I watched Bauer’s face, once described as resembling a clenched fist, softening into a smile. “Bauer likes this guy,” I thought to myself. “He respects him.” (I looked it up: Ed went 7-for-12 with a homer in that four-game series.) --- We met in 1967 when the Mets brought him in to replace Ken Boyer at third base. During batting practice in the Houston Astrodome, the first indoor ball park, Ed summoned me onto the field, behind third base, shielding me with his glove and his athletic reflexes. “Look at this,” he said, pointing at the erratic hops on the rock-hard "turf" -- one low, one high, a torment for anybody guarding the hot corner. I must have stayed beside him for 15 minutes and nobody ran me off. I have never been on a field during practice since. That was Ed Charles. Easy does it. --- We had a reporter-athlete friendship, but there are always gradations. During a weekend series in glorious mid-summer Montreal in 1969, somehow there were three VIP tickets for a Joan Baez concert. I went to a brasserie with Joe Gergen of Newsday and Ed Charles and then we saw the concert, with Baez singing about love, and the Vietnam War. --- The Mets won the World Series and Ed went into orbit near the mound, but then he was released, his career over, with a promotions job with the Mets gone over a $5,000 dispute in moving expenses. But I was walking near Tin Pan Alley in midtown in 1970 and there was Ed, working for Buddah (correct spelling for that company) Records. He was destined for Big Town. He later had some ups and downs in business but patched things up with the Mets and settled into his groove as poet/Met icon. ---When Tommie Agee died suddenly, Ed was working at the Mets’ fantasy camp, and he took calls from reporters to talk about his friend. Ed Charles, as this New Yorker would put it, was a mensch. --- In 2012, the 50th anniversary of the Mets, Hofstra University recruited Ed to give a keynote talk on his poetry and his deep bond with the Mets. I was asked by my alma mater to introduce him, and I suggested to Ed that I could help him segue into his poems. He smiled at me the same way he had calmed down Rocky Swoboda and all the other twitchy Mets kids back in the day. “I got this, big guy,” he told me – and he did. --- Last time I saw him, a few months ago, I visited his apartment in East Elmhurst, Queens. Lavonnie was there, and I brought some of that good deli from Mama’s in nearby Corona, plus enough cannoli to last a few days. Ed was inhaling oxygen confined to quarters. I saw sadness and acceptance, He let me know: he knew the deal.
On Monday, The Glider had his last New York moment. There will be a funeral in Kansas City on Saturday and he will be buried, as a military veteran, at the national cemetery in Leavenworth, Kans. The funeral home Monday was a few blocks from the first home owned by Jackie and Rachel Robinson in 1949. The first Robinson home, on 177 St. in the upscale black neighborhood of Addisleigh Park, has been declared a New York landmark, as written up on the StreetEasy real-estate site (by none other than Laura Vecsey, a sports and political columnist.) Ed Charles often talked about taking inspiration from sighting Jackie Robinson as a boy in Florida; the proximity of the funeral home and Robinson home was a sweet coincidence, the family said. The karma was unmistakable. Like Rachel and Jackie Robinson, Ed Charles encountered Jim Crow prejudice, but came to New York and won a World Series, and left a great legacy of talent and character. (The Charles family has requested that any donations go to worthy causes like: The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City or the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York) Big Al passed last Sunday morning. What that means – what I think that means – is that I will not be getting any more emails out of the blue, like: “Just asking. How good a clutch hitter was Yogelah, anyway? Ask your friend Newk.” This was a very personal barb, aimed not just at me but at the admirable Don Newcombe, still working for the Dodgers out in LA, who got creamed by Yogi Berra for two – count ‘em, two – two-run homers in the seventh game of the 1956 World Series. Oh, yes, Big Al remembered. And made sure to remind me. Big Al was a loving member of his own family, but his special charm was getting on a point and pushing it. This made him a great lawyer for a major insurance company, according to Joseph LoParrino, for whom Al was mentor and friend. “Al and I debated every major sports and news story since 1999 and since email was invented,” LoParrino wrote to me. “When the Tiger Woods scandal broke - my phone buzzed. His commentary made you fall over laughing. I could press his buttons in any category.” Big Al was a master in button-pushing. My first contact with him was via his company envelopes and company stationery, before the advent of emails. Big Al would scribble – penmanship obviously not his forte in the public schools of East Queens – lengthy screeds about how I had insulted the current Yankees or, much much worse, The Mick. Al – who was a decade younger than me – thought part of the problem was that I had attended Jamaica High in the 50’s whereas he had attended rival Van Buren High in the 60’s. (He couldn’t blame college, since we both attended Hofstra as undergraduates.) Al let me know, in six pages of briefs, that he knew more about sports than I did because he had played basketball and baseball for the demanding Marv Kessler at Van Buren. I loved his descriptions of Kessler, vilifying him in Queens billingsgate, for sins committed in games or practices. (Many years later, Kessler praised Big Al as player and mensch; Al felt that praise was a tad late.) Every journalist would be thrilled to have a critic like Big Al. We became mail pals, bonding over the long-lost Charney’s deli at 188th and Union Turnpike, and zaftig Queens girls, and Alley Pond Park, and the way the old Knicks played, and really what else is there? Al became my Yankee Everyman, a stand-in for all of them. What he felt, they all felt. Eventually we met for a few dinners at the old Palm on the west side of Second Avenue. Al would deride me for ordering broiled fish and salad rather than the double primo beef and potatoes. Sissy. Weenie. And other Marv Kessler terms. Sometimes he would order a full meal to bring home to his mother who lived in New Jersey. He was such a Palm regular that his caricature was on the wall of valued customers, celebrities or just people who liked to eat beef. (Alas, that caricature seems to have been lost in the move across Second Ave.) By then, Al was no longer the rail of a forward that Marv Kessler had berated back in Queens Village. He was Big Al, Manhattan bachelor, Eastside Al on one email handle. We would talk politics, and he would tell me tales about his service veteran/fireman/tradesman/paper hanger father who gave up his love of the Brooklyn Dodgers for his Yankee-fan wife, Ruth, who had seen Gehrig play. Al was proud to tell me how his mother loved Andy Pettitte more than she loved him. He ascribed it to Pettitte’s schnozz but knew it was about Andy’s gentleness. With no context whatsoever, Al dropped little e-bombs on me about or how Casey Stengel stuck with lefty Bob Kuzava against Jackie Robinson in the seventh game of 1952 and how Billy Martin raced across the windy, sunny infield to catch the popup. Always there was Yogelah, golfing homers off his shoetops, an endless loop of homers off poor Newk (one of the great people I have met in baseball.) Al went silent one year, and I worried, so I sent a letter to his office, and somebody told me he was out on sick leave. When his mom passed in 2009 he took over her house in New Jersey and lived near his sister and her family -- and raved to his friends at work about the joys of the Jersey suburbs. Via the email, he never stopped taunting me, or raving about the Yankees and in particular The Mick. (He loved Sandy Koufax, too.) One time he spoke for all New York fans who flocked to the ball parks on opening day over the decades: streeteasy.com/blog/baseballs-opening-day-nycs-boroughs-influenced-its-pro-teams/ Recently I sent an email: “Al, where are you?” His sister, Roberta Taxerman Smith, emailed me Monday morning saying Big Al had passed Sunday at 67 and the funeral would be held Tuesday in New Jersey. His paid obit was in the Times and on legacy.com: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=alan-taxerman&pid=188012820 I smiled when I noted that Big Al passed in the Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck. He was a loyal Jew, and a most ecumenical dude, as many of us were in Queens. He and I exchanged greetings at Rosh Hashanah and Christmas and the first day of pitchers and catchers and other holy days. He knew I had grown up with mostly Jewish friends and he called me “landsman.” When I found out, via DNA testing, that I am 47 percent Jewish, via my father, who was adopted, Big Al's reaction was: I told you so. Then again, that was often his reaction. Roberta Taxerman Smith told me Al believed, to the end, that the docs were going to take care of him and he never complained. He had saved his complaints for Joe Torre’s strategies, and we argued over that, too. Here’s what I really hate about losing Big Al: he I were both looking forward to seeing Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton in the same lineup, the same pinstripes. Murderer’s Row, 2018. If there is justice, on Opening Day they go back-to-back. Maybe Big Al will send me an e-mail. Need a baseball fix? Here’s one, right in the heart of Manhattan on Jan. 27 – a day-long festival of the summer sport, from SABR, the baseball research organization. The speakers include many experts in baseball and/or research, including a librarian, a major-league umpire, a scout who played for the Philadelphia A's in 1953, and an outfielder who helped win the 1969 World Series. Another speaker will be Tyler Kepner of the New York Times, who has been writing (excellently) about baseball since he was, I think, 3 years old. Speaking of precocity, if you know a youthful baseball fan who follows all the trade rumors and knows the new analytics like WAR (I have no clue what that is, but I hear it all the time), this conference might make the young savant happy on a Saturday in January. I spoke at this conference five years or so ago, and one of the highlights for me was a young fan who asked a good question and seemed to know just as much as the predominant geezers who had witnessed Carl Furillo and Monte Irvin and Whitey Ford in this city. (The rate for “students” is $20 as opposed to the rate of $35, still reasonable.) Sometimes a young pheenom of a fan actually grows up to be Tyler Kepner. I witnessed that not long ago when a kid in Philadelphia started putting out an occasional baseball magazine, with features by him, drawings by him, layouts by him, headlines by him, circulation by him, marketing by him. The occasional journal was Phillie-centric, and it was charming. The very same Tyler Kepner is now a great baseball writer for The Times, old enough to have four children. Back in the day, Tyler produced his baseball magazine irregularly, to allow him to honor other commitments, like kindergarten. The late and lamented Robert McG Thomas, Jr., of the NYT wrote a feature about him in 1989: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/13/sports/sports-world-specials-baseball-pitcher-outfielder-publisher.html. Nowadays, in the time of the Web, when sportswriters are lashed to the 24-hour hamster wheel, Tyler keeps typing away, brilliantly. I recently heard how at the seventh game of the 2016 World Series he wrote an early column and then late in the game wrote a new column on Rajai Davis when it appeared Davis’s homer would win won the Series. However, the Davis column never made the paper or the Web because, well, the Cubs won while Tyler was typing. So he started all over again, and then woke up the next morning and fed a few more columns to the beast – five columns within 18 hours, by the office's count. The program for the SABR event does not specify Tyler’s subject on Jan. 27th but notes that he is currently writing a book. Oddly enough, about baseball. The program will take place Jan. 27, 2018, from 10 AM to 3 PM at the New York Public Library, at 42nd St. and Fifth Avenue (you know, the one with the lions.) It will be held in the Celeste Auditorium, lower level of the South Court, of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The event is officially the New York City Casey Stengel Chapter’s annual meeting, as part of the Society for American Baseball Research. The participants, recruited and moderated by Ernestine Miller, are: Virginia Bartow, the Senior Rare Book Cataloger in the Special Collections at the New York Public Library, whose illustrated presentation includes photos, graphs, trade cards, newspaper features and other memorabilia of baseball in New York. Ed Randall, moderator of a panel on: “Standouts of the Game”-- author and on-air personality for WFAN, Sirius and ESPN Phil Cuzzi, Major League umpire who has worked for 22 years in 2,428 games including three MLB no-hitters. Tom Giordano, age 92, long-time scout and official who scouted Cal Ripken, Jr., and in 1953 played 11 games for the 1953 Philadelphia Athletics under manager Jimmy Dykes. Art Shamsky, who platooned with Ron Swoboda on the 1969 Miracle Mets, and remains the only player in MLB history to hit three home runs in a game in which he was not in the starting lineup. Jon Springer, SABR research presentation on Edward "The Only" Nolan, the star pitcher of the 1884 Quicksteps, a team that played a role in the first battle of the Reserve Clause war, the establishment of post-season play, and the evolution of playing rules and equipment. Nolan was recognized for his unique pitches as well as his notorious behavior which led to fines, suspensions, being kicked off a team, and eventually, his being blacklisted from the league. (I have never heard of Nolan. This is what SABR does so well: telling about fascinating players from long-ago times.) Diane Firstman will make a SABR research presentation, “The Three True Outcomes,” shedding light on the relationships among walks, strikeouts, and homers from her research on “three true outcomes” (TTO). She will highlight trends comparing Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Aaron Judge in those categories. After this warmup it will soon be time for that glorious annual event called Pitchers and Catchers. It’s coming, honest, it’s coming. Please pre-register if possible, with David Lippman at: kiwiwriter47@gmail.com I am ecstatic for Yankee fans, really. Happy they have Giancarlo Stanton to go along with Aaron Judge. More homers in the Bronx. The natural order. Mostly, I am happy for good friends like Big Al, like Marty, who share their Yankee highs and Yankee lows with me. Now I read that the Yankees have signed the aging warrior C.C. Sabathia for $10-million for another season. How nice to have owners who spend money like that. But: it’s that time of year – the holidays, good will to all. I must admit, I am feeling the opposite emotion of the holidays –deprivation, not getting enough toys. As a Met fan, cooped up indoors at this time of year, I remember how Mets games helped get me through last season, trying to avoid unpleasant subjects I will not mention. I rooted for Curtis Granderson and Jay Bruce and Neal Walker and the best defensive catcher on the team, René Rivera, and Addison Reed, with his cap cockily tilted sideways after a successful inning. Then they all got shipped out. The Mets have a new manager I never heard of. They just signed a long reliever I never heard of. Underwhelming. Now I find myself playing a mental game: Name one position in the Mets lineup, offense or defense, that is really secure. C: Travis d’Arnaud tries hard. Kevin Plawecki is big. The Mets are bringing Jose Lobatón into camp, as a non-roster catcher. Adds up to – what? 1B: Dominic Smith showed some power but other times looked like the second coming of Mo Vaughn. 2B: Nobody has mentioned Weeping Wilmer Flores, who is what we Brooklyn fans used to call “The Peepul’s Cherce.” 3B: Asdrubal Cabrera aged five years last year. Jose Reyes is unsigned. SS: Amed Rosario showed youth and flash. But Ron Darling or Keith Hernandez were often saying (but nicely): “Oooh, he shouldn’t have done that.” LF: Yoenis Cespedes was dragging in the first television spring exhibition. He kept breaking down. I suspect that football physio from Michigan only made Céspedes worse. Maybe terminally. CF: Juan Lagares is altering his swing for more power. Three years ago he looked like Curt Flood. What went wrong?
RF: Michael Conforto was having a streaky year. Then he got hurt. Pitching: Jacob deGrom. The best we have. Thor better stop lifting those freaking weights, or maybe it’s too late. The Dark Knight needs to leave Gotham City. None of this is any consolation at the onset of bleak winter. I cannot imagine watching this team, even as distraction from unpleasant subjects I will not mention. I am happy for pals like Big Al, like Marty. Very happy. But I am just asking: in the grand tradition of my home town, with all those gift packages heading to Yankee Stadium, would it be so terrible if something happened to, um, fall off the truck? In a moment of weakness last week, I wrote the piece below that I liked this new version of the Yankees. Scratch that. The ownership/management Ghost of Boss George reared its twitchy head and fired Manager Joe Girardi after the Yankees didn't win it all, again. I thought Girardi did a good job, ushered in a new era, was patient with Judge and Sanchez, and got them to the league series. Anybody seen Houston? Better young players. Not Girardi's fault. That's all I have to say. The rest of this post is the same as before. I've been watching runners and relief pitchers scamper across the screen late at night. Your updated reaction to the World Series is appreciated. Regards, George * * * Much to my chagrin, I really don’t mind that these Yankees are deep into the post-season. This runs against my entire upbringing but I kind of like Aaron Judge and Todd Frazier and the rest. I think it is a form of Stockholm Syndrome, but the other day I found myself identifying with Yankee tradition and not the petulant yelping of the social media and the hang-him-high posse mentality of arriviste playoff fans. When Joe Girardi botched the potential challenge against Cleveland – probably costing the Yankees a game – the web mob was bellowing for Girardi’s scalp. I harrumphed: “He’s done a good job for a long time. Everybody has a bad game.” I checked with my Yankee guru, Big Al, Esq., from Jersey, who's been busting me for years for being a Brooklyn/Met type. On this one, we totally agreed: Girardi should stay. Now look at them. The bulk of my life experience has taught me to fear the Yankees – autumns as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, watching an endless parade of Joe Page, Tommy Henrich, Billy Martin, Mickey Mantle, Bob Kuzava, for goodness’ sakes, and Don Larsen in 1956. And every fall, that golem that Big Al, Esq., calls Yogalah. A childhood of ineradicable pain, Doctor. Covering the aging Yankees of the early ‘60s did not alter my impression of entitled and mostly grumpy champions. I finally got to like the Yankees, briefly, when they were terrible and they had good guys like Bill Robinson, Steve Hamilton, Gene Michael, Dick Howser and Ruben Amaro. Then, I was off covering the Real World for a decade and when I came back there were new reasons to feel skin-crawly about the Yankees – George and Billy and their tempestuous co-dependency. Then the Boss was forced to keep the young talent in the system – five admirable guys named Bernie, Derek, Jorge, Andy and Mariano. And I remember a catcher named Girardi, smart and positive, whom I once pegged as a future manager, maybe even in the Bronx. You could see it. We were all getting older. On the night in 1998 when the Yankees swept the Padres in San Diego, the Boss came into the locker room and got his ritual Champagne dowsing from the new leader, Jeter, and then George M. Steinbrenner, III, while talking to reporters, began to bawl. (The Boss was a crier.) What else was a 50-something columnist to do? I hugged him and congratulated him. Yikes. But I did it. Maybe this was a breakthrough, Doctor? Now the Boss is gone. My old friend Bob Sheppard is gone. Jeter and Mo, impeccable old-line Yankees, are retired. There is not one player on this squad with the starchiness of an old Yankee. Judge has the sweet, open facial expressions of a junior-high-school kid. He says all the right things. And he can play. Frazier runs around and leads cheers like a role player from some less-august franchise. And what ball fan would not love that bullpen? I have never, ever, said this before: The Yankees are fun to watch. Note: I ran this theory past a Red Sox fan whom I will not identify any further than as my agent. She sneered. (Over the phone, I can recognize a sneer.) She wouldn’t mind if the Yankee bus had a flat tire and they had to forfeit a game. I recognize the emotion. I never once expressed it in print because that would be unprofessional. But I used to feel like that. However: what happens if the Yanks meet the Dodgers in the World Series? The Dodgers wear the colors of my childhood plus they have the admirable Curtis Granderson, whom I am calling The Last Living Met. Will I have flashbacks, Doctor? I stopped watching the Mets a month ago, when they reverted to 1962 ineptitude. I normally don’t watch the Yankees or network broadcasts, but I probably will check out the post-season.
Meantime, baseball remains the best writing/reading sport of all. Here are four new books I recommend, in season or out: The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper, and the Making of a Classic. Richard Sandomir. Hachette Books. As a young Brooklyn fan and later as a young reporter, I could hear the melancholy echoes of Lou Gehrig’s farewell, echoing under the eaves of the old (the real) Yankee Stadium. Gehrig remains a phenomenon for his 15 steals of home (all on the back end of a delayed steal but, with his thick legs, quite an accomplishment) and his 2,130 consecutive-game streak as well as the terrible way he died, from a disease that would bear his name. The latest talented observer to write about Gehrig is Richard Sandomir, a friend and colleague from the New York Times, in his compelling new book, “The Pride of the Yankees,” which Sandomir calls “the first great sports film.” Sandomir covered sports media for decades and now uses his talents in the prestigious obituary section of the Times. He conveys the man and the movie as a story for the ages, noting that producer Sam Goldwyn wanted to make a love story about a doomed man. “Goldwyn didn’t see the value in a baseball story – a game he thought was played with twelve bases on a field,” Sandomir notes. Goldwyn did not care that Gary Cooper looked like a 1962 Met when he tried to swing or throw or run. I learned in this book that Cooper, from Montana, had never played baseball, not once. But Sandomir quotes the noted director, Howard Hawks, as saying, “The grand thing about Cooper is that you believe everything that he says or does.” Getting people to believe. How courant. Sandomir brilliantly describes how myth-making is enhanced by bending reality. Eleanor Gehrig was not the demure lass depicted by Teresa Wright; she was a daughter of privilege from Chicago who had done a bit of roaring in the Roaring Twenties before she met the shy mother’s-boy from a German section of Manhattan. In real life, Gehrig, after months of stumbling on the field, told the manager in a hotel that it was time for him to stop playing. In the movie, Gehrig is replaced at first base in the middle of a game – because it is more dramatic. Sandomir is the perfect writer to depict the murky border between reality and art. Electric October: Seven World Series Games, Six Lives, Five Minutes of Fame That Lasted Forever. Kevin Cook. Henry Holt and Company. Just as in a Shakespearean play, in a World Series involving Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson, the minor characters are fascinating, too. Cook depicts six characters in epic World Series – managers Bucky Harris and Burt Shotton, Brooklyn’s Cookie Lavagetto who broke up a no-hit attempt and beat Bill Bevens in the ninth; Bevens, who would never be the same; George Stirnweiss of the Yankees, a war-time regular who managed one good World Series when the stars came back; and Al Gionfriddo of the Dodgers, who made a great catch on DiMaggio in left field, the last play Gionfriddo would make in the majors. (I once stood next to Gionfriddo at a reunion in the early 80’s; he was tiny, 5-6 at the most.) Cook’s best work is researching the rest of their lives, after that antic World Series – faith, failures, early death, and a few ripe old ages. The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age. Sridhar Pappu. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Wait, 1968 was the end of the Golden Age? Didn’t the Mets win the World Series in 1969? Sorry. Pappu ably describes year of the pitcher, which forced baseball to lower the mounds from 15 inches to 10. Gibson was driven; McLain was corrupt; both were sensational. (Mickey Lolich became Detroit’s star in the Series.) Pappu interviewed me at length about Gibson, whom I admire, beyond his testiness (or maybe because of it.) Making My Pitch: A Woman’s Baseball Odyssey. Ila Jane Borders with Jean Hastings Ardell. University of Nebraska Press. Borders managed to play in male leagues into high school, college and an independent league on a team owned by Mike Veeck in the late 90s. She had her moments as a pro and won the respect of most teammates and fans. Borders touchingly describes her personal and family life. I did not know much about her until this book and I have great admiration for her. Enjoy the rest of the season. In an age when ball players hold lodge meetings at every base and deliver fist bumps on every random encounter between “opponents,” it is refreshing to see old-fashioned crankiness, animosity – and even knucklehead thinking, as recently demonstrated by the Yankees’ C.C. Sabathia.
Sabathia, a competitor and generally rational person, spouted off about the Red Sox’ Eduardo Nuñez, for plunking down a bunt rather than trying to lash the ball into the seats of Yankee Theme Park in the Bronx. The nerve. Sabathia was quite adamant that bunting on such a fine person as himself was bad form – showing up a colleague. Nuñez, a former Yankee teammate, pointed out that he was trying to get on base any way possible, a quaint theory long scorned by players unashamed to strike out regularly. Be a man. Don’t bunt. Where do they get these standards? Jim Rice, the former Red Sox star, a member of the Hall of Fame, chimed in that Sabathia – listed as 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds – could go easier on the clubhouse food spread and perhaps he would be able to bend down and field his position. This is wonderful stuff, reminiscent of the Fisk-Munson feud when the Red Sox were emerging as rivals in the Steinbrenner Sucks! Era of the ‘70s. Those were the days, star catchers rolling in the dirt. Nobody knows what tribal rule Sabathia thought had been violated. There is an old baseball belief that it is unsporting to lay down a bunt in the very late innings when a pitcher is working on a no-hitter. Mets fans let Randy Hundley have it for bunting on Tom Seaver just before the Jim Qualls single broke up a no-hitter in 1969. Hundley pointed out, quite rightly, that the Cubs were ahead of the Mets in the division race. Who knows, if Hundley had been able to get to first base, maybe the Cubs would have won the pennant – and not have to wait 47 more years. Players are so touchy these days. Pitchers’ feelings are upset when batters “flip” the bat in celebration of some moon-shot homer they have just launched. But that feeling goes back to when pitchers virtually checked their stopwatch as sluggers performed the so-called Cadillac Trot around the bases. And hitters do not take kindly to pitchers who launch a quick pitch, the way Hansel Robles did to the Phillies Darin Ruf in the 2015 season. To be fair, a hitter could be hurt if he does not know a pitch is coming in his direction. But ultimately, with all the dawdling that extends games, players are responsible for being prepared. I don’t want to sound blasé about the dangers of flying baseballs, but I covered Bob Gibson in the ‘60s and appreciated his skill – and crankiness, cussing out his catchers for visiting the mound. I swear I have heard Gibson, Ron Fairly and Joe Torre all tell the same story about the time Fairly dared to make conversation with Gibson, who had just smitten a single, and Gibson just glared at him. When Fairly came to bat next time, he said to Torre, “I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this at-bat.” At which point Gibson hit him in the ribs – for praising him. (Some savvy web fans seem to have proven that this never happened in an official game. But it’s still a good story -- indicative of the way the lads played half a century ago.) The stuffiness by Sabathia can be traced to the gimmick of the American League, where pitchers do not hit for themselves, and bunting has no place. In the National League, pitchers are asked to bunt…and run the bases…and in general be baseball players. Look, kids, don’t try this at home. Don’t act like the Yankees and Tigers did recently when they obviously threw beanballs and punches at each other – a throwback to the old times. Somebody could get hurt. Still,the concept of dropping a bunt and trying to run 90 feet fast is a venerable and honored tactic. It is called baseball. I’m proud to be on the program for the national convention of SABR, the invaluable baseball research group, on June 28-July 2, in New York City. I’ll be on a panel about Yogi Berra – aptly titled “It Aint Over” -- with Dave Kaplan, Harvey Araton and Lindsay Berra, the oldest grand-daughter of Yogi and Carmen. This means I can sit back and listen to Lindsay, a compelling presence who tells lovely stories about Yogi. Kaplan, who founded the valuable Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, N.J., and my pal Harvey, still writing great stuff in the Times in "retirement,” also knew Yogi well. I'm sure I can talk a bit about being a young reporter and asking a question of Yogi. Every so often my friend Big Al sends me an email, out of nowhere: "Tell me, was Yoggalah some kind of clutch hitter?" Just to rub it in to an aging Brooklyn fan. Our time is 9:15 AM Saturday, July 1, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel at Grand Central Station. SABR is an international treasure of well-researched articles about famous and obscure baseball people and is now a go-to source for analytics. The program includes needs-no-introduction stars like: Jean Afterman, Claire Smith, Jim Bouton, Marty Appel, William Rhoden and John Thorn. For information on schedule and rates, please see: http://sabr.org/convention For full program, please see: https://sabr.org/convention/sabr47-speakers Carmen and Yogi. They met when she was a waitress at Stan Musial's restaurant in St. Louis. But what was Yogi wearing that one might not wear to a restaurant? It's in my Musial biography, and I will be glad to tell the story if somebody asks at the panel. I counted on them. Just the thought of them got me through a horrible winter.
Every fan knows what I am saying: the unique place of baseball -- seasonally correct, holding promise of a new spring. My team happens to be the Mets, already sinking toward the lower depths, but fans of other teams will recognize the angst: for this I dreamed all winter? I see Curtis Granderson floundering and I see Asdrubal Cabrera falling apart – two of my favorite players, with intelligence and humor and a fine body of work, who were so fine last season. This is hard to watch. I am allowed to root. One of the liberations of retirement is shucking professional neutrality. I obsessed about the Mets’ pitching staff, all those talented kids, and I saw the Mets beating out the under-achieving Nationals. I needed the Mets to thrive, particularly since that sickening night in November when a candidate we New Yorkers knew as a damaged charlatan was elected, ick, but I cannot say it. I tried to get through the winter with partisan television news -- squirmed through rude interruptions of guests, daydreamed through 20-minute rambles with two minutes of content, rolled my eyes at the harmless repetitions of the word “lies,” as if they did any good. Everybody reacts differently. People I know are developing a cursing syndrome when McConnell and Ryan ooze into view. Tim Egan called Ryan an "Irish undertaker." I think he meant unctuous. With my Irish passport, I laughed out loud. Felt good. For 30 seconds. I tried behavior modification. I cannot listen to my large collection of rock and folk and country and jazz on my iPod. No mood for The Band or Stevie Wonder or Iris Dement or The Dead. Songs of lost love and rolling down the highway don’t do it right now. In mid-winter I listened to chamber music and waited for DeGrom and Céspedes and Familia, when his mini-suspension was over. Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun. It’s all right. But now we are a month and a half into this season, and the Mets look done. This is not their year. I know, I know, this is not the loyalty of a true fan, but I covered a zillion games of baseball and I can tell a team that has too many flaws. What’s up with the Alleged Dark Knight? In the same way that I assess my broken ball team, I assess my homeland. I thought the damaged goods would be returned to sender, like some bad Amazon purchase, within 18 months, and it could happen sooner. But the Democrats look like an expansion team – too old, too callow, no core. I scan the prospects among the majority party for enlightened, idealistic action: I see stirrings of conscience in Graham and Collins. I really like John McCain from having interviewed him once; if you spot him approaching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a couple of cohorts, let me know. I watched Ben Sasse – a fresh face, a note of hope, like Michael Conforto of the Mets -- during the hearings the other day and thought, this guy could actually have intelligence and courage. But I’ve been wrong before. I thought my ball team would give me spring-to-autumn diversion. Now I peek at them, through spread fingers, like a child, for an inning here or an inning there. (I'm even happy for Yankee fans. First time in my life.) It’s mid-May and I have lost hope for my team. On Saturday, every major-leaguer will wear No. 42, to commemorate Jackie Robinson, the first African-American in the majors in the 20th Century.
This will be the 70th anniversary of Robinson’s debut in Ebbets Field, Brooklyn – the beginning of a grueling season, a grinding decade. Jackie Robinson would die at 53. Many people think the ordeal heightened his diabetes, hastened his death. In a real way, he gave his life for a cause. This sense of Robinson as vulnerable point man for equality is never more relevant than in a time when Americans seem to be questioning their direction – when the Roberts Supreme Court can negate previous civil-rights legislation, letting us know that things are just fine now, we don’t need all those rules bolstering people’s rights to vote. By some cosmic happening, the Robinson anniversary and the return of baseball take place in the spring, in the time of Passover and Easter, celebrations of survival. Robinson’s own beliefs – the power that kept him going – is currently explored by Ed Henry in his new book, “42 Faith,” published by Thomas Nelson. Henry is the Fox News Channel chief national correspondent (and a friend of mine.) Henry is too young to have seen Robinson play or meet him but in his busy life he has admirably sought out people and places where Robinson’s history can be felt. Henry explores the magnetic pull of the ball park that used to be in Flatbush; the vanished hotel in Indiana where Branch Rickey gave shelter to the black catcher on his college team, the still-standing Chicago Hilton where a wise Dodger scout named Clyde Sukeforth interviewed a Negro League player named Robinson. Holy places, in a way. The story has been well told by Arnold Rampersad and Steve Jacobson and Roger Kahn, if not with this overt angle on faith: Robinson was a mainline Protestant who relied on his pastor, who taught Sunday school, who saw life through a framework of Christianity. He was sought out for the Brooklyn Dodgers by Branch Rickey, a man of religious dedication – who did not go to the ballpark on the Sabbath -- who had no qualms about wheedling his best players out of a thousand here, a thousand there. Aging Brooklyn heroes like Carl Erskine and Vin Scully recall the strength and complexity of Robinson, and aging fans recall the example of Robinson holding his natural fire, to establish himself, and his people. This was a big deal, the coming of Jackie Robinson. I remember being home in the spring of 1947 when my father called from the newspaper office to say that our team, the Dodgers, the good guys, had just brought up Robinson from the Montreal farm team, that he would open the season in Brooklyn. We (white, liberal) celebrated. Every year the major leagues celebrate with No. 42 on every uniform. Thanks to an inquiring journalist, the story goes on. Here is yet another poll I don’t want to hear. According to the highly-respected Quinnipiac Poll, residents of New York City prefer the Mets to the Yankees by 45-43 percent.
I’m a Met fan, totally out of the closet since retirement as a thoroughly impartial, you-never-could-tell sports columnist. I come by my National League/Long Island bias honestly as a boyhood Brooklyn Dodger fan who suffered terribly at the hands of the Yankees (to say nothing of, periodically, the New York Giants.) Quinnipiac is undoubtedly more correct when it says residents of New York State favor the Yankees by 48-34 percent. Those are the kind of odds I would have expected, what with all those World Series plus icons from Ruth and Gehrig to Jeter and Rivera. I have come to assume a lot of perfectly nice people have been swayed by the echoes in the “Big Ball Park in the Bronx” (Red Barber’s alliteration, not Mel Allen’s) and all those championships. Mets fans see their team as an occasional delightful surprise -- that World Series every decade or so, plus gallant efforts foiled by the 1987 Pendleton home run and the 1988 Scioscia home run and the 2006 Molina home run and the 2016 Inciarte catch – plus, the 2000 World Series when rich Yankee fans bought up huge swaths of Shea Stadium tickets. The gloomy words of George Orwell, personified. Now some New Yorkers may be swayed by all those fine young arms and the power of Céspedes and the dash of the prodigal son Reyes and the professionalism of Cabrera. Mets fans have expectations? Dangerous. I still want the Mets to be a minority taste which makes the Swoboda catch and the Mookie grounder all the more special. Then there is this: I don’t want my life guided by polls. Not anymore. Last autumn I was reassured by within-the-margin-of-error polls: the rational would squeak past the raging id. No more polls. * * * Play ball. Which the Yankees did, indoors, at Tampa Bay, on Sunday. By the second inning, I was immediately delighted with the fine details of baseball: -- Rays' LF Mallex Smith took a circular route but caught a fly in foul territory. -- Then, Smith (new to that team) took a piece of paper out of his pocket to scan the defensive scouting on the Yankees. Don't know that I've ever seen that. -- Between innings, the immortal voice of Bob Sheppard urged us -- stylishly, of course -- to follow the Yankees on the YES network. Nice touch. -- As starter Masahiro Tanaka faltered, he was watched intensely by three people in the Yankee dugout -- manager Joe Girardi, pitching coach Larry Rothschild and trainer Steve Donohue. Their faces told me: the real season has begun. With no clue about the glories about to unfold, my nerves were kicking in, 12 hours before kickoff.
I was obsessing about the starting lineup – and the formation – and the deep hole in the standings for the American men’s soccer team. I could not summon any of this fear and trembling for the just concluded World Baseball Classic, but on Friday, as the U.S. prepared to play Honduras in San Jose, Calif., I was worried if Tim Howard’s injury and Clint Dempsey’s heart issues would allow them to go full-tilt-boogie. I was looking forward to Bruce Arena’s return as head coach. I was worried about the injuries that have decimated Arena’s player pool. This is true national sporting fear, known to soccer fans around the world, and now a very real tradition in the United States. Then the U.S. displayed the get-out-of-jail-free card and welcomed back Dempsey and Howard and Arena with a 6-0 romp over Honduras. How often, in motion sports like soccer, basketball and hockey, do players display initiative at the changing of a coach? From the whistle, the U.S. was energized and creative. The first sign was relatively new players like Darlington Nagbe (speed, brains and low-to-the-road center of gravity) opening up the field. He was followed by Christian Pulisic and Sebastian Lletget, displaying freedom to find space, to take their shots. And then Dempsey, his glower intact after a bout with arrythmia, scored a hat trick. And Michael Bradley turned and launched a long left-footed goal that reminded me of Jermaine Jones' surprise blast in the last World Cup. And Howard was back in goal, his bald head sweating in a prolonged pre-game practice, his eyes giving direction to his defenders. What I am saying is, in my own home, liberated by retirement to be a fan, I loved it. Now I can start obsessing about the match in Panama Tuesday. I could not summon anything like this for the final of the recent Classic Tuesday although I enjoyed watching a compelling young U.S. pitcher, Marcus Stroman, shut down Puerto Rico in an 8-0 victory. From reading the terrific analysis by Billy Witz in the Times on Friday, I see the American players have reacted negatively to the emotion shown by fans and players from Latin America and Asia. The excitement is cultural….and it is the future of the Classic….but I can understand what the U.S. players are feeling. They are from Major League Baseball, the best league in the world, and so are most of their opponents. In a few weeks they will be playing official games and I will have knots hoping Yoenis Céspedes can hold up all season and most of the young pitchers will be healthy and what adventures will befall our beloved Weepin’ Wilmer Flores. Allowed to shed neutrality, I get tied into knots for my home-borough Mets, not for an all-star national team in March. My friend Clemson Smith Muñiz, editor of a terrific new site on Latin baseball, explains my inner dichotomy: “Hola, George, the irony of the WBC final was Latinos had skin on both side of the field. Team USA starting pitcher Marcus Stroman's mother is from Puerto Rico; third baseman Nolan Arenado's father is Cuban and his mother Puerto Rican; and first baseman Eric Hosmer's mother is Cuban. Yes, it took a ‘Half-Rican’ to beat the undefeated ‘Quarter-Rican’ Seth Lugo and the rest of the Boricuas.” Plus, the stirring Puerto Rican team, with its dyed blonde hair and accent marks on the back of the jerseys, consists of beloved and respected players from the long season: venerable Carlos Beltrán and dynamic Yadier Molina, players we love to watch all season (except maybe when they help crush the Mets.) Those emotions are ahead of us. But ever since Paul Caligiuri’s goal in Port of Spain in November of 1989, the U.S. has had the feel of the World Cup -- the men’s quadrennial struggle to qualify, the women’s reign of excellence, now in decline. Qualifying is brutal – hard faces on Latin players, coming to American soil with much to prove, flying objects and language in ominous places like Azteca Stadium, inexplicable official decisions on the road. The stuff of horror movies. Maybe the World Baseball Classic will get there some day. Right now, I knew true sporting fear – meaningless, but tell that to my nerves. Anybody else watching the World Baseball Classic on the dawn patrol?
It's hard to tell the players without a scorecard – and a genealogy printout. National identities blur, and so do team and league ties. Those two players who collided at home plate the other day? Why, they are teammates – Sal Butera of Italy crashing into Salvador Perez of Venezuela, both of them catchers for the Kansas City Royals. In real life, Perez is the star and Butera is the backup but for these few weeks they are playing for national teams, and playing it hard, and playing it right. Butera was trying to score a run that Italy had to have, and Perez moved into his path, and took a hit. The word from Perez is that his knee may not be as badly injured as was feared, but time will tell. There was nothing dirty about the collision. In fact, it was a common sight in international sport: people who spend an entire league season together suddenly represent other nations. Butera, an American, has Italian background and is entitled to play for Italy. Many of the Venezuelan players live in the States for safety and comfort reasons, as James Wagner pointed out in the Times, but they proudly play for their homeland. Sometimes international play can get nasty, the way it did at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona when the American Dream Team of basketball met soon-to-disband Yugoslavia. Toni Kukoc was about to join the Chicago Bulls after receiving a huge contract that frosted a couple of Bulls named Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen who hounded and trapped and jostled Kukoc with a fervor that could only be labelled personal. Welcome to our world, they said, with their elbows and hands and hips and knees and hard stares. (Read all about it in a story by the late Alan Greenberg in the Hartford Courant.) The World Cup of soccer mixes friendships and rivalries and guild-member respect. Men who spend the entire season together in the same jerseys try to beat their pals for 90 minutes – and then exchange jerseys and hugs. One great example was the 2006 World Cup first-round match between Italy and the Czech Republic. Gigi Buffon, the Italian keeper, was sticking with Juventus, which had been downgraded to the second division because of a scandal involving team officials and referees and gambling. His Juve teammate, Pavel Nedved, was also sticking with Juve while other mainstays were exercising their right to leave. On this afternoon in Hamburg in 2006, they were opponents – who happened to know each other’s moves. Three times in that match, Nedved took a shot on his pal, but Buffon stopped him. At the end of the match, a 2-0 Italy victory, they embraced with obvious respect. “Oh to be a fly on the wall of the Juventus dressing room when this pair report back for pre-season training,” said the play-by-play on the BBC web site. Italy went on to win that World Cup (remember the Zidane head butt on Materazzi, an old tormentor from Serie A?) and Nedved retired from the Czech national team but helped Juve's comeback through 2009. Today, Nedved is a youth coach with Juventus and Buffon is still the emotional keeper for Juve and the Azzurri. Recently Nedved told a Czech paper that he hopes Buffon will play until he is 50. Their World Cup match against each other is part of their bond. * * * The subplots are also fascinating in this Baseball World Classic – including the tangled but verifiable ancestries of players, that produces an American named Ty Kelly (with a Jewish mother) playing third base for Israel. (Ken Belson’s stories in the Times have caught the mood perfectly.) Israel won its first four before losing to the Netherlands in the Tokyo Dome on what I think was Monday evening. In their time zone in Israel, Hillel and Mendel, who often comment on this site, have been following Destiny’s Darlings. Hillel Kuttler was interviewed about baseball madness in the Holy Land: https://www.facebook.com/i24newsEN/videos/721330744702264/ While Israel was 4-0, Mendel Horowitz cited great runs by Cleveland and the Cubbies in the World Series, the rally by the Patriots in the Super Bowl, the comeback by Barcelona in the Champions League, and, yes, even the shocking election victory by the candidate-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken. Israel was hammered, 12-2, on Monday but Horowitz still has his theme: “The Year of the Impossibles.” Who thinks about Casey Stengel these days?
Mets fans should, because he basically invented the Amazin's. Just the other day, a hit rolled into the right-field bullpen and a Braves outfielder flung aside a garbage pail to retrieve the ball -- a garbage pail! -- and I recalled what the Old Man used to say: "Every day in this game of baseball, you see something you never saw before." Still I might have thought history contains all it needs about Stengel, the quintessential figure on all four New York teams – “the Brooklyns,” the Giants, the Yankees, and the Amazing Mets. Casey let a sparrow fly out from his doffed cap as a Dodger; he hit an inside-the-park homer for the Giants in the World Series; he won 10 pennants in 12 years as the Yankee manager; and he managed the Mets for their first four seasons. Now, my friend Marty Appel has found good new stuff about Casey – and his times – in a new book, “Casey Stengel: Baseball’s Greatest Character,” to be published by Doubleday on March 28, just in time for a new season. Appel uncovered some gems about Casey’s childhood in 19th Century Kansas City and his playing career in a Brooklyn so long ago there were no hipsters. He has used computerized libraries and files not available to previous biographers of Stengel, including the late Bob Creamer, a luncheon companion of ours. For example: Appel discovered that the Stengel family lived in the same neighborhood as Charles (Kid) Nichols, a Hall of Fame pitcher who won 361 games from 1890 to 1906. When “Dutch” Stengel was a rambunctious teen-age ball player, the old pitcher advised him to always listen to his managers. “Never say, ‘I won’t do that.,'" Kid Nichols said. "Always listen to him. If you’re not going to do it, don’t tell him so. Let it go in one ear, then let it roll around there for a month, and if it isn’t any good, let it go out the other ear.” This is wonderful advice. I spent a lot of time around Casey from 1962 to 1965 -- in his office and late at night in bars – and I never heard him mention Kid Nichols. But I now know that Kid Nichols helped Casey learn as a player – and teach as a manager. Appel tells a great story (new to me) about a prospect named Mantle, who could run but was slowed down by his habit of looking at the ground. Stengel told Mantle he was no longer playing football in Commerce, Okla., that the major leagues had groundskeepers who created smooth base paths and that he should keep his eye on the ball and the fielders. It made Casey crazy to see blank looks on players. The Old Man also tried to teach “my writers,” in murky soliloquys very late at night. Just when you were about to give up (or doze off) he would grab you with a stubborn paw and say, “Look, you asshole, I’m trying to tell you something.” Appel has learned about Casey’s wife, Edna Lawson Stengel through an unpublished memoir made available by Edna’s niece, Toni Mollett Harsh. Apparently, the Stengels considered themselves too old – in their thirties – to start a family, but they were affectionate toward the wives and children of some of the younger players. (He bought a ginger ale for my oldest child, Laura, in the motel bar in Florida after his managing days. She remembers it vividly.) I learned something else. Appel amends the legend that Stengel’s wealth came through his wife’s family, which owned a bank and businesses in Glendale, Calif. In fact, young Casey paid attention to a teammate from Texas who talked him into buying oil rigs. Casey often barked, “You make your own luck.” Marty Appel reminds us all that Casey Stengel made his own luck. I’m having so much fun with spring training baseball, I’m sticking with it. On Friday I watched two of the Mets’ best prospects, Dominic Smith and Amed Rosario, enter an exhibition mid-way and lash hits (off a shell-shocked kid pitcher, to be sure.) They looked so confident -- the way Gary Sanchez did when he arrived with the Yankees during last season. (How nice for them.) This is the stuff of spring training. Some of them are strictly March pheenoms – who’s old enough to remember massive Clint Hartung of the New York Giants a zillion years ago? But sometimes young players are the real thing. Smith plays first base and Rosario plays shortstop. Gary Apple and Ron Darling on SNY-TV were chattering about how both were being groomed for 2018 – but maybe sooner, depending, etc. What baseball fan does not love this kind of talk? It sustains me in March. For the moment, I can even shut out the image of the blundering lout somebody elected president. Go Dominic Smith. Go Amed Rosario. Go Gary Sanchez. * * * We live on a flyway, between two bays. The other morning I went outside and heard honking – hundreds of geese, flying high, moving fast, in a V formation, heading north.
These guys must know something, I thought. And sure enough, the geese were soon followed by ball games, on the radio and on the tube, from a warmer place. Bread and circuses? It’s time for diversion – baseball, even better than the caloric Hershey Kisses being ingested by the very funny Joyce Wadler in her Sunday column in the Times. (You know whom she blames for her chocolate binge: her mom…and Trump.) I got something healthier for you. My email from my friend Big Al said: Yanks-Phils 1 PM on YES. Life begins anew. Big Al is a Yankee fan. What can I say? I found the first Mets game on the radio Friday while idling in the horrendous traffic at LaGuardia Airport. The Mets brought mostly a B squad to Fort Myers, but there was Howie Rose with his haimish accent, straight-from-the-upper-deck-at-Shea. Howie was filling us in on the 11 Mets who will be playing in the Baseball Classic, the world-cup-for-hardball, in March, including Ty Kelly playing for Israel. (Read Hillel Kuttler’s piece: Kelly’s mom is Jewish.) It was delightful to sit in traffic with something important to think about that did not involve mental health and ineptitude and malice – the depth of the Mets’ system that has decent players like Kelly and T.J. Rivera scrambling for spots. Rooting for underdogs is so very baseball, so very New York. Time for a viewing of the 2017 Mets. On Saturday, my pal Gary and I sat in his living room and watched on SNY as the Mets played a home exhibition in 86-degree Port St. Lucie. The first treat was hearing the broadcasters, Gary Cohen and Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, the familiar banter and expertise. As is only normal we heard about other preoccupations – Seton Hall basketball for Cohen, a delightful 1-year-old son for Darling, and a bad knee that may require replacement for Hernandez. The docs better make sure Hernandez can still scoop up a bunt and fire to third base. But enough about the main act. There was also the undercard -- the 2017 Mets, a work in progress. Lucas Duda was missing because of injections into his aching hips. Jacob DeGrom was sporting a totally hideous mustache that negates his flowing hair and beatific smile. Good old David Wright, in yet another comeback, hit a fly ball and later beamed as he talked about his 1-year-old son. Washington brought along some A-List sluggers, Bryce Harper and Daniel Murphy, and lifer manager Dusty Baker in the dugout, working his toothpick. A moment of terror as the Mets’ Kevin Plawecki had his knee put into reverse in a home-plate collision, followed by at least a dozen horrifying replays and relieved applause as he hobbled off the field, (Update: x-rays negative, better than could have been imagined.) The broadcasters did what they do best. They digressed, about the new rule that allows an automatic base on balls. Darling pronounced it “nothing.” Better they install a time clock for pitchers. Hernandez and Darling bickered over the use of colored grease pens for cast-of-thousands exhibitions. Cohen presided with a paternal sigh. My pal and I watched the entire three-hour marathon. The players. The manager and coaches. The broadcasters. The fans – no politics in evidence – watching the long game. Life under the flyway, enjoying the first honks of spring. We had 60 degrees Wednesday, a whiteout Thursday, frozen rain Sunday. But some of us take heart from the first robins of spring – pitchers and catchers sighted down south.
Then there are advance copies of baseball books, just being distributed to lucky media types like me. My first CARE package was a literate and knowing little gem, “Off Speed: Baseball, Pitching, and the Art of Deception,” by Terry McDermott, from Pantheon Books, which will be on the shelves in May but has already rejuvenated me. McDermott, a writer on other serious subjects like terrorism, is also a baseball buff, stemming from childhood in Cascade, Iowa. He describes his first big-league game – a Yankee doubleheader at Comiskey Park, June 28, 1959, on a road trip that reminds me of a boy’s rambunctious bus pub crawl with Welsh elders in the classic Dylan Thomas short story “The Outing.” Once a year, McDermott writes, the men of Cascade “would charter a Burlington Line train – who knew you could even do this? -- out of East Dubuque, Illinois. They’d fill the train with Knights of Columbus, cold ham sandwiches, and Falstaff beer – or maybe Schlitz in a good year – and head east. My father, known to everyone as Mac took me along as an early birthday gift.” McDermott adds: “It was my first game, my first train, my first taxi, my first bus, my first time seeing grown men pass out drunk.” Also, his first time seeing and hearing black Americans on the South Side of Chicago. The hold of baseball -- a rural game played in urban settings -- reminds me of the great book, "The Southpaw," by Mark Harris I wrote about it for opening day in 2005: The young lefty from upstate New York goes to his first game in the big city where he will one day pitch. In his first pilgrimage to another great baseball town, McDermott witnessed Yogi Berra catching both ends of a doubleheader loss. The great source Retrosheet does not allude to it, but McDermott is sure he saw a foul pop drop untouched near Berra just before an Al Smith homer, 58 years ago. Fans remember stuff like that. Cascade is a small town, 15 minutes from where Kevin Costner wandered in the corn fields in “Field of Dreams,” and it fielded a weekend team which won 64 of 65 games one season. The star pitcher was obscurely known as Yipe; every male in Cascade had a nickname. McDermott could have written only about the enduring pull of baseball in a small town (which still has a team) –– and that would have been fine, in fact, beautiful. But the book does much more, economically – the dissection of a perfect game by King Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners on Aug. 15, 2012 – sunny day game after a night game, McDermott duly notes. He has taken four full seasons to reconstruct that game, talking shop with the scattered principals, lifers who remember every pitch. He uses each inning to illustrate one of nine different pitches in baseball’s arsenal. Some of the old masters include Walter Johnson, Three-Finger Brown, Candy Cummings, said to be the inventor of the curveball, and Cascade's own Urban (Red) Faber, Hall of Famer and next-to-last (legal) practitioner of the spitball. And more: McDermott was a ballboy one night in Cascade when Satchel Paige 56 going on 1,000, pitched a few innings. Satchel winked and asked the boy to please not clean the dirt off the balls being rotated back into the game. Let’s have some fun, Paige suggested. This book taught me some things: hitters who start 0-1 in the count bat .230 on that at-bat but hitters who start 1-0 bat .275. Thirteen pitchers have had their perfect game disrupted with two outs in the ninth. And, in this affluent era when barely-used balls are tossed to the fans, the average game consumes 120 balls. McDermott provides touching digressions about the numerous shoes in his daughter’s closet, and the time his headstrong dad cooked meat on the lid of a garbage can. (It was for the dog, he quickly adds.) He has a great ear for the verbal excursions and minutiae and great truths that baseball produces, more than any other sport. “Off Speed” will be out soon enough, but my privileged early peek assures me: baseball lives. I always thought Chaim Tannenbaum was from Quebec. He was the lanky male presence behind the beloved Kate and Anna McGarrigle, instrumentals and passionate tenor – particularly singing the lead on “Dig My Grave.” Talk about soul: Chaim Tannenbaum, singing gospel. One night the sisters decamped in Symphony Space or Town Hall or somewhere, and Chaim was nowhere to be seen. The sisters sang a song or two before a fan shouted lustily, “Where’s Chaim?” The ladies shrugged as if to say, deal with it. Maybe Chaim had a philosophy class to teach at Dawson College in Montreal. That was his day job. Kate passed in 2010 and the torch is carried by Loudon, by Martha, by Rufus, in their ways. And at the age of 68, Chaim released his first solo CD, “Chaim Tannenbaum,” last year. Never too late. One of his songs is “Brooklyn 1955,” about, you know, Next Year. Turns out, Chaim is from Brownsville. Who knew? We fans thought Next Year would never come, but the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the dreaded Yankees in that World Series and bells rang all over the Borough of Churches. (I can attest; I was in a soccer match in Brooklyn that afternoon.) In this tribute, Chaim strums and sings about the hallowed Dodgers long before pre-hipster Brooklyn, catching the mood of a borough finally having its moment. He’s been in Montreal for decades, and his Brooklyn history is a bit vague: people were already committing white flight in the early ‘50s, and Brownsville is not the total hellhole he describes. But he is right. Brooklyn, 1955, was a time and a place. Stick with the video because at the end the great Red Barber recites the defensive lineup from the 1952 World Series -- my eventual friend George Shuba in left, plus Billy Cox, “The Hands,” at third base. And Barber promises that sometime that afternoon the fans would be “tearing up the pea-patch” in Ebbets Field, one of his signature phrases -- a southerner talking about a pea-patch. In Brooklyn. (Below: Young Chaim Tannenbaum sings “Dig My Grave,” a cappella, 1984, Red Creek Inn in Rochester N.Y. with Anna McGarrigle, Kate McGarrigle and Dane Lanken, bass vocal.) The New York Times asked me to write a column for Monday about whether George Steinbrenner should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
I remembered being a frequent critic of Steinbrenner, when I became a sports columnist in 1982. I often wrote that he should get out of town, go back to Tampa or Cleveland, because his crude bullying did not belong in Big Town. (Supply your own current punch line to that.) He did odious things but over the years I developed a partial grudging respect for him as a big-timer who could take a certain amount of banter, like most politicians and public figures. I looked at him from the perspective of a childhood Brooklyn Dodger fan who had suffered terribly, who never, ever, rooted for the Yankees. But at least the Yankees stayed in the Bronx, a symbol of domination and bluster and endless sentimentality with all their deities and trained American eagles swooping around the big ballpark during post-season games. Overkill. The Yankee way. But when the Times asked me to write about George and the Hall, I decided he had upgraded a historic franchise, and was – in neutral terms – an epic figure in his business, and he belonged in the Hall. When the column appeared on the NYT web site Sunday evening, many knowing readers criticized my reasoning, in the Comments section. Others wrote to my NYT address. (geovec@nytimes.com.) I was impressed by so many arguments to keep him out: --His meanness discredited anything the Yankees won. ---He broke rules, not as a player but as an owner, and that should count to keep him out. ---In fact, he went from 1978 to 1996 without winning a World Series, the longest drought since Babe Ruth arrived. How smart could he be? ---It was wrong of me to compare his splurging with cable and attendance money with the bargain-basement tactics of pioneer Hall of Fame owners like Connie Mack and Clark Griffith, both former players who helped build baseball. --The Hall voters (NYT writers, including this pensioner, do not vote for such honors) have shunned known and suspected users of PEDs. If McGwire and Clemens and Bonds and Sosa are still outside, what about an owner who hired a gambler to dish dirt on Dave Winfield, who made illegal political contributions? ---He was a bully who mistreated many people, from baseball officials to players to humble workers. This was true. Some readers had one nasty brush with The Boss, and never forgot it. The first time I met him was in 1976, when I was still a cityside reporter and was sent up to the Stadium as the Yanks prepared for their first World Series since 1964. The Boss gushed over my work on Loretta Lynn’s book, but a minute later he reamed out a Stadium supervisor named Kelly for minute imperfections. It was a way for him to demonstrate his power to me. It was embarrassing to be present for this. But four decades later I have come to think he was a giant as an owner, and should get in the Hall one of these years. I love the readers’ comments – so informed, so passionate, and polite. But I think character has long been ignored by the Hall anyway. There are racists in the Hall, from players to commissioners; many great stars led terrible lives – drinking, carousing, misbehaving, to disgrace and early death. Some executives in the Hall are mere lodge brothers, voted in during a simpler time. George Steinbrenner was complicated. He bought a failing franchise and forced it back to the top. He won 11 pennants. He made the Yankees big-time. Finally, I made an allusion to a column I wrote in 1986 urging a burned-out Boss to sell the franchise to a local builder who needed a hobby, a focus in life. I did not mention Donald Trump by name but many readers compared Steinbrenner’s bullying with Trump’s. As a New Yorker, who has met both men, I can attest that Steinbrenner was more centered, more educated, more generous than Trump. It’s not as if anybody was voting for George Steinbrenner to be President, for goodness’ sakes. I thank the readers who prodded my reasoning. Those who care to prod it here are welcome. The debate goes on. On a murky, rainy Tuesday, I was with a gaggle of baseball-writer types at a friend’s apartment in the city. Our hostess provided a nice lunch and we celebrated the 96th birthday of our colleague, who saw Lou Gehrig play. Late in the lunch, I started getting texts from two rabid Mets fans. “Céspedes back! 4 years!” one wrote. “Finally, some good news!” the other wrote. “This could get us almost all the way up to the next election,” the first one added. I broke the news to the dozen writers, including Mets, Yankees Tigers and Orioles fans. "Céspedes should play right field,” one of them said. "With that arm, that’s his best position.” We debated that, and the $110-million price, for four years. Money well spent. (Not our money, to be sure.) We talked baseball til it was time to go home. Forty-five minutes later, I was driving through my home borough of Queens, in the dark, in the rain, right past the Mets’ ball park. (I know it has a corporate name, but I hate banks -- more since the crash.) The huge message board was hawking stuff – probably a hazard for drivers trying to negotiate the shifting lanes and insane rush-hour drivers on the Whitestone Expressway. But I took a quick glimpse anyway – commercials, some U.F.C. event, season tickets. Céspedes, I said. Brag that you just locked up Céspedes for four years. That would have been big-time celebrating – lighting the candle rather than stumbling in the dark, which the Mets have been known to do. But nobody in the Mets' office had pushed the button to tell the Whitestone Expressway about Céspedes. I kept my eyes on the road but my mind was on April, when Céspedes, that imperfect star, will start swinging for the fences, and catching almost everything hit near him, and throwing out knuckleheads who run on his arm. The Mets remain a contender particularly if their young pitchers recuperate. I thought about the ball park buzzing, buying a hero at Mama's stand, watching Cabrera's sure hands and Granderson's smile and DeGrom's and Syndergaard's locks flapping in the breeze. I felt better than I have in a month. We would get through the winter. Baseball will be back. I suspect Yankee fans feel the same way about the prospect of the first full season of Gary Sanchez. Yankee fans are human. They got to live, too. They look forward to driving around with John and Suzyn calling the game, the way Mets fans feel about Howie and Josh. In the winter, in the red states, in the blue states, in the big markets and the small markets, fans are lying dormant, dreaming their dreams. (What dreams can Cubs fans possibly have, now that their tormented circadian rhythms have been forever disrupted?) That's baseball. On a gloomy afternoon, somebody sends a text, and the ever-hopeful fan thinks, I can make it through the dark months. We will survive. (Note to readers: Please check out the lovely comment from Neil about his beloved grandmother, whose life spanned two epic eras in Cubs' history. In Comments below:)
* * * As soon as I saw the costumes on the web, I knew the Cubs would be loose going to Cleveland, needing to win twice. Still, how much is loose worth? By Wednesday night I was questioning manager Joe Maddon’s tropism to yank his starting pitcher. Normal. After the Cubs won on Sunday, to stay alive in the World Series, Maddon told his players to enjoy Halloween back home in Chicagoland. Never mind a workout in Cleveland on the travel day. Munch candy corn rather than clubhouse food. Maddon was cool when he managed Tampa Bay, an educated mixture of geek and free spirit. (See the 2008 article by Alan Schwarz:) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/sports/baseball/10rays.html. Maddon was also cool managing the team with the long void in its dossier. He didn’t need to exhibit football-coach control over his players. Play. Then play. This doesn’t imply anything negative about Tito Francona, the Cleveland manager. He’s good, too. But the Cubs needed to win two on the road, and Maddon showed proper insouciance by telling his players to take Monday off with loved ones, before boarding a flight to Cleveland – action-hero regalia optional. The photos on the web tell the story: http://m.mlb.com/cutfour/2016/10/31/207743190/cubs-wear-halloween-costumes-on-world-series-trip-to-cleveland The Cubs won Tuesday as Addison Russell, most recently seen as a lime-green Ninja Turtle, drove in six runs, tying the World Series record. On Wednesday, Maddon properly had all hands in the bullpen as Kyle Hendricks pitched into the fifth inning. Hendricks, known as The Professor, is smart and unflappable and had thrown only 63 pitches when Maddon got him with a 5-1 lead. The Fox crew questioned Maddon’s short-twitch strategy, even for a seventh game, and so did I. The questioning wasn’t so much about Jon Lester’s serious imperfections in throwing to bases as it was about using another very good starter that early, ultimately forcing Aroldis Chapman to go multiple innings, again. Turned out, Chapman was as spent as anybody could have feared. His face said he knew he didn’t have it. Then it rained, after nine innings. During the 17-minute delay, the player showing the most yips – Jason Heyward, in his first year with the Cubs, in a year-long slump, swinging at 57-foot pitches -- had the inner strength to call a clubhouse meeting, to remind the players how far they had come. Then the Cubs held on for an 8-7 victory in 10 innings, past midnight. One grand old baseball city celebrated and another mourned. Maddon had treated the players like grown men. Of course, so did Francona. Now the Cubs can wear any action-hero outfit they want for the parades and parties that may last all winter. Insouciance won. * * * Here's another article by Alan Schwarz about Joe Maddon from the Tampa Bay days: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/sports/baseball/23maddon.html * * * http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/sports/baseball/23maddon.html It has taken nearly a month of mourning, but I am finally paying attention to baseball again.
The World Series has gotten interesting, after five games. Anything can happen, just like in real life. Of course, my avid interest in the fifth game may have come from fear and withdrawal, because of the assorted ghouls floating in late October air -- fright masks of Donald Trump and Anthony Weiner, perfectly matched, like twin Rasputins, scoundrels that never go away. Seeing Weiner crawl out of the crypt (with help from the FBI) to invigorate his soul brother from the other party drove me to watch the fifth game Sunday night. Before the Series began, I wrote on another site that I had no dog in this fight, since the gallant Mets went down in the wild-card game. That still goes. (Hard to feel much sympathy for a franchise that traded Lou Brock or a franchise that traded Rocky Colavito. Then again, I root for a franchise that, gulp, traded Nolan Ryan.) It would be easy to rationalize being a National League fan and root for a team that has not won a World Series since 1908, but what’s another year or 20? I also root for the Rust Belt, for old river towns like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati -- and Cleveland would qualify for underdog status ahead of Chicago. But that’s not the point. Escapism is the point. Things I have noticed about this Series: Jason Kipnis of Cleveland personified the ambiguities of this Series after his three-run homer Saturday. He’s from a Chicago suburb, and would not exult on TV about what it would mean to win a World Series. He’s going home, either way, after the Series, and did not want to insult his home town. Nice guy. I love the antiquity of Wrigley Field (blessedly still named after the chewing-gum family that used to own the team, not cursed anew with some geeky corporate logo.) Wrigley is one of only four ball parks in which pitchers warm up in foul territory, bless its heart. The Cleveland bullpen was slow to clear out for Jason Heyward to chase a wind-blown popup in the first inning Sunday night. I flashed back to Pat Pieper, the public-address announcer for half a century, who worked on the field, behind home plate. And I noticed the low-slung brick wall behind home plate from when my Brooklyn Dodgers traveled to meet Bill (Swish) Nicholson back in the day. I love Wrigley the way I love Fenway Park – a reminder of the past. But that doesn’t mean I am rooting for the Cubs. Pardon my smirk, but I love the two recent Yankees dominating out of the bullpen – lefty Andrew Miller of the Indians and righty Aroldis Chapman of the Reds. This is the time of year for Mr. October (Reggie) and Mr. November (Derek.) Now these two ex-Bronxites will be rested for longish duty in the sixth game. The Yankees won’t know if they made good deals, unloading these relievers for young talent, for several years, so this Series must be a lot of fun for Yankee fans, what with A-Rod preening in the overcrowded Fox gallery. (How I miss the Mets’ broadcasters, known commodities, not overloading the listener with detail and gab.) Any World Series only gets really interesting when it goes to a sixth game, full of developed plot lines, when anything can happen from here on in. For somebody who has been taking a month off in sympathy for the injured Mets, these are fresh faces, fresh arms. Thanks to long-suffering Cleveland and long-suffering Chicago and the long slog of post-season baseball for prolonging the World Series, for giving another day or three of diversion from twin Halloween horrors. In the end, the Mets’ final game had nothing to do with ancient failures and curses on the Brooklyn Dodgers and early Mets. The Mets lost to a great pitcher, a great October pitcher.
I saw Madison Bumgarner’s expressionless face as he trudged out to the mound nine times. I was visiting my friends Gary and Nancy, and I explained to them that he was a mountain man from western North Carolina, neither north nor south but Appalachian. He had a job to do, and he had the tools to do it. Later, when the job was done, he submitted to an interview, and I could hear the mountain accent; he comes from a hamlet full of Bumgarners, for generations. One tough, self-reliant dude, with great arm, great purpose. My friend Big Al from Queens, who used to pitch off the scruffy mound in Alley Pond Park, wrote me this morning that as a former hurler he marveled that Syndergaard could bust in 98- mph fastballs, with admirable location, but that Bumgarner’s 92-mph pitchers went even more precisely to the right place, where Céspedes and others could not harm him. Big Al thinks Bumgarner could have gone 11 or 12. I’m just sorry it was Familia at the end. He’s such a nice guy, gave us such a good season. Then there is Granderson’s catch. He is already the favorite Met to so many people. (I know a few women who refer to him as “my boyfriend” when he smiles and hits home runs.) On Wednesday night he ran straight to the center-field fence knowing he could make contact, and he held the ball for the third out. My son David wants to know how Granderson’s catch compares with Endy Chavez in 2006 and Tommie Agee and Rocky Swoboda in 1969, and I say quite equally. Big Al had to bring up – he always does this – Mantle’s catch off Hodges to preserve Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956, and I retort with names like Gionfriddo from 1947 and Amoros from 1955. But that’s old stuff. Right now it is 2016 and Bumgarner evokes names like Ford and Gibson and Koufax. For me, la guerre est finie. I got no dog in this fight from here on in. I’ve seen all the baseball I want for this lovely surprising gritty season of the Mets. I’m checking up on the Premiership and Serie A, and books, and classical music. Big Al suggests Chopin and Schubert. I’m thinking Dvorak and Bartok. As we said in Brooklyn, wait til next year. (Your comments on the game and 2016 are welcome; my earlier premonitions of gloom and doom are below.) Brian Savin asks if I have any thoughts about the Mets in the wild-card game Wednesday. Oh, yes, doctor, I have thoughts. I also have fear and trembling on this 65th anniversary of something terrible. It happens every October, when I feel that something terrible is going to happen in a ball park near me. I mean, it’s only baseball terrible. Henrich terrible. Thomson terrible. Sojo terrible. Molina terrible. This has nothing to do with Syndergaard vs. Bumgarner, Mets vs. SF Giants. They are on their own and will perform what they perform. I am talking about the miasma of gloom that hangs over an old, I mean old, Brooklyn Dodger fan at this time of year. Let’s start with Oct. 5, 1949, first game of the World Series (still played in sunlight, before the current long march toward freaking November.) I race home from school, turn on the radio, just in time for the bottom of the ninth, and Tommy Henrich blasts a homer off Don Newcombe, first and only run of the day. Traumatic? And not just me. Let us fast forward half a century or so. My good friend and Newsday colleague Steve Jacobson is typing in the press room of Yankee Stadium on old-timers day. He sees Tommy Henrich, still spry, heading toward the men’s room. Steve accuses Henrich of ruining his childhood with that home run. From that point on, Steve laments, he could no longer study, and therefore had to drift into the sordid life of sports columnist. “Tough shit,” Henrich says genially. “What were you going to be, a doctor?” (Perfect Noo Yawk inflections and gestures.) And like a man taking a trot around the bases, Henrich continues to the men’s room. Next stop: Oct. 3, 1951. I am in shop class in junior high. The teacher lets us put on the radio. My Dodgers have a lead on the annoying New York Giants in the third game of a playoff for the pennant. A classmate, a Yankee fan, says, “I can’t imagine how you will come to school tomorrow if the Dodgers lose.” I take the subway home. Bobby Thomson hits a home run. Perhaps you have heard of it. I go to school the next day. Giants fans and Yankee fans jeer at me. The only good that comes of it is Don DeLillo’s great “Pafko at the Wall” segment of the otherwise murky (to me) novel, “Underworld.” Later, the New York Mets will be formed, and the collective angst of the Dodgers and Giants will be infused into the Mets’ DNA. The Mets will know glory in October, but also despair, as in 2000 when Yankee fans outnumber Mets fans for World Series games in Shea Stadium and Luis Sojo dribbles a crushing hit up the middle, and in 2006 when Yadier Molina hits a two-run homer as the Cardinals beat the Mets for the pennant. Now my friend asks if I have any thoughts about the Mets’ game on Wednesday. This has been one of the most enjoyable baseball seasons I have ever had, with the Mets playing beyond all hopes and expectations in the final six weeks or so. I will always glory in Granderson and TJ Rivera, Cabrera and Familia, and the prodigal son Reyes. But I am writing this on the 65th anniversary of Bobby Thomson. The game will be played on the 67th anniversary of Tommy Henrich. I have thoughts. I didn’t remember, until a nice guy named Bob sent me a link that noted the 75th anniversary of Stan Musial’s first game, Sept. 17, 1941.
This reminded me that baseball -- for all the steroids and designated hitters and the deafening blare of ball-park commercials – is pretty much the same game. Teams battle all season, and then in September new boys come along to alter the pennant race. You never know. In New York this week, the Mets won a game because an obscure callup named T.J. Rivera, out of the Bronx, hit a home run, and the Yankees almost won a game as a recently dismissed hitter named Billy Butler flew across the country to drive in runs in his first game. Shades of Stan Musial, now known as a career .331 hitter but in 1941 not known at all, even in St. Louis. He was just a kid called up from Rochester because a few Cardinals were hurt as the team tried to catch the Brooklyn Dodgers. My Brooklyn Dodgers. I was 2, but I was rooting. Years later, our fans would dub him “Stan the Man.” He moidered us, but we loved him all the same. Nobody knew him when he came up. There was no web-o-sphere, no blab-o-sphere. He just showed up in St. Louis, as ordered, took the uniform No. 6 (he was not a star prospect, but the uniform was available) and in the second game of a doubleheader he tried to hit Jim Tobin, a pitcher known as Abba-Dabba because his knuckleball fluttered with occult mystery. Musial popped up the first time but then calibrated for a double and single and two runs-batted in. The Cardinals didn’t catch the Dodgers, but Musial pretty much hit like that right through 1963. The Boston Braves’ manager, named Charles Dillon Stengel, was so jealous of the new talent that he kept telling people, “They got another one,” or words to that effect. Thus was born one of baseball’s most beautiful bromances, two men who positively adored each other for life, but never got to work together. The Cardinals loved the kid’s swing, and decided they shouldn’t run him out of the batting cage, the way veterans did. On a subsequent train ride, Terry Moore, one of the great baseball captains, sat next to Musial in the parlor car and asked him who he was, and Musial said he was the lefty whom the varsity had bombarded in a spring-camp game. Right, he started the year as a rag-arm pitcher. It’s all in the biography I did about Musial, “Stan Musial, an American Life,” published in 2011. Musial passed in January of 2013 and I wrote about him in the Times -- the 475 homers, the exact same batting average at home and on the road, the friendship with John F. Kennedy, the identification with his hard-times home town, Donora, Pa., and his adopted home of St. Louis, where he could be his aw-shucks self. Players still come up in September and perhaps affect pennant races, but not necessarily anybody quite like Stan the Man. * * * Musial’s first box score: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1941/B09172SLN1941.htm The link in the web site of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: https://stltoday.newspapers.com/clip/4562936/sept_17_1941_stan_musials_first/ Never have I appreciated defense in baseball as much as I do this season.
Watching Asdrubal Cabrera – why did I know nothing about him until this year? – cavort at shortstop (and in the dugout) has been an absolute treat. (Parenthetically, I am enjoying the mere fact of Gary Sanchez, without even having the time or psychic energy for the Yankees.) What a fun September for both New York teams, no matter how they ultimately do in their wild-card pursuits – action every day, scoreboard-watching every day, crowding out U.S. Open tennis and soccer and any other sports that might happen to be in season. * * * Saturday Update: Defense played a huge role Friday night as Mets did it again in Atlanta -- down, 4-0, winning, 6-4, with some defense from an improbable source. Skipper Collins used Loney and Flores in logical switches and needed a first baseman in the eighth. Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez were curious who would get the call – and it was Eric Campbell, in the minors since the end of May. Never known for defense, Campbell stopped one smash in the eighth and another smash in the ninth – “protecting the line in the late innings,” as Hernandez often says. Campbell is a big guy out of Boston College with a nice attitude, crowded out by more talented players. He saved a game. With his glove. Will we remember those plays in October, or next year? * * * Cabrera has been a revelation all year. People are saying how much José Reyes has revitalized the Mets, but in my opinion the Mets were already a better team with Cabrera at shortstop this season. They have currently won nine of 11 after the comeback Friday. I have not seen the Mets improve so drastically on defense since 1964 (How’s that for dropping a season on you?) when Roy McMillan came over from the Braves. Suddenly, balls that got through for two-plus seasons were being handled smoothly. The Mets still finished last, but they were, finally, respectable, at times. I never paid much attention to Cabrera in his peregrinations from Cleveland to Washington to Tampa Bay. There are lots of Cabreras and lots of shortstops. But from the first day, he has been terrific. Recently, Cabrera he gilded his hair. Nice touch. He hits and fields and has appointed himself the greeting committee when a teammate else hits a home run, lifting the helmet off the slugger’s head. And when it is Cabrera who hit the homer, René Rivera does the honors. Rivera is a career backup, so good defensively that he has been assigned to a quorum of starters. What a joy to watch him throw to second, call signals, take control of jittery pitchers. Cabrera and Rivera are part of the Latinization of the Mets, a very positive sign, from players who know and respect and love the game. They are leaders the way David Wright and Michael Cuddyer were last year. Cabrera leads his own way. He acknowledges the fans, a great idea in Big Town. In one game, he made a catch near the stands and patted the head of a kid in the first row. In another game, he backed up Reyes on a tricky roller past third, and dove to third base, beating the runner. When Cabrera came out for the next inning, my grown son, sitting behind third, applauded, and Cabrera understood it was for him, and tipped his cap, showing all of that golden hair. The man is not a hot dog, in ball player parlance, but he certainly is a master draftsman, with a flair. The Mets have also improved at first base with James Loney and second with Neal Walker until his back went out. You could make the case that Reyes is better at third base than the gallant Wright. Plus, Terry Collins, the dandy little manager, is now one of the best managers the Mets have ever had. This team has never quit on Collins. Never. I personally quit at least twice this season. Now the Mets are winning with starters up from the minor leagues. I thank Cabrera and his dugout mates for another long and enjoyable season. Our son was moonlighting as an assistant clubhouse man one summer in Peoria, Ill., where he went to college and worked for the Journal-Star. (He’s got lots of good stories about shagging flies when Jim Thome was visiting his home town, and chatting with Jimmy Piersall, the roving scout.)
One day the Appleton team bus arrived after a long haul from Wisconsin, and Dave was impressed that the young bonus baby sprang for pizza for the entire team. It was not hard to be impressed with Alex Rodriguez. The Appleton hitting coach collected opposing ball caps, so Dave said he would trade one for an A-Rod ball. They walked into the visitors' clubhouse and the coach had A-Rod sign. Dave still has it, on an official Midwest League ball – clearly from A-Rod’s first pro season. I emailed Dave the other day and said, the ball’s value has gone up. * * * Our older daughter, Laura Vecsey, became a sports columnist in Seattle as A-Rod arrived later in 1994, a slender kid with power. Nobody predicted 696 homers – but maybe 500? He couldn’t miss. They got along, in a quirky kind of way, with A-Rod treating her like an older sister. He had mood swings, sometimes chatty, sometimes silent. When his contract was up, he insisted that his next move would not be predicated on money, but rather on comfort level, on loyalty, both ways. When he signed with the Texas Rangers, Laura reflected the attitude of that lovely city that had fallen so hard for A-Rod. She gave him a new nickname - Pay-Rod. He did not much like that. * * * He could have led Seattle to the World Series but Texas was the wrong place for him. He jumped to the Yankees after three years, sticking a conversational shiv between the shoulders of his erstwhile pal, Derek Jeter. By this time, Laura and he were talking again. “Dad,” she said, “he’s always asking what it was like to have a father in the same business. He doesn’t have a father. You ought to talk to him.” She was talking about possible access to A-Rod – all journalists think like this – but she was also talking about a human being who, she felt, was trying to learn, to grow. That spring in Yankee camp, I introduced myself to A-Rod, and we chatted for a while. Nobody is fooled about this dance, but I was always looking to write about the human side of players. When adults like Bob Watson and Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira came to the Yankees, I enjoyed learning about them. In the early days of the first season, I was walking in the narrow corridors of the old Yankee Stadium, long before a game. A-Rod was walking toward me, nobody else around. I smiled, said hello. He never made eye contact. Just kept walking. Oh-kay. It was a small thing, but it told me he was in his world, I was in mine, and adult politeness was not part of the equation. I never did see him open up in New York. Sometimes he pretended to open up, but he had too many secrets. His teammates seemed happy for him when he finally helped win a World Series in 2009, but I could not help noticing the disdain Derek Jeter let slip in spring training of 2009, when reporters came around to ask about A-Rod’s latest apology for drug usage. “One thing that irritates me is that this was the steroid era,” Jeter said. “I don’t know how many people tested positive, but everybody wasn’t doing it.” Jeter casually said he had been counseled by his parents as he was growing up. “You’re educated,” he said, adding, “If you do some things, eventually the truth will come out.” Jeter is not the type to let his feelings show. This time they did. My feelings about Alex Rodriguez as he retires from the Yankees? I hope he will be all right. |
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