Quote of the Day (Babe Ruth, on Baseball, ‘The Only Real Game in the World’)

“The only real game in the world, I think, is baseball.”—Baseball Hall of Famer Babe Ruth (1895-1948), speech to the crowd at Yankee Stadium on “Babe Ruth Day,” April 27, 1947

Seventy-five years ago today, for only the second time in history, all clubs in major-league baseball honored a single individual: Babe Ruth. The event was deeply poignant, because the mighty slugger had come down with cancer.

The center of activity that day was, appropriately enough, Yankee Stadium. Though The Babe had left the Bronx Bombers with his managerial ambitions unfulfilled, the stadium remained indisputably “The House That Ruth Built,” the site of his major feats as an everyday player.

“Babe Ruth Day” would not be the last time Ruth would visit the stadium—he’d be back a little over a year later, when his number was retired—but many of the more than 58,000 in attendance in April 1947 sensed that the end was drawing near for their hero, as the once-powerful hitter was helped to home plate.

If there was any doubt about his condition, Ruth removed it quickly. It remains shocking, if you click on the above link, to hear him rasping, “You know how bad my voice sounds. Well, it feels just as bad.”

But then, Ruth started speaking about the two things that had brought out the best in him as a player: youth and the game of baseball.

A classic at-risk youngster, Ruth credited his life being turned around after he’d been taught the fundamentals of baseball by Brother Matthias of St. Mary’s Industrial Training School, a Baltimore educational institution primarily for boys with behavioral issues. "If it wasn't for baseball,” he once said, “I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery."

And now, Ruth told the crowd—and the lords of baseball—the right way and time to instruct youngsters in the game:

“As a rule, people think that if you give boys a football or a baseball or something like that, they naturally become athletes right away. But you can't do that in baseball. You got to start from way down, at the bottom, when the boys are six or seven years of age. You can't wait until they're 14 or 15. You got to let it grow up with you, if you're the boy.”

Over time, I’m afraid, baseball has forgotten the lesson that The Babe was trying to teach that day. There are so many other sports today competing for attention. How can young fans become attached to baseball when so many games are held at night and last so long?

Tweet of the Day (Chipper Jones, on Hank Aaron’s ‘Class and Integrity’)

“I can’t imagine what Hank Aaron went through in his lifetime. He had every right to be angry or militant.....but never was! He spread his grace on everything and every one he came in contact with. Epitome of class and integrity. RIP Henry Aaron! #HammerinHank”—Former Atlanta Braves All-Star third baseman Chipper Jones, tweet of Jan 22, 2021

I agree with this well-meaning tribute by Chipper Jones to fellow Braves great Hank Aaron, except for that second sentence. The African-American slugger was indeed “angry” about the torrential abuse rained on him by bigots for breaking Babe Ruth’s career record for home runs.

Wouldn’t you be, if the FBI needed to investigate death threats against you and kidnapping threats against members of your family?

Wouldn’t you be, if you had obeyed one of the cardinal rules of American society—to succeed, work hard—only to grasp that for countless unseen cowards, this was not enough?

Wouldn’t you be if, decades after praising two of your heroes (Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella) for proving to the world that “a man’s ability is only limited by his lack of opportunity,” major-league baseball was still making painfully slow progress in placing minorities in managerial and front-office positions?

It would have been more correct for Jones to tweet, then, that Aaron was not as angry as he had every right to have been about the rancid racism he experienced for decades. 

I not only, like Jones, “can’t imagine” what Aaron went through, but how he restrained himself from saying anything more scathing about John Rocker’s 1999 Sports Illustrated interview than that he had “no place in my heart” for the prejudiced pitcher's infamous comments about gays and minorities.

In other respects, Jones is correct: Aaron did epitomize grace, class and integrity—and so much more. Though physically gifted (the young Alfonso Soriano was praised for strong, quick wrists that reminded many of “Hammerin’ Hank”), he realized it wasn’t enough.

This meant that, as teammate Dusty Baker told the New York Daily News’ Jesse Spector in 2007, Aaron exercised “total recall” on how he had fared against every pitcher he ever faced—"line out, walk, all kinds of stuff.”

And so, quietly, without the flair for the moment displayed by contemporaries Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, Aaron mounted his inexorable assault on Ruth’s hallowed career HR record. (By the way: Aaron achieved that mark in an era of pitcher dominance and competition from African- and Hispanic-American players excluded in Ruth’s era—and without the performance-enhancing drugs used by Barry Bonds.)

Along the way, he not only posted other offensive records (most RBIs, total bases, extra-base hits, and All-Star Game appearances) but demonstrated excellence in other aspects of the game, stealing 20 or more bases six times and winning three Gold Gloves for his defensive play in the outfield.

Hank Aaron was enshrined in Cooperstown because of these astounding career totals. But he is universally mourned because he was a model of dignity, dependability and perseverance. I am just sorry for younger fans who, unlike me and others of my generation, were not fortunate enough to see him play.

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on the Awesome Power of ‘The Natural’)

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”— Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952)

This past summer marked the 65^th anniversary of the first novel by Bernard Malamud. When it was turned into a vehicle for Robert Redford in 1984, The Natural was given a happy ending.

I’m normally a stickler for staying as close to original source material as possible, but I didn’t mind in this case. At the time, baseball had been hit with a series of drug scandals. No, not performance-enhancing drugs, but a performance-detracting one: cocaine, which afflicted several members of the Kansas City Royals in the early 1980s and, in 1985, burst out, in even more spectacular fashion, at the Pittsburgh Drug Trials, which ensnared such stars as Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, and Dale Berra.

So, I was in an acquiescent mood in the 1980s when Malamud’s dark warning of the corruption of innocence was turned into the kind of optimistic, life-affirming film that Frank Capra once made. Since then, it has become not only one of my two favorite baseball films (vying with Bull Durham), but also one of my favorite movies, period.

I was surprised, then, as I began to write this post, to discover that, in nearly an entire decade of blogging, I had written only glancingly about The Natural before. One day, perhaps on the 35^th anniversary of its release, I may well write about the movie at the length it deserves.

But the book itself weaves its own magic, and one of the ways it does so, as seen in the quote I used here, is in evoking the mythological aspects of baseball. 

“Wonderboy”— the bat of Roy Hobbs, desperate to make the most of perhaps his only shot at the big leagues—endows the improbable 35-year-old rookie with the same kind of astonishing power that Excalibur afforded King Arthur.  He has, to his team’s amazement, obeyed the offhand command of his manager Pop to “rip the cover off the ball.” Through one swing of the bat, he has changed the entire climate of the game—even the New York “Knights” miserable season to date—with his Thor-like presence.

I thought of Hobbs’ amazing highs and lows in the ensuing season as I followed the fortunes of Aaron Judge (pictured) this year. It’s appropriate that the New York Yankee rookie occupies right field, once the domain of Babe Ruth—perhaps as close to a mythological figure as baseball has ever produced. 

As of this writing, Judge has not only surpassed the major league rookie record for home runs, but also The Bambino’s mark for the most HRs in franchise history at home for a single season. Judge has even been heavily associated with a phrase evocative of the Thor-like Hobbs: “exit velocity.”

Slumping is another way that Judge resembles Hobbs. Malamud is very shrewd on the utter helplessness that the best baseball minds feel in the wake of a slugger’s doldrums, which can consume a contender as much as a power surge can lift them. Judge had his own epic meltdown after the All-Star Game, when Yankee fans such as myself worried that pitchers had discovered and exploited a fatal flaw at the plate.

More recently, Judge has righted himself, resuming something like his home run pace of the first half. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can keep carrying the team (like Hollywood’s Hobbs) or if he will falter in the end (like Malamud’s). Baseball prodigies, like Greek deities, sometimes prove all too humanly fallible in the end.

(Photo of Aaron Judge in a Yankee game against the Baltimore Orioles, taken Sept. 7, 2017, by Keith Allison from Hanover, Md.)

Quote of the Day (Wall Street Journal, Comparing Nelson Cruz and Babe Ruth)

“In 37 career postseason games, [Nelson] Cruz’s production is largely comparable to what [Babe] Ruth did through the first 37 of his 41 career postseason games. Cruz has more home runs (16 to 13), more hits (41 to 37) and more RBI (32 to 27) in only two more plate appearances than Ruth had over the same span.”—Brian Costa, “The Count: Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014

Few articles in The Wall Street Journal—even those editorials that sound like bad leftover musings of Gilded Age plutocrats—have left me sputtering with rage quite as much as the one quoted above. Oh, yes, Costa allows that Babe Ruth was a pretty fair pitcher during the postseason—an accomplishment that Nelson Cruz (pictured) can never hope to duplicate—and, if the writer wanted to explore defense a bit further, he could note that The Bambino, unlike Cruz, not only played the outfield on a regular basis but also that, early in his career, Ruth’s arm made him one of the better corner outfielders in the game.

But no—Costa is leaving out something far more fundamental. The only things that Ruth put into his body that could be considered outside the norm were gargantuan portions of hot dogs and beer. In contrast, Cruz, as every baseball writer knows, was suspended for 50 games in 2013 as part of the Biogenesis performance-enhancing drugs (PED) scandal.

Every baseball writer knows this, but you’d be surprised how few are inclined to bring it up this time of year—in fact, this year at all. The only notable exception I can think of was back in early July. At that point, John Lackey, then still with the Boston Red Sox, and smarting after a pasting (a homer, a double, and a single) given him by the Baltimore Orioles “slugger,” made one of those no-comments-that-say-everything: "I've got nothing to say about him. There are some things I'd like to say, but I'm not going to. You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff."

The media love a controversy as much as anything else, and they couldn’t have been happier when O’s skipper Buck Showalter retaliated with one of his own no-comments-that-say-everything: “Everybody needs to make sure that their own backyard is clean."

Now, sensing a feud, reporters were happy to provide a bit of context: Lackey was making a veiled reference to Cruz’s enforced sitdown, while Showalter had in mind the failed (and mysteriously unexplained and undisciplined) 2003 drug test by Bosox designated hitter David Ortiz.

I’m not a fan of Lackey, who showed class neither in downing fried chicken and beer as his old team choked in manager Terry Francona's last season nor in calling the resulting controversy about it “retarded.” But his sullen no-comment about Cruz was entirely warranted—especially the part about how “You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff." 

This time of year, on the air and in print, it’s all about how Cruz is killing the ball. Players, front offices, and broadcast booths all have vested interests in accepting retiring Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig’s belief that everything is fine on the Good Ship Lollipop, and that nobody would even think of trying to circumvent the sport’s PED ban.

It is unpleasant to think and write this, but who is to say that Cruz is not resorting to PEDs again? Two prominent similar cases of this phenomenon have already occurred, involving Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of A-Rod, the discovery of his continuing involvement with PEDs came not from a positive drug test but because of a lengthy and damning paper trail.

In fact, many of the players detected by the drug program have been minor-leaguers—i.e., too young and stupid to realize that human growth hormone rather than steroids is more likely to boost performance without triggering a positive identification.

You would think, then, given this background, that Costa might have learned the importance of avoiding categorical statements by looking at a past headline from his own paper, back in 2012: “Earth to Tigers: Stop Pitching to Nelson Cruz.”  That was printed at a time when, it is reasonable to believe now, Cruz's blazing postseason performance resulted from a steroid regimen.

When the Texas Rangers decided to part ways with their longtime player following his 2013 suspension, Cruz signed a one-year deal with the Orioles worth $8 million. As a free-agent following a monster year, he can now expect a sizable increase in his contract no matter what team he signs with—a nice bit of change for a player entering his mid-30s. All the more reason, then, why he might choose to go with the odds and try to resort to PEDs again.

Two weeks ago, Costa’s Journal colleague Daniel Barbarisi wrote about the icy treatment he received from Derek Jeter after a tweet that joked about meeting the Yankee icon and his latest glamorous girlfriend, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Davis, in an elevator.  Perhaps Costa dreads a similarly wintry reception from the entire Orioles clubhouse.

But Jeter’s annoyance, however seemingly petty, had a point: his private conduct, unless it was illegal, had no bearing on his on-field performance. The same cannot be said for Cruz: Almost certainly, the past PED use of  “Mohamad” (the nickname for the player on a July 2012 client list kept by Biogenesis head Anthony Bosch) meant that pennants had been decided, careers made or unmade, because of an unfair advantage he possessed.

So, with the Orioles having moved on now to the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals, instead of the media launching the same, boring questions (e.g., “What was on your mind when you stepped to the plate late in the game with guys on base?”), let’s see Cruz answer these questions instead:

*If you are swinging the bat so well now, why did you feel the need to use PEDs in the first place?

*How long had you been using steroids before you were suspended?

*Do you retain ties to anyone who helped you get around the drug-testing program before, as Alex Rodriguez did with his "Cousin Yuri"?

*Did you use steroids in prior playoff appearances? If so, how can we be sure that you aren’t doing it again?

So, back to that article’s question: “Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice.” Really? I mean, you’re kidding, right?

Quote of the Day (Billy Martin, on Being ‘Baseball’s Bad Boy’)

“I've got the reputation for being baseball's bad boy and I don't deserve it. But I think I'd make a good manager. For one thing, I know how to handle men. That's the secret of managing. For another, I know enough about the game, not fundamentals, but executing. I think I could get the most out of players with common sense and psychology. I'm fiery enough that I'd have their respect. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever get the chance and there's nothing in the world that can change that." –Billy Martin, onetime New York Yankees second baseman (and future manager), quoted in Baseball Digest, June 1961

Somehow, I doubt that my maternal grandparents get much eternal rest in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y. It’s mostly because of two other residents of that final resting place who, if they are anything like what they were in life, are kicking up a ruckus. One was Babe Ruth; the other, Billy Martin, born on this date (as Alfred Manuel Martin) in 1928 in Berkeley, Calif.

Both Yankees had troubled childhoods, growing up almost feral on the streets of their cities, with fathers effectively out of their lives. They managed—barely—not to get into worse trouble as adults because of their talent for baseball. Each, wildly undisciplined off the field, wanted desperately to manage once their playing days were done. Despite fearing that his reputation as “baseball’s bad boy” would get in the way, it was Martin, not the Sultan of Swat, who got the chance to manage—and then some: five times with the Yankees alone.

Martin, unlike Babe Ruth, possessed only average skills as a player, but he raised the level of his game in the post-season. While only batting .257 in 11 big-league seasons, he hit .333 in the World Series. "If liking a kid who will never let you down in the clutch is favoritism, then I plead guilty," Casey Stengel said of his team’s sparkplug. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the one year that the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series during Martin’s playing days was 1954, when he was serving in the military.)

I have a theory that, in his managerial stints with the Bronx Bombers, Oakland A’s, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins, Martin was the closest that the modern age has come to the fiery skipper of baseball’s New York Giants, John J. McGraw. The link between the two was Martin’s manager with the Yankees—and the closest he ever came to a father figure--Stengel—who, as a part-time assistant to McGraw, learned much that he would put into practice on his own. 

McGraw loathed what he saw as the change (instigated by the coming of Ruth) toward power hitting and away from the “Scientific Baseball” of pitching and craftiness that he preferred. Even as he installed Reggie Jackson as his cleanup hitter in the last several weeks of the 1977 season (a move that carried the Bombers to the pennant), Martin resented the attention that came the slugger’s way. 

In his autobiography, longtime manager Tony LaRussa described Martin as a baseball genius but tortured soul. On the plus side of the ledger for the on-again-off-again Yankee skipper: his use of pitchers (most notably, of course, in Oakland in 1981, when his entire young staff of righthand starters experienced shortened careers as he relied on them for complete games). When he wasn’t exhausting arms, he was exhausting patience levels. While his teams invariably improved immediately under his tutelage and prodding, at least some players would begin to tune him out—and, before long, fights would break out, and he’d be out of a job.

In Martin’s favor: an ability to outwit opponents, to engage his players and fans in not just exciting, but daring baseball. His clashes with some players--Jackson, Ed Whitson, Dave Boswell--were legendary. Others, however--Rod Carew, Willie Randolph, Thurman Munson, Willie Horton among them--swore by him.

The tempestuous Martin’s life ended characteristically, in a one-vehicle accident following Christmas Day carousing with a friend. He saw so much about himself--his fiery temperament, persuading players to execute the fundamentals--but never learned how to apply "common sense and psychology" to his own case.