Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Mets Mood Swings – With No Swing At All

4/9/2021

Conforto gear for next game. Via Offspring 1

The daily rollercoaster of emotions continues for the Amazing Mets.
The Mets won a game Thursday when Michael Conforto’s arm happened to be extended into the strike zone, with the bases loaded, just in the right place to get pinged – for a game-winning run.
Some people who know the game very well – including a relative of mine -- think it was a bush stunt by Conforto – cheating, in fact.

I'm not condoning cheating -- like the Astros a few years ago, or doctoring the balls, or the bats. But I do accept "gamesmanship" -- a soccer goalie "cheating" off the line for a penalty kick, or a batter taking his chances with letting a pitch hit him.

I learned the game from 1962 on, in the company of Casey Stengel, as he managed The Worst Team in the History of Baseball.
Casey's first young star with the Mets was Ron Hunt, tough country boy and master of getting hit by pitches.
Casey knew the odds were stacked against the Mets. He said the umpires “screw us because we are lousy,” only he said it more graphically.
So his Mets had to do something. He had a club rule – anybody who got hit by a pitch with the bases loaded would make $50.
On May 12, 1963, Rod Kanehl, scrappy itinerant, took one for the team – and for his wallet – by managing to get hit by the Reds, scoring (NB: delightful Mets names about to appear) Tim Harkness, with Jim Hickman moving to third and Choo Choo Coleman moving to second. It is said that Rod virtually skipped on his way to first, laughing at the manna from heaven, or Casey, either way.

How much would $50 be today? Kanehl’s protégé in 1964 was Bill Wakefield, rookie pitcher. Being a Stanford guy, Wakefield crunched the numbers the other day and figured the windfall for his late pal would be worth between $600-750 today. “We were all making $7K - $10K a year,” Wakefield wrote.
Plus, the Mets went on to win the game, no small achievement then, or ever.

Casey’s belief that you gotta do something was not lost on Ron Hunt, who used to wear floppy flannel jerseys a size or two big, so they would hang out and absorb a pitch. Hunt even dared the fates by getting hit by Bob Gibson, the surliest pitcher in the universe, and proud of it. Hunt went on to set a modern record by getting hit 50 times in 1971 (for Montreal.)

Being around scrappers like Hunt and Kanehl and enablers like The Old Man, I still think it is part of the game to bend the rules until the umps wise up. One ump who may have wised up by now is Ron Kulpa, who ruled Conforto was legitimately hit, and the game was over, but later admitted Conforto had his arm in the strike zone and should have been called out. (Every sportswriter in American promptly dubbed him Mea Kulpa, obviously.)
Having been around tough birds like Casey, Hunt, Kanehl and Gibson, I have some advice for the admirable Michael Conforto: in the next two games against Miami, you just might want to hang loose.
* * *
PS: Talk about mood swings: the Mets were down, 2-1, going into the bottom of the ninth. Howe Rose, on Mets radio, said he knows the mindset of Jeff McNeil, intense second baseman (when management leaves him alone) who was hitless in his first 10 at-bats this season. Take it from an old-timer, McNeil has some Rod Kanehl and Ron Hunt in him. Howie Rose said McNeil would try to pull a home run -- which he did, tying the game, prompting a celebratory bat flip, seen as bad form by opponents these days, Soon came Conforto's bases-loaded heroics. If I were McNeil, I also might want to hang loose in the next two games.
* * *
Rod Kanehl’s $50 plunking in 1963:
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1963/B05122NYN1963.htm

Lovely profile of Ron Hunt:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-year-ron-hunt-got-hit-by-50-pitches/

Casey Stengel on Ron Hunt: "Whaddaya want him to do, tiptoe up to home plate and get tagged out?"

ahron horowitz

4/10/2021 10:24:00 pm

george-beautiful.i also thought that conforto and mcneil should hang loose.was at a weekday day game at the polo grounds that harkness won with a 270 foot grand slam.

George Vecsey

4/11/2021 05:25:30 pm

Ahron: I was there, Weekday day game....hot...I had mowed the lawn in the AM and got there before gametime at the Polo Grounds, I can still see Harkness -- nice guy -- outside the clubhouse in deep CF, waving to the fans. The PG was nuts for those two years. I feel that it's still there somehow. GV

ahron horowitz

4/11/2021 06:56:22 pm

george-i was a 15 year old in that crowd he was waving to.i can pick myself out of the crowd in the next seasons yearbook.

Mendel

4/12/2021 01:52:14 am

http://studiousmetsimus.blogspot.com/2015/02/one-mo-met-in-time-tim-harkness.html?m=1

Ed Martin

4/11/2021 01:20:58 pm

Sigh! Mets shut out, DeGrom 8 innings, one ERA, (previous discussion). Meanwhile four Met starters are batting under the Mendoza line, and another at .211. The all star, superstar, team saver is one of them!

As we Quakers say, “OY!”

George

4/11/2021 05:30:32 pm

Yes, that is an old Quaker saying. Our grandson, maybe 4- or 5, was in a grocery store with his mom outside Harrisburg, PA -- and he used the word "schmutz." Somebody laughed appreciatively -- our daughter didn't know if the person was familiar with Yiddish or Pennsylvania Dutch, or both., What a great country!

Mike from NW Queens

4/11/2021 02:20:20 pm

Did Conforto get Mo Vaughans old locker? He dresses like him on the field with that forearm gear.
Battle gear.
He forgot his lumber yesterday.
Poor Jacob too.

Thanks as always for the nostalgia GV.

George

4/11/2021 05:38:59 pm

Mike, I had forgotten Vaughn's armor ....but they're not the only ones, I covered the 2002 WS, Giants and Angels, and Barry Bonds was dressed like some warrior in "Monty Python" -- armor everywhere,
Funny thing, nobody hit him in 7 games of the Series and only 9 times during the season. He was such a presence -- dominating each at-bat with his menacing swing and focused presence -- not my favorite, but at the peak -- and he looked imposing with the pads everywhere, as I recall.

Mendel

4/11/2021 03:34:46 pm

George Costanza: "It's not a lie if you believe it."

George Vecsey

4/11/2021 05:41:14 pm

Mendel: It is a good Talmudic question: which is worse: believing something or not believing but saying it anyway? GV

4/11/2021 05:07:36 pm

I have this vague memory od someone saying, “if it had hit him on the head, it wouldnt have hurt him,” but cant find it. Anybody else?

In searching I looked at Babe Herman, who was wonderful at bat, but not much in the field. One statement he used about himself on how to identify him, “hit three flyballs to the outfield, if he cathces them its not me.”

Altenir Silva

4/13/2021 09:09:04 pm

Dear George: Thank you very much for bringing these amazing baseball stories. Your texts increase my love for baseball. I never get tired to read and reread.
Be well/Altenir

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the great Maureen Dowd:

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

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

Mets Mood Swings – With No Swing At All

Categories

Buy the Book