Quote of the Day (Brian Cashman, on His First George Steinbrenner Trauma)

“I told him [the late New York Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner, pictured], ‘This way is faster.’” [Incorrect: The “shortcut” to a haircut appointment, the Third Avenue Bridge, was closed for renovations.] “And he starts going ballistic: ‘’You effing idiot. Take me back to the effing stadium.’ He’s crushing me from the back seat. I mean, my hair was blowing forward because of his bellowing from the back. It was relentless, because that’s how he was. If somebody told me the same story and said they crawled up into the fetal position, I could understand it.”—New York Yankee General Manager Brian Cashman, on “the worst experience of my life” (with then-boss George Steinbrenner, naturally) as a summer intern in the mid-‘80s, quoted by Bruce Schoenfeld, “‘I Feel the Pain More Than I Feel the Joy,’” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 16, 2026

Good God, wasn’t George Costanza available to take The Boss around?

This incident must have been pretty bad. Now, most people would call losing a loved one “the worse experience of my life.” Maybe even losing a job.

In the case of the Yankee GM, I might plop for a divorce that exposed an extremely messy private life to tabloid and late-night talk show ridicule. Maybe even the anecdote in this September 2019 Ian O’Connor profile relating how Steinbrenner humiliated his young charge into personally collecting players' spring training rental car keys before they headed north.

But no, Brian Cashman says this incident driving The Boss around was the worst. Between the sheer physical sensations (the high-decibel insults! the hair blowing! the pushing from the backseat!) and the full-on exposure to baseball’s most impulsive, truculent owner, maybe it was.

If you listen to New York sports radio or podcasts to any extent, you might find some Yankee fans who wish that Steinbrenner was even tougher on Cashman.

Bronx Bomber fans are like Notre Dame football fans: success early in team history has only increased the fury over the lack of a title in recent years, though there’s a good excuse: the games have changed radically since the glory days of The Gipper and Babe Ruth.

So, from now until some point in mid-fall, Yankee fans are on The Cashman Watch: Will George’s son Hal stick by him, or will he be given his walking papers? Many will be venting on sports talk radio if manager Aaron Boone is let go for his squad’s underperformance but that great Houdini Cashman survives yet again.

Until then, just remember the wisdom of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham: “It's a long season and you gotta trust it.”

(The image of Brian Cashman that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 7, 2012, at the American League Divisional Series Game 1 between the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles, by Keith Allison.)

Quote of the Day (Mark Kramer, on Baseball’s Tommy John)

“Tommy John is an American hero in his own right, esteemed by millions of baseball fans. He has entered a kind of timeless boyhood that seems especially appropriate to the clockless game of baseball. He's not the oldest pitcher pitching; he's not in the teary final months of a long career; he continues to be good and never was the best; he's neither outrageous nor electrifying during interviews. What he has done is endure and gather admiring fans through 20 seasons of play, while sharing with the public his religious convictions and dramatic off-field struggles—the surgical repair of his injured pitching arm, the near death of Travis. He is a hero for the age of the born again and the silent majority. Blessed with athletic talent and a picture-book family, driven by self-discipline and piety, given to forthrightness and modesty, abstemious among colleagues sometimes given to excess, he has become a national demonstration that around these parts, love of church, country and family is still what gets rewarded.”—American sportswriter Mark Kramer, “The Timeless Boyhood of an American Hero,” The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1983

I can count on the fingers of one hand my encounters with current or retired baseball players, but one was Tommy John. I saw him in early 1982 in a restaurant-bar in Fort Lee, NJ called Clams Casino—something of a hangout for alumni of my high school, as a friend worked as a bartender there.

It was still relatively early in the season, before John was traded from the New York Yankees, and he was at the restaurant a bit late in the evening following a game. Fans quickly gathered around the star pitcher, with many asking after his two-year-old son Travis, who the prior year had been in a coma for 19 days following an accident. 

John was gracious to everyone giving him their best, even though it was interrupting time I’m sure he would have preferred with his family.

I think many people saw the pitcher on multiple other occasions reacting similarly: with modesty, grace and gratitude for what he’d been given.

I flashed back to that evening over a week ago, when I read John’s farewell and thank-you to Yankee fans. He was unable to attend the annual Old Timers’ Game that weekend because he was in hospice care.

So it was no surprise that he died at age 83 this past weekend from bladder cancer, nor that tributes poured in for him from those he thrilled while on the mound or touched in personal encounters.

I can think of only one other Yankee, Lou Gehrig, whose name is tied so closely to modern medicine. The Hall of Fame first baseman gave his name to the neuromuscular disease that took his life; John, to a career-saving medical specialty that helped him—and later, countless other pitchers—return to the mound.

All credit to Dr. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers team surgeon who developed and performed the innovative technique in 1974. 

But John was not merely a passive recipient of another’s genius. He took the risk of this surgery, then put in the long, countless hours to make sure he could not only return to baseball, but with the same or greater mastery than he had before.

In this respect, John was a revolutionary figure in the evolution of the game. But I chose the quote that leads off this post to illustrate that paradoxically, he was also a throwback.

The two people mentioned in this article as the southpaw’s heroes, Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, illustrate his religious and political conservatism.

But John came of age before the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle or social media when athletes, no matter what their personal beliefs, did not go out of their way to proclaim them, and when fans could care less what their heroes thought so long as they helped the team win a championship.

As a starter who managed to excel even without a 100-MPH fastball, John was a throwback in another sense. His career is confounding to modern pitching coaches and sabermetricians who urge starters to throw as hard as they can for five or six innings before turning the ball over to a battery of relievers expected to hold the lead with similar hummers.

In contrast, John believed in going deep into games and, when possible, even completing them. He didn’t have to throw overwhelming heat; he could make his admittedly underwhelming fastball drop like a sinker, and his curve bit the inside or outside corner. More often than not, hitters swore at their ineffectuality in grounding out.

John’s death has left many of his baseball contemporaries arguing with greater urgency the case for his eventual enshrinement in Cooperstown. If that push is like others posthumously propelling Dick Allen and Ron Santo into major league baseball’s Valhalla, he might have a real chance this time.

(The source of the image accompanying this post, of Tommy John around 1981, is the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)

Photo of the Day: A Prized Pirate’s Locker, PNC Park, Pittsburgh

With this past weekend’s Baseball Hall of Fame induction of Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltran, and Andruw Jones, it seemed like an appropriate point to reflect on a place with reminders of its own Cooperstown members: Legacy Hall in PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

As I mentioned in this post from the other day, a thunderstorm cut short my plans to watch the Bucs for the first time while I was on vacation earlier this month. 

But before finding my seat and waiting impatiently for the “Play Ball” call that never came, I spent a few minutes in Legacy Hall, a multi-use space filled with some great team memorabilia, with much of it not previously displayed at the ballpark.

Several Hall of Fame players are commemorated here, including Willie Stargell, Ralph Kiner, Honus Wagner, and Bill Mazerowski. But I’ll focus on one in this post: an original locker from the club’s prior home in Three Rivers Stadium, occupied by Roberto Clemente. Elsewhere in the city, a museum honors the life and legacy of this great ballplayer and humanitarian.

But fans will still want to look and linger at what is on display honoring him at Legacy Hall: his uniform, jacket, cap, cleats, photos, and a bat—emblematic of a consistent and superb hitter who won four batting titles and collected 3,000 hits.

These days, Latinos and Hispanics make up anywhere from a quarter to a third of players in major league baseball. But Clemente was the first superstar of the group. What this proud and sensitive man had to endure from the media then was shameful and would not be tolerated today.

It took a while for Clemente’s skills to be noticed in a bumper crop among a bumper crop of contemporary outfielders that included Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Frank Robinson, but eventually his performance at the plate and on the field in the 1971 World Series exposed to a nationwide audience the greatness that so many in baseball had recognized since his debut in 1955.

His statistics and leadership had already made Clemente a basement legend. 

But his death on board a plane carrying supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua during the Christmas season of 1972 lifted him to the status of role model and icon, much like the New York Yankees’ Lou Gehrig—the only other player that Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame board explicitly waived its five-year rule for consideration to major league baseball’s Valhalla.

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Breslin, on the Original Mets as Lovable Losers)

“You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American columnist and novelist Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017), Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets' First Year (1963)

In the late 1970s, when Jimmy Breslin accepted an award from my college newspaper, he described the astounding experience of covering the 1962 New York Mets, or, as he called them, “the worst baseball team in the history of the universe.”

As the above paragraph indicates, that version of the Amazin’s acquired a certain cachet as classic underdogs. Nothing could help them, as they staggered to a 40-120 record, 10^th and last in the National League, and so far from first place (60½ games!!!!) that they could have used a telescope to find it.

As this year’s major league baseball trade deadline approaches, the 2026 squad doesn’t remotely approach it in ineptitude, but it doesn’t come near it in lovability, either. 

As I type this, their record stands at 44-62, placing them last in the National League East, 18½ games behind their divisional rivals, the Atlanta Braves. With hyperexpensive (signed to a 15-year, $765 million) right fielder Juan Soto going on the injured list for a second time this season, the squad is extremely unlikely to make a late-season run for anything except the exit ramp.

Owner Steve Cohen must be gnashing his teeth over his dismal return on investment. Their sorry mid-season mark comes for a franchise that, at $367.9 million, ranks second only to the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers as having the highest payroll in major league baseball, even surpassing that of their hated crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees.

The 1992 Mets season was so disappointing (a $45 million payroll combined with a 72-90 record) that few people could argue with the title that sportswriters Bob Klapisch and John Harper came up with the following year for their account: The Worst Team Money Could Buy. One hates to think of the title for any prospective postmortem of this year.

Photo of the Day: Fireworks Display, PNC Park, Pittsburgh PA

I took the image accompanying this post a little over two weeks ago, while visiting a close relative in Pittsburgh. Several times before, I had been impressed by the exterior of the home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, PNC Park.

With its setting along the Allegheny River, statues paying tribute to several Hall of Famers with the club, and easy access to multiple points in the Smoky City, the ballpark, which opened in spring 2001, struck me as a picturesque throwback to old-time baseball venues, much like Baltimore’s Camden Yards.

Yet I had yet to see a game there, until a few days after the Fourth of July, when the Pirates were to square off against the Milwaukee Brewers, ahead of them by a dozen games in the National League Central Division. 

It promised to be a pivotal series, with any hope for the home team making the playoffs, even as a wild-card contender, starting here. To underscore the dramatics involved, there would even be a fireworks display at the ballpark.

So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men.

By mid-afternoon, the Pittsburgh area was drenched in a thunderstorm that didn’t dissipate until  6:30. Fans still poured into the stands, optimistic that at the end of the hour-long rain delay would  eventually lead to the cry, “Play ball!”

That hope lasted until the announcer’s voice came on the loudspeaker: “The good news is that the planned fireworks display will take place in 10 minutes….”

The fans who had patiently sat through the rain delay already sensed what the rest of the announcement would be—“But tonight’s game will be rescheduled”—and promptly began booing. They had waited long enough, and could see on the weather apps on their cell phones that it was unlikely more rain would follow. They were not happy.

That game was to be my first attending a Pirates game. Now, with me heading out of town the next morning, it would have to wait a while longer—perhaps next season.

Well, sometimes in life you have to endure disappointments—like rainouts—and sometimes there are compensations—like the gorgeous multi-color display seen here on a warm summer night over one of America’s great rivers.

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on Baseball)

"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.”—American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Lardner on Baseball (2003)

This Day in Baseball History (Death of Harmon Killebrew, Unassuming But Feared Slugger)

May 17, 2011— Harmon Killebrew, as eager-to-please a personality as ever to step onto a baseball diamond, yet so feared for his home run prowess that he earned the nickname “Killer”—died at age 74 of esophageal cancer at his Scottsdale, AZ home.

For most of two decades, it was Killebrew’s misfortune to play—first in Washington, DC, then in Minnesota—for owner Calvin Griffith, who low-balled him at salary time. 

After he retired, misfortune often took a more dire financial form: car dealership and car leasing firms whose failure ultimately, despite his healthy sums from sports memorabilia appearances, pushed him towards bankruptcy in 1993.

Killebrew was honest enough to admit feeling stressed by all of this, but he soldiered on, demonstrating why he was liked and respected not just by fellow baseball players but by sportswriters, who finally elected him to Cooperstown, after three missed tries, in 1984.

Though nothing like the versatile “five-tool player” (hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, arm strength, fielding ability) held up as the beau ideal of everyday players, Killebrew possessed one skill in abundance: slugging home runs.

The 573 round-trippers he amassed at the end of his 22-season career ranked fifth at the time of his retirement. Even that statistic doesn’t indicate the frequency, consistency and force with which he punished the ball.

Starting with the Washington Senators, then moving when the team became the Minnesota Twins before closing out his career after one season with the Kanas City Royals, Killebrew recorded eight 40-home run seasons and 44 multiple home run games. He led the AL in home runs six times, walks four times and RBI three times. 

Named to 13 All-Star teams, he was selected Most Valuable Player for the American League in 1969, when he led the Twins to the American League West Division championship.

Ossie Bluege, the farm system director who scouted and signed him for the Washington Senators, observed: "He hit line drives that put the opposition in jeopardy. And I don't mean infielders, I mean outfielders." 

Griffith took note of these tape-measure homers: “He would hit the ball so blooming high in the sky, they were like a rocket ship going up in the air.”

That bat was what kept Killebrew in the lineup game after game, year after year, despite a glove that most observers of the game thought was suspect. But in his defense, he never spent enough time at one position to master it. 

According to Mark Armour’s post shortly after Killebrew’s death, “he was repeatedly shifted between three defensive positions throughout his career, getting 44% of his starts at first base, 33% at third base, and 22% in left field.”

Off the field, Killebrew’s benevolence sprang from a belief that “The most important reason that we're here on Earth is to love and help one another.” To that end, he became involved in several charitable activities, including:

*helping to establish, in Sun Valley, ID, the Danny Thompson Memorial Golf Tournament (named after a Twins teammate who died of leukemia);

*creating the Harmon Killebrew Signature Classic Golf Tournament to benefit the American Red Cross; and,

*starting the Harmon Killebrew Foundation, a fund-raising charity.

Flashback, May 1966: Floundering NY Yankees Replace Keane With Houk

Only a year and a half from managing the St. Louis Cardinals to a seven-game World Series championship over the New York Yankees, then resigning to take over the team he defeated, Johnny Keane (pictured) was fired 60 years ago this month after enduring a sixth-place finish in the American League in 1965 and a 4-16 start to the next season.

The Bronx Bombers may have felt confident that replacement Ralph Houk—who had managed the squad to three straight pennants and two world championships before becoming general manager for two seasons—would turn the club around. Indeed, the team proceeded to win 13 of the first 17 games after the return of “The Major” (a reference to his World War II service).

It was all a mirage, however. By the end of the year, the team had fallen into last place—a finish predicted by fading slugger Mickey Mantle in a private conversation with a reporter in spring training—and the first time the team had sunk to this level since 1912.

That ugly denouement was in keeping with the way the team’s top brass terminated Keane (not to mention his predecessor, beloved icon Yogi Berra, dropped after losing the 1964 World Series). 

It happened on a Friday—within 24 hours of now-minority owner Dan Topping scorning the rumors of the skipper’s departure as ridiculous—and, following a loss in Anaheim, Calif., conveniently timed so that most fans would not hear the bad news until they opened their Sunday papers.

Nobody realized that the team’s precipitous slide was not a temporary blip but the start of a decade in the wilderness before it returned to the postseason.

The days when the team’s fans could rely on seeing their team in October—when fans in other cities would grumble that cheering for them was like rooting for U.S. Steel—were long gone. “A sequence of historic events and bad decisions in 1964 changed the course of baseball history, ending four decades of Yankee dominance,” wrote sportswriter Leonard Koppett.

Those multiple, interlocking forces included:

*A bad managerial fit: In his memoir Uppity, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman (and future Yankee broadcaster) Bill White bluntly stated that Keane, the former manager he had come to admire, “tried to apply a National League hard-work ethic to an American League team of complacent, aging superstars and was resented for it.” The Yankees saw what White and others recognized—that he demanded much from players—and missed, beneath his strait-lacked, religious exterior, what they well knew: that he respected and rewarded effort. The team was particularly incensed when Keane fined clubhouse leader Mantle for showing up to a game hung over. Despite the players’ pro-forma statements to the press after Keane’s termination that they felt their underperformance had let him down, they admitted years later that he’d effectively lost control of the locker room.

*Injuries: It was bad enough that the team’s cornerstones in pitching (Whitey Ford, blocked artery in his pitching arm) and the plate (Mantle, hurt shoulder and pulled hamstring; Roger Maris, broken right hand) were sidelined for much of 1965 and still adversely affected in 1966. But the squad was also reeling from ailments that debilitated shortstop Tony Kubek, starting pitcher Jim Bouton, and catcher Elston Howard—and the team was on notice that second baseman Bobby Richardson, though still young at 31, would retire by the end of the season.

*A lost advantage in the new amateur draft system: The draft gave underperforming teams a better chance at picking prized prospects, undercounting powerhouse franchises like the Yankees.

*New ownership in the Kansas City Athletics: In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Yankees and A’s engaged in several trades that were so lopsided in the Bombers’ favor that many observers suspected something nefarious, even charging that the Midwestern team was, in effect, a “farm team” for the Bombers, giving them key players like Maris, Ralph Terry, and Clete Boyer. Whatever the truth of the arrangement, new A’s owner Charles O. Finley was so annoyed by what he heard that, in February 1961, he had a “Shuttle Bus to Yankee Stadium” burned as a not-so-subtle indication that the old ways were over.

*New ownership in the Yankees: In 1964, owners Dan Topping and Del Webb sold an 80% share in the Yankees to CBS. The transaction, shifting control of the club to the number-one television network, signaled a shift from a sportsman model of ownership to one owned by a conglomerate. (David Halberstam’s October 1964 is especially good at explaining the shock this represented to the baseball establishment.) As it happened, CBS had not done as much due diligence as they should have into the problems associated with the most famous franchise in sports.

*Corporate disinvestment in baseball operations: In trying to maximize the worth of the ball club in the late 1950s in preparation for an eventual sale, Topping and Webb had been told that, to stay on top, the team had spent heavily in several areas. The partners then cut their expenses in areas such as the farm system, scouting, and roving instructors. After a year or two, the realization dawned on CBS that Topping and Webb that, with their top stars aging—and even younger ones unexpectedly hurt—they had few options coming up who could replace them.

The nadir of the Bombers came on September 22, when only 413 fans showed up at Yankee Stadium for a drizzly weekly makeup game with the Chicago White Sox. Announcer Red Barber lost his job for highlighting the empty stands during the game.

The visual impact of all of this might have been embarrassing, but not any more so than the Yankees’ fall from contention and grace. The team would not appear in the postseason again until two more seismic forces appeared in the Seventies: free agency and the new owner who exploited it, George Steinbrenner.

Quote of the Day (Roger Kahn, on Pitchers and ‘Competitive Intelligence’)

"Pitchers, of all ball players, profit most from competitive intelligence. It is a simple, probably natural thing to throw. A child casts stones. But between the casting child and the pitching major leaguer lies the difference between a boy plunking the piano and an artist performing." —American sportswriter Roger Kahn (1927-2020), The Boys of Summer (1972)

Thank God the baseball season is upon us now and we can be (temporarily) diverted from polarizing issues.

Today isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of pitchers’ intelligence. Late last summer, some readers might recall, I analyzed it briefly in the case of Hall of Fame hurler Greg Maddux.

But today, I’d like to nominate another pitcher as having keen intelligence, along with a fierce integrity that fully matched his fierce competitiveness: New York Giant hurler Christy Mathewson.

“Matty” (dead a century ago now) wasn’t content to overpower hitters with speed; he unsettled them, with pinpoint control of a variety of pitches. He might not have been the first pitcher to analyze batters’ tendencies and tailor his approach to exploit these, but he made it an art form and passed his wisdom down in a book, Baseball in a Pinch.

You couldn’t ask for more different people than the gentlemanly, college-educated Mathewson and the fiery John McGraw, but the Giants skipper knew he could rely on his ace when the game was on the line.

As for integrity? Much was and still is made of the deeply religious Mathewson not pitching on Sundays. But, as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he also suspended Hal Chase for intentionally throwing games and correctly sized up that that the Chicago White Sox were doing the same thing in the infamous “Black Sox” scandal of 1919.

Surviving footage of this mound master is scant and grainy, but his legend endures, as does his place in the baseball pantheon, with his 373 career victories still ranking third all time.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Woman of the Year,’ As a Sportswriter Introduces His Date to the Game of Baseball)

Tess Harding [A sophisticated foreign correspondent played by Katharine Hepburn]: [In the stands at a major-league ballpark, observing the large crowd in attendance] “Are all these people unemployed?”

Sam Craig [A sportswriter, played by Spencer Tracy]: “No, they're all attending their grandmother's funeral.”— Woman of the Year (1942), screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, and John Lee Mahin, directed by George Stevens

A lovely hat that Miss Harding is wearing, isn’t it? Except that it blocks the view of the large, angry-looking fellow behind her.

Oh, well—with the help of Sam, she’ll learn about not just the balls and strikes that affect the players, but appropriate attire for spectators like herself! 

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Mickey Lolich, on Perceptions of His Weight)

“Throughout my 16 years in the major leagues, whenever things weren't going right, people always looked for reasons. For some, it was 'Maybe they're staying out too late at night,' 'Maybe too many outside interests,' 'Maybe their head's not screwed on right.' For me, it was 'He's too fat.' 'But when I was pitching good, they'd say, 'He's strong as a bull.' ''—Burly southpaw pitcher—and 1968 World Series MVP—Mickey Lolich (1940-2026), quoted by Ira Berkow, “When Fat Is Beautiful,” The New York Times, Aug. 7, 1989

First, all honor to Mickey Lolich, who died two days ago and is fondly remembered—especially by Detroit Tigers fans—for his three gutsy complete-game victories in the 1968 Fall Classic against the formidable St. Louis Cardinals.

The lefthander’s wry comment on how uncharitable—heck, merciless—some fans could be about his weight reminded me of an incident I witnessed with another baseball player.  In 15 seasons in the big leagues, John Mayberry clubbed 255 homers and drove in 879 RBIs, reaching a peak of 34 HRs in 1975 and another 30 as late as 1980.

By 1982, however, the slugging first baseman’s glory days were behind him. Midway through the season, the Toronto Blue Jays shipped him off to the New York Yankees. 

Any hope that the short right-field fence at Yankee Stadium would revive his power proved short-lived, as he hit only eight HRs and, worse, recorded a miserable .209 batting average with the Bronx Bombers.

Why did his numbers decline? Was it the natural consequence of nagging injuries over the years, the slower bat speed that players often encounter with age, or something elsw?

Some had a simple, nasty explanation: his weight. Lolich claimed that during his career, he carried 220 pounds on a 6-ft.-1-in. frame, though some believe that weight was an underestimate.

As for Mayberry: the Baseball Almanac lists his measurements as 6-ft.-3-in., 215 pounds. Other sources note that he’d added five pounds by the time he got to the Yankees, and Blue Jays fan Tom Dakers in a 2016 post on the “Blue Birds Banter” blog claimed that he’d reached 230 pounds north of the border.

That summer with the Yankees—Mayberry’s last in professional baseball—I attended a Yankee game in the mezzanine section with a close relative. Mayberry was in the middle of his prolonged offensive struggle. Each time he flailed and floundered at the plate, we could hear a voice behind us raining down insults, each a variation on “You stink!”

At last, late in the game, with Mayberry striking out again, that voice reached a crescendo in vituperation: “HEY MAYBERRY, IF YOU COULD ONLY BAT YOUR WEIGHT, YOU’D BE THE BIGGEST THING SINCE TY COBB!” (Ty Cobb, be it noted, had a lifetime batting average of .367.)

“I’ve got to see who this guy is!” my relative said. Turning around, we  were surprised to see, several rows behind us, a fellow graduate of our high school. 

He laughed when he noticed us, and we agreed that it was lucky for him that he was so high up in the stands, rather than closer to the field where Mayberry might have taken serious exception to the abuse.

An ideal “five-tool” player is blessed with a consistent ability to hit for average, bang home runs, run the bases with speed, play elite defense, and possess a strong, accurate arm. Notice that “rabbit ears” is not part of this skill set, particularly when it comes to weight.

I have no idea how Mayberry felt about such taunts, but fortunately, Lolich took it all in stride. I hope that he is enjoying as many delicious donuts as he likes in Heaven now—and not gaining an ounce.

Quote of the Day (Joe DiMaggio, on the Importance of Shortstops)

“The shortstop roams far and wide for his chances, and his duties are numerous enough to keep him busier than a one-armed paper hanger. Above all players he must be fast of foot, strong of arm, acrobatic as a trapeze artist. He must throw hard and far, overhand, sidearm, underhand. He must make his pegs while running, falling, skidding, from a crouch, even while in the air—with both feet off the ground.”—New York Yankee and Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio (1914-1999), Baseball for Everyone: A Treasury of Baseball Lore and Instruction for Fans (1948)

Anthony Volpe’s multiple problems—for his first two seasons, at the plate, and now there and in the field—have nettled Yankee fans like myself who became accustomed to the yearly consistent excellence of Derek Jeter.

When Joe DiMaggio looked at the shortstops of the Bronx Bomber clubs of his time, he could see models of defensive stalwarts in Frank Crosetti, who held the position in his first years, and Phil Rizzuto (pictured), who did so through the end of the Yankee Clipper’s career, and beyond.

Implicit in DiMaggio’s analysis is how a great shortstop can relieve pressure on a pitcher—rescuing him from a desperate situation, or avoiding a prolonged at-bat that can put runners on base, tax his arm, and exhaust his spirit.

Though the Yankees have enough offensive power to go far into October, as they did last year, their weakness at shortstop may form part of a larger defensive vulnerability that could doom their chances. In any case, the top brass will have difficult conversations in the offseason about Volpe, a player they once characterized as one of their hopes for the future.

Quote of the Day (Robert Francis, on the Pitcher’s Art: ‘Eccentricity’)

“His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
 
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.”—American poet Robert Francis (1901-1987), “The Pitcher,” from The Orb Weaver (1961)
 
When I read these lines, the pitcher that came to mind for me was Greg Maddux (pictured), a remarkably consistent pitcher who thrived despite not throwing a terribly hard fastball (ranging from the high 80s to low 90s in MPH). 

As a youngster, this future Baseball Hall of Famer recalled in a 2007 interview, his coach “worked with me when I was 15 years old, and he taught me that movement was more important than velocity. He helped me make the ball move and sink as opposed to seeing how hard I could throw it.”
 
His 78-pitch complete game in July 1997 was just one example of how he worked, using pinpoint control and an ability to outthink batters to hamstring the Chicago Cubs lineup that day.
 
His intelligence particularly impressed his peers on the mound, according to Ed Graney’s July 2007 article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “No one thought the game better than Maddux. No one understood how to take advantage of its perplexing components more than he did.”

Quote of the Day (Baseball’s Earl Weaver, on How Managers Should Deal With Losing Streaks)

“Don't worry. The fans don't start booing until July."—Baseball Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver (1930-2013) quoted by Larry Keith, “Someone Old, Someone New,” Sports Illustrated, Apr. 28, 1980

Okay, the calendar has turned another page—the month that Weaver warned about. It’s time for the managers of the New York baseball teams, Carlos Mendoza of the Mets (who have lost 12 games of their last 20) and Aaron Boone of the Yankees (12-13 in their last 25 games) to invest in earplugs, the better to tune out any booing from their home crowds.

(The source of this image, cropped from a baseball card of Earl Weaver from the 1976 Baltimore Orioles Photocards set, is Trading Card Database.)

Flashback, June 1925: Baseball Hall of Famer Eddie Collins Notches 3,000th Hit

Eddie Collins laid down another marker as perhaps the greatest second basemen in baseball history in early June 1925 by belting a single (and then a second) to center for the 3,000^th hit of his career, sparking the Chicago White Sox to a 12-7 victory over the Detroit Tigers. 

Only five players—Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Ty Cobb, and Tris Speaker—had achieved this feat before him—and, of the nearly 21,000 known players in the history of the major leagues, only 27 have done so since. Yet remarkably, nobody observed the milestone at the time.

Even now, I have seen or two different dates in this week 100 years ago for when Collins reached that point.

I became interested in Collins for a couple of reasons:

*He preceded Lou Gehrig as a student at my alma mater, Columbia University, who ended up inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame;

*Though captain of the White Sox during the 1919 World Series, he was considered so honest that he wasn’t even approached by any of the ringleaders of the notorious group that threw that series at the behest of gamblers;

*He was, simply, a superb player, so respected that New York Giant manager the best ballplayer I have seen during my career on the diamond.”

If ever there was a “money player”—one not just well-compensated (for his time) during the regular season, but in baseball’s World Series, where additional money and glory accrue—it was Collins. He remains the only non-Yankee to be part of the same team winning five or more World Series.

Consistently over his 25 seasons in the big leagues, he could do nearly all—hit for average, walk, bunt, hit-and-run, steal bases, and play excellent defense. (The only skill he did not possess was hitting home runs, but that was not important in the “deadball” era in which he spent the first half of his career.)

The nickname given Collins was “Cocky.” Joe Posnanski’s 2021 book on what he considers the greatest players of the national pastime, The Baseball 100, insists that “on the field, he was all arrogance and bluster and condescension.” But baseball biographer Jack Kavanagh has written that the nickname came “not because he was arrogant, but because he was filled with confidence based on sheer ability." (Indeed, unlike Pete Rose, he was, by most accounts, oblivious to his assault on the record books.)

Whatever the case, he believed he could rise to any occasion—and he nearly always did.

Intelligence bolstered Collins on and off the diamond, and set him apart from many of his teammates. Not the fastest of players, he developed his prodigious base-stealing prowess by scrutinizing pitchers’ motions, then taking off when he detected the point in their delivery he was waiting for. A left-handed batter, he would slap outside pitches past third base if the defense played him to pull the ball—a discipline that many modern players have never learned.

Masterful at adapting, Collins went from a core member of Connie Mack’s famous “$100,000 Infield” with the Philadelphia Athletics to an equally key member of the Chicago White Sox.

Despite his athletic accomplishments, Collins succeeded in triggering resentment, possessing levels of class and education that teammates from more hard-scrabble backgrounds did not enjoy. He grew up in a comfortable middle-class environment as the son of a railroad freight agent who could afford sending him to boarding school. He had planned to become a lawyer after graduating Columbia until he realized he could make decent money as a baseball player. He was college educated (and Ivy League, at that) in a time when that was beyond not just most big leaguers but most Americans.

The animosity of some A’s teammates first surfaced in 1914, when they suggested that a series of magazine articles he wrote alerted rivals to flaws he detected (such as tipping pitches) and enabled them to correct these.

But this annoyance took on more significant dimensions in 1919 when he rejoined the White Sox after his WWI military service concluded. That team, he later concluded, though more talented even than the Yankees’ immortal 1927 “Murderers’ Row.” was “torn by discord and hatred during much of the '19 season. From the very moment I arrived at training camp from service, I could see something was amiss."

Collins and Ray Schalk headed what baseball maven Bill James called the “gentlemen’s faction,” while Chick Gandil headed a more discontented clique. So loathed by this group was Collins that he was frozen out of pregame infield practice through much of the season.

Nobody ever suggested that Collins was part of the “Black Sox” scheme that autumn. But accounts have varied about how much Collins might have suspected, and what he did to stop it. At one point, Collins observed that he had heard something might be amiss, but dismissed these thoughts as preposterous. In a second account, he said he had approached Charles Comiskey in early September with the rumor, only to be dismissed—a claim that the White Sox denied.

Whatever the case, though Collins expressed some sympathy for Shoeless Joe Jackson for not having enough education to sense he was being manipulated, he supported baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s ironclad ban on the eight group members who knew about the fix.

The White Sox began a slow but inexorable long-term passage from contention that even Collins couldn’t prevent when he served as player-manager from the end of 1924 through 1926. He was then traded back to the A’s, where he concluded his career in 1930.

After retiring as a player, Collins served as general manager of the Boston Red Sox, trading for top-line players like Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove before building the team for the long term by spotting and signing future Hall of Famers Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams.

But he only granted a tryout to African-American players when subjected to public pressure—and even then, in 1945, he failed to pursue Jackie Robinson, whose subsequent career demonstrated that he was the same kind of intelligent, aggressive game- and team-changer that Collins had been.

(Dan Holmes' 2017 post from the "Baseball Egg" blog calls Collins "the greatest second baseman of the Deadball Era" and ranks him third overall at that position for all major league history. Many would rank him even higher. 

But Holmes succinctly summarizes his postseason excellence, and offers a delicious piece of trivia: Collins "buried his bats during the off-season in shallow holes in his backyard that he called 'graves' in order to keep them 'lively.'”)

Quote of the Day (Bob Uecker, on His Professional Baseball Experience)

“I was once named minor league player of the year. Unfortunately, I had been in the majors for two years at the time.”—Former baseball player, announcer, commercial pitchman and actor Bob Uecker (1934-2025), quoted by Richard Sandomir, “Bob Uecker, Clubhouse Wit Turned Popular Sportscaster, Dies at 90,” The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Bob Uecker as a St. Louis Cardinal, was taken in 1965 and made available by tradingcarddb.com.

Quote of the Day (Ken Rosenthal, on Rob Manfred’s Pete Rose Decision)

“[Major league baseball commissioner Rob] Manfred is nothing if not shrewd. He surely did not want to risk the president embarrassing him publicly on social media. He also probably did not want to get on Trump’s wrong side at a time when he is pushing for a direct-to-consumer streaming service for the league, and the migration from broadcast to streaming by professional sports leagues is under government scrutiny. Also, while Trump is known to be pro-management, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, if sufficiently annoyed, he could threaten baseball’s antitrust exemption.”—Ken Rosenthal, sportswriter for “The Athletic,” on the decision to remove Pete Rose from MLB’s “permanently ineligible” list, in "Hall Must Weigh 4,256 Hits Against a Heap of Questions," The New York Times, May 15, 2025

Two decades ago, as many entertainers raised their voices against the Iraq War, a Laura Ingraham book popularized unsought advice that right-wingers offered progressives who were, to their way of thinking, sticking their noses where they shouldn’t: Shut Up and Sing.

These days, many Americans are likely to co-opt the first two words of Ms. Ingraham’s title and hurl them at President Trump. 

Prior Presidents, too busy with affairs of state, never felt the need to comment 24/7 on so many non-governmental areas of life to which people, no matter their parties or ideologies, retreated for relief.

Consider this just one more precedent, one more norm broken wide open by the current administration.

Don’t imagine that such blustering and blundering will end with the case of baseball’s all-time hits king (who, it has come out, also sought to score with a teenager in the Seventies, at a time when he was married with two children).

This week, former Death Row Records head Suge Knight predicted that Trump could pardon Sean “Diddy” Combs if the rapper is convicted at his current trial.

In that case, will Rose fans—will Trump fans—continue to excuse the President’s intrusions in areas that should not concern him?

This Day in Yankee History (Impulsive ‘Boss’ Fires Livid Yogi)

Apr. 29, 1985—After promising as late as spring training that he would let Yogi Berra manage the New York Yankees for the entire season, principal owner George Steinbrenner abruptly fired him before the first month had even ended.

The cause was not misconduct, a breakdown in relations with players, or defiance of the man the media had nicknamed “The Boss,” but a 6-10 record following an 87-75, second-place 1984 finish.

Berra’s replacement, Billy Martin—hired for the fourth time—didn’t produce the desired result, either, going 91-54, good for an overall 97-64 season—leaving the Bronx Bombers second once again in the American League East division. Forget about a pennant, the minimum that the Boss expected: Martin couldn’t even get the team into the playoffs.

Though Berra did not express anger initially (“He’s the boss, he can do what he wants”), at some point his dismissal began to gnaw at him. It wasn’t until years later that his grievance was aired: after 30 years with the organization, he felt that Steinbrenner owed it to him to deliver the bad news himself rather than to entrust the dirty job to General Manager Clyde King.

And so, the Yankee great—a Hall of Fame catcher, coach, and manager beloved by teammates, players, and fans—vowed to boycott all Yankee-related functions for as long as Steinbrenner remained in charge of the organization.

Fourteen years passed before Berra relented. In the process, he accomplished something remarkable: He became perhaps the only employee in the Steinbrenner Era to get the better of the Boss.

With each passing year—even with the team winning World Series again after a decade without even being in the playoffs—Steinbrenner suffered a public-relations embarrassment for his cavalier treatment of the most visible remaining link to the DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty.

At last, with Yankee radio announcer Suzyn Waldman as a diplomatic go-between, the standoff concluded with Steinbrenner showing up at the opening of the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Montclair, NJ. All the way over from the Bronx to the museum, the owner had never looked so nervous, an associate recalled later, according to this 2015 article by the New York Times’ Harvey Araton.

But in a short meeting behind closed doors, Berra got what he wanted: an apology.

Think of it: a powerful man forced to travel abjectly to the turf of the one who had brought him to heel. How often does that happen?

Quite apart from the shabby treatment of the lovable Berra, was his removal warranted? Did the results justify it? To both questions, I would answer no, for these reasons:

*The three most important Yankees that year—Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, and Rickey Henderson—were, at that point, still not at full strength because of injuries. In other words, this team had not yet started to fire on all cylinders, but it would do so shortly—if only Steinbrenner had given it a chance. In short order, they were about to become an offensive powerhouse this season.

*One complaint that Steinbrenner had voiced about the squad in the past few weeks—a “lack of discipline” on the field—was spurious. In addition to the three players mentioned previously, this Yankee team featured veterans like Don Baylor, Ken Griffey Sr., Ron Guidry, and Phil Niekro. Motivation and self-discipline were not problems for this group.

*The removal continued to destabilize a team in desperate need of a calming influence. This was the 12^th managerial change since Steinbrenner had taken over the club in 1973. The players liked and got along with Yogi.

*Speaking of “destabilizing,” Martin was about to fall into familiar habits. Martin favored a fast, aggressive style of play that had become known as “Billy Ball.” But sometimes his non-traditional style of play could backfire. That’s what happened late in the year, when he sent third baseman Mike Pagliarulo to the plate to bat right-handed, late in a crucial September game against the Detroit Tigers—even though “Pags” was not a righty, or even a switch-hitter. The move failed. Worse, as Steinbrenner’s carping predictably picked up again, the alcoholic Martin got into one of the barroom fights that had come to mark his career as player and manager, this time with his own pitcher, Ed Whitson. While Martin ended up with a broken ulnar bone in his right arm, his inconsistent but high-priced starter came away with a broken rib and fractured hand.

*If Martin was overrated as a manager, Berra was underrated. Martin’s insistence on complete games by his starters effectively killed on the best young rotations in baseball when he managed the Oakland A’s following the 1981 season. He might have produced immediate improvements for the teams he managed, but the gains were temporary, as he exhausted the patience of owners and players alike. On the other hand, Berra had already managed two pennant-winning teams that probably shouldn’t have even made it that far. In 1964, he had managed a proud but aging team of Yankee sluggers to the seventh game of the World Series before they fell to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1973, with Rusty Staub—a productive but not traditional cleanup hitter—batting fourth, he took the Mets to the World Series, too—even knocking off the powerful Cincinnati Reds in the playoffs before falling to the Oakland A’s in the Fall Classic.

With his 10 championship rings, Berra had long been loved by Yankee fans not just as an important contributor to the team’s success but also as a colorful character famous for malapropisms—sometimes real, sometimes invented by others—that became known as “Yogisms.” His often basic, awkward communication skills led sportswriters particularly to underestimate his knowledge of pitchers and feel for the game.

But the long cold war with Steinbrenner enhanced the respect with which he was held. For years, it had been the pugnacious Martin who had garnered sympathy for his fights with the owner, even though it had often been manifested in boorish, self-defeating antics.

But, by standing stubbornly on principle without acting out, it was now Berra who had become an object of sympathy, as well as a stand-in for anyone who had to endure a bumptious, bullying boss. When the dust had settled, though no longer working on baseball, he had become the beloved elder statesman of the Yankees, a position he retained until his death 10 years ago.

(The image accompanying this post, of Yogi Berra in 1984, was made available by the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)