Quote of the Day (Kellogg’s 1934 ‘Baseball’ Guide, With Fielding Advice That the Dodgers Can Use)

“Good outfielders will tell you not to be too tense. If your wrists and hands are rigid you’ll increase your chances of fumbling. Be relaxed when you catch the ball.”—“How to Catch a Ball,” Kellogg’s “Baseball” Guide (1934)

I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me last week the 1934 Kellogg “Baseball” guide you see here. I had just finished writing a post about Jimmie Foxx, and the guide took me back to the world of the Philadelphia A’s and Boston Red Sox slugger of the Thirties. The tips in this pamphlet offered the kind of advice from him and other future Cooperstown greats that American boys would have received at the time.

It was comforting to discover that, before designated hitters, armies of relief pitchers, and sluggers advised by hitting coaches not to worry too much about strikeouts if they could put the ball out of the park, some elements of the game of the past have managed to carry over.

After last night’s game, I’m sure that Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts might have wanted to get the above passage into the hands of centerfielder Chris Taylor. With only one strike to go to secure victory and a 3-1 World Series advantage, Taylor and Dodgers catcher Will Smith committed a cascading series of errors that frightened their fans with what one Twitter user termed “a double Buckner”—a reference to the Red Sox first baseman unfairly tagged the goat of the 1986 World Series for a ball that skidded through his legs.

Maybe the Boys in Blue will recover and this set of defensive miscues occurring in a mere 10 seconds will be forgotten in the ensuing era of good feeling. But if the Dodgers don’t win the series, expect Roberts to be put on the same “Win This Year or Else” clock that Aaron Boone is on following his deeply problematic pitching strategy in Game 2 of the American League Divisional Series with the Tampa Bay Rays.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Boswell, On the Nats’ ‘Touchstone Emotional Moment’ for DC)

“Until a city with a big league team holds a World Series, it doesn’t really know what it means to have baseball in its city — not fully. The sport returned to Washington in 2005. But only now…is the sport in its fullest form finally back….I suspect this World Series, regardless of result, will be our touchstone emotional moment: ‘Washington, meet baseball.’”— American sportswriter Thomas Boswell, “After 86 years, Anything Can Happen,” Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2019

Flashback, October 1919: ‘Black Sox’ Scandal Marks Change in Baseball

When the Cincinnati Reds won their best-of-nine in the World Series against the Chicago White Sox, few fans could have imagined that the contest would still be remembered a century later. But then again, few would have thought that America’s Pastime could be tarnished by gamblers and players willing to “throw” the games.

The “Black Sox” scandal, for all intents and purposes, represents a dividing line between early baseball and how it would be played throughout the rest of the 20^th century. Baseball had been touched by gambling before, but never had a substantial part of any team been so complicit nor the stakes so high.

A full narrative of this black mark on the game is beyond the scope of a limited blog post such as this one. Suffice it to say that it richly earned the description by Douglass Wallop, best known for the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (quickly adapted into the hit Broadway musical Damn Yankees): “a labyrinth, an incredible maze of double-crosses upon double-crosses, of broken promises, of guileless stupidity among the players, of artful, cruel deceit among those who manipulated them—gamblers, baseball executives, and public officials alike."

Not long after the end of the series, White Sox owner Charles Comisky got wind of the scheme. But rather than dismantle a potentially championship squad, he only chose to punish the plot’s ringleader on the team, Chick Gandil, by him a contract without a raise. The others in on the scheme were also offered raises, with three—including the team’s best hitter, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson—given large ones.

Long-festering suspicions, initially fanned by Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, were given renewed force late in the 1920 season, when another betting scandal on a meaningless August Chicago Cubs-Philadelphia Phillies game prompted an inquiry into events from the year before. After weeks of stories that violated the cardinal rule of grand-jury secrecy, indictments were handed down against the eight players that the press had taken to calling “the Black Sox.”

By that time, the scandal compelled team owners previously reluctant to act against gamblers on their teams lest it harm their squads to establish the office of commissioner, or “czar,” of baseball to reestablish trust in the game. For the next two decades, the job was filled by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge highly regarded for his integrity who also happened to be a Chicago Cubs fan.

The acquittal of the Chicago eight might have led other people to reinstate them, however reluctantly. But expulsions of players in the minor-league Pacific Coast League in another betting scandal—individuals who had also escaped conviction—gave Landis the precedent he needed to banish the Black Sox for life.

Landis’ stated religious and political views predisposed him against anyone involved with gambling, but ambiguous circumstances could allow him room to maneuver. After credible reports emerged that future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker had conspired to throw a game between their teams in 1919, Landis ruled that the pitcher making the accusation was driven by a personal grudge, and Cobb and Speaker were allowed to finish their careers. It is interesting to note, however, that neither player—each blessed with considerable knowledge of the game—ever served in their retirement as either a manager or front-office executive.

Owners might have sometimes chaffed against the complete autonomy they had been forced to give Landis when they hired him, but his integrity allowed the game to benefit from the explosion of interest in the game that followed the emergence of Babe Ruth as an everyday slugger. After his death, none of his successors would be allowed to operate so independently, and the commissioner’s office increasingly became a tool of the owners.

The fallout of the scandal was such that betting on baseball—and, by extension, association with gamblers—became, in effect, the specter haunting the sport. Just how damaging that could be was seen in 1989, when Pete Rose ended up banned from the sport for betting on the team he managed, the Cincinnati Reds.

Even before that, the baseball community shuddered when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended the Detroit Tigers’ Denny McLain for half the season for participating in a bookmaking operation. 

Kuhn’s statement to the contrary, it also appeared that the outcome of the 1967 American League campaign—a pennant race in which the Tigers lost to the Boston Red Sox—may have been affected when a mobster broke the two-time Cy Young Award winner’s toes, sidelining him for the crucial last few weeks of the season.

The cultural impact of the “Black Sox” scandal was also considerable. Since the late 1980s, audiences have focused squarely on the tarnished World Series through two film adaptations: John Sayles’ Eight Men Out (from a nonfiction account by Eliot Asinof) and Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams (from W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe).

But two earlier novels used these controversial games as a symbol of the corruption of American innocence. Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1952), ends with Roy Hobbs not only striking out with the pennant on the line, but also with slugger being greeted outside a courthouse by a street urchin with “Say it ain’t so, Roy”—an unmistakable echo of another real-life youngster who begged the White Sox’s Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The name of Hobbs’ team, the New York Knights, hints at the mythological overtones of Malamud’s modern allegory. Hobbs is consumed by a quest, a dream, as is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Not long after making the acquaintance of his new neighbor, narrator Nick Carraway is startled when this “elegant young roughneck” tells him privately that the eccentric figure to whom he has just been introduced is “the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”

Carraway’s mind boggles at the thought: “I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people —with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”

Meyer Wolfsheim, the character who sparks these thoughts, was based on Arnold Rothstein, a New York underworld figure who denied any connection to the World Series fix. While Fitzgerald surely would have banked on the association that astute readers of the time would have made between the real and fictional characters, he was also after larger game.

After all, if a game created on a beautiful field could be tarnished, what chance for the “transitory vision” of the New World glimpsed by Dutch sailors in the novel’s elegiac conclusion?

Photo of the Day: Mets Central, Gone Too Soon

Listening to the World Series this weekend, I heard one of the announcers say that in terms of sheer emotion, it could only compare with the 2001 Fall Classic—and that, of course, was, as much as anything, a primal scream, from a New York painfully wounded, for the Yankees to win just one more game, somehow, as if to blunt the still-searing pain of 9/11.

The New York Mets’ improbable push for the World Series championship this year had a different emotional dynamic, of course—the desire to attain a title not achieved since 1986. But I wanted to capture the moment, and the bold, brassy exterior of the Tonic Bar in Times Square offered that opportunity, in the form of this photo, this past Saturday.

At first, what came to mind about the ending of this series and this season was the famous essay “The Green Fields of the Mind,” by the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

But as I read on, another, less well-known—but perhaps more appropriate—thought from that same meditation summed up how I, as a Yankee fan, felt 14 years ago, and how —God bless ‘em!—hundreds of thousands of Mets fans have felt over the last 24 hours, watching two games slip away in extra innings: “how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another.”

See you in the spring, when the “sunshine and high skies” come alive again.

Photo of the Day: Mazmatazz!

I think I can identify with that sinking feeling that many Pittsburgh Pirate fans possess right now. It’s similar to what I felt in October 2004 during the American League Championship Series, when the New York Yankees, with a chance to take the series at home with a decent starter, lost Game 6 and were faced with a difficult pitching choice. For the ’04 Yankees, it was Kevin Brown. For this year’s Pirates, it was—almost--A.J. Burnett—who, come to think of it, the Bronx Bombers allowed to depart at the end of his contract two years ago, because he didn’t come up big enough often enough.

This year, though, Pirate fans might be thinking of another name associated with the Yankees: Bill Mazeroski.  No, obviously, he did not play for the Bronx team, but he broke their hearts in the most dramatic way possible: with the only walkoff home run in Game 7 of a World Series.

“Maz” was a peerless second baseman—some say the best defensive one of all time, with eight Gold Gloves to his credit. But more often than not, it takes a bat—even a bat wielded under the most dramatic circumstances—to make the case for greatness to Hall of Fame voters, and that may well have been the case here.

I have written before about photos I took this past July of three other statues of Pirate Hall of Famers at PNC Park: Honus Wagner, Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente. But the Mazeroski statue stands out among this quartet. While the other images capture their heroes in moments that could have occurred at any time in their careers, local sculptor Susan Wagner’s bronze likeness of the second baseman captures Maz in the great moment of his life, when his ninth-inning swing off reliever Ralph Terry beat the greatest dynasty in professional sports, an overwhelming favorite in the series.

At 5 ft. 11 inches, Mazeroski was of average height, But an indelible moment, captured with a camera, can make you appear larger than life, and so the great Pirate is here: 14 feet, 2,000 pounds, arms fully extended in triumph, waiting to jump into the ecstatic arms of his champion teammates.

It must have been tough, but I’m glad that Pirate manager Clint Hurdle dispensed with the services of Burnett in this do-or-die game. The assumption on the part of many seemed to be that, at age 36, with eight postseason appearances in six different series, Burnett would be a seasoned vet. But his earned run average in those starts was a whopping 6.37, and the big right-hander admitted that, on the field of the St. Louis Cardinals in the opening game of this series, he had been too emotional before he finally unraveled.

Gerrit Cole might be a rookie, all of 23, but that shouldn’t be a handicap: He did perfectly well against the Cardinals in Game 2. Besides, Mazeroski was only a year older when he unleashed his mighty swing.

Flashback, September 1968: Gibson Gem Caps Career Year on Mound

St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson capped a career year for himself—and major-league pitchers in general—by blanking the Houston Astros 1-0, at Busch Stadium on September 27, 1968—his 13^th shutout of the season, the first time a National Leaguer had recorded that many since 1916.

This same season, Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers set a consecutive-innings scoreless streak record (surpassed by Orel Hersheiser 20 years later); Denny McLain became the last 30-game winner to date; and Juan Marichal, in a relatively forgotten performance, won 26 games while pitching 328 innings. But it was Gibson’s statistical and psychological dominance that made 1968 “the Year of the Pitcher.” He not only was a unanimous winner of the NL Cy Young Award, but also won the Most Valuable Player award.

For an idea of the great right-hander at this personal peak, you can start with this excerpt from a 1980 Roger Angell profile, “Distance,” in The New Yorker:

“Everything about him looked mean and loose—arms, elbows, shoulders, even his legs—as, with a quick little shrug, he launched into his delivery. When there was no one on base, he had an old-fashioned full crank-up, with the right foot turning in mid-motion to slip into its slot in front of the mound and his long arms coming together over his head before his backward lean, which was deep enough to require him to peer over his left shoulder at his catcher while his upraised left leg crooked and kicked. The ensuing sustained forward drive was made up of a medium-sized stride of that leg and a blurrily fast, sling-like motion of the right arm, which came over at about three-quarters height and then snapped down and (with the fastball and slider) across his left knee.”

The picture accompanying this post completes the motion. The force of the follow-through has not only taken Gibson off his feet, but well toward third base—seemingly way out of position to field a bunt. But that proved increasingly unlikely, not only because the ball, like so many others he hurled around this time, is at the high end of the strike zone and blindingly fast, but because the pitcher was a nine-time Gold Glove Award winner, not to mention a superb athlete who had been a Harlem Globetrotter before he settled on baseball as his profession.

This is what the 32-year-old pitcher looked like on the mound. What it leaves out is the view from the plate, where one batter after another meekly waved his bat at pitches. In fact, it might be said that while everyone else in the park was playing baseball, Gibson excelled at Fear Factor.

There was, for instance, his competitive streak—highly pronounced in any major leaguer, utterly ineradicable in him. "I've played a couple of hundred games of tic-tac-toe with my little daughter and she hasn't beaten me yet,” Gibson told Angell. “I've always had to win. I've got to win." Seventeen years after hanging up his spikes, Gibson sent a brushback pitch against Reggie Jackson in an Old-Timers Game. It didn't escape anyone's notice that at the same event the year before, Mr. October had hit a home run off him. Even now, the proud old Cardinal couldn't bear to be shown up.

That desire also fed on fierce pride (even teammates didn’t offer encouragement on the mound, lest he scare them away), resentment over racism still experienced by most black athletes in the civil-rights era, and a Darwinian instinct for survival of the fittest. If you were seeking a competitive edge against Gibson by crowding the plate, you could expect a fastball boring in you. Who did you think you were? He owned the corners of the plate.

If you celebrated after a homer, the outcome would be even more dangerous. Today, if they had the unenviable task of facing Gibson, instead of watching their handiwork sail over the fence, David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez would be on their rear ends—and thankful that was the only thing to happen to them. "When I knocked a guy down, there was no second part to the story," Gibson remembered.

Remember the score of this particular victory: 1-0. Many pitchers today would want to sue for such lack of run support. But a single run was often all Gibson needed to get the job done, because in 24 of his 34 starts, he allowed zero runs or only one run. His earned run average for 1968—1.12, the second-lowest ever in the National League--became one of the best-remembered baseball stats of the 20^th century. Over 99 innings in June and July, he allowed only two runs. The Cardinals weren’t a hard-hitting team, but each time he took the mound he gave them another shot of repeating as NL champs.

In addition, Gibson was about to extend his mastery into October. In his first start in the World Series, he made the Detroit Tigers look very foolish as he recorded 17 strikeouts.     

Gibson was truly King of the Mound in 1968, and in the off-season the lords of baseball monkeyed with the rules to ensure that neither he nor any other pitcher would reign with such dominance again, lowering the pitching mound from 15 to 10 inches.   

There is yet another sense in which we’ll never see his like again: Gibson set the mood and the pace for games that year. He never dawdled or agonized on the mound, demanding balls back immediately from catchers—and, partly because, after several years, he had learned to throw the curve almost as well as his fastball and slider, he wasn’t about to beat himself with walks, either. The result: fans and players could enjoy a great afternoon game and be done by 3:30, in plenty of time for other activities.

In recent years, Gibson seethed when he would be held up as an exemplar of winning through intimidation for modern pitchers. (And well he might: in the case of Roger Clemens and who knows how many others, their headhunting tendencies derived at least partly from the aggression fueled by performance-enhancing drugs, not from following any markers laid down by a classic pitcher.)

They missed the larger point: Gibson entered Cooperstown in 1981 because he refused to be conquered by adversity. As a ghetto child whose father died before he was born, he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. His career was repeatedly threatened: by a fractured leg (1962), severely damaged elbow (1966), broken other leg (1967). In the deciding game of the 1964 World Series, he was running on fumes in the last couple of innings against the New York Yankees, but he gutted out the complete-game victory. In explaining why he did not resort to a reliever—a move today’s managers would have made without a second’s thought—manager Johnny Keane gave one of the best tributes ever made to a champion: “I had a commitment to his heart.”