Quote of the Day (John Updike, on Ted Williams’ Last At-Bat)

“The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky."—American fiction writer and essayist John Updike (1932-2009), "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 1960

Sixty years ago today, Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams accomplished something that most players desire desperately but can’t achieve: retire on top, with a home run in their last at-bat. John Updike’s account of this game is one of the classic baseball articles.

As seen in this passage, Updike endowed the last homer of the Hall of Famer’s 521-HR career with mythic majesty. He did the same thing in evoking how the 42-year-old Williams, who had quarreled with the press and even fans throughout his career, stayed true to form, refusing to tip his cap or come out of the dugout to acknowledge the wild cheering from the roughly 10,000 fans in Fenway Park after his eighth-inning blast.

Updike summed up the disdain of “The Splendid Splinter” simply, in perhaps the most quoted line of the piece: “Gods do not answer letters.”

This Day in Baseball History (Hall of Famer Foxx Clubs Last HR)

Sept. 9, 1945— For one last, shining moment—after his skills had diminished through injuries and the self-medication he used to deal with the resulting pain—Jimmie Foxx reminded baseball fans of the awesome power that made him one of the game’s greatest players, hitting a home run and double while driving in five runs in a game for the city where he became a star.

But the circumstances had changed greatly since he had started his career as a prized prospect 20 years before, with a Philadelphia A’s team building towards two World Series trophies and three American League pennants. This time he was a part-time player with the crosstown Phillies, a 42-94 squad—and this seventh homer of the season would be the 534^th and last of his career.

In the 1930s, no player could match Foxx for either power (415 HRs, 1,403 RBIs) or versatility on the diamond (though he primarily played first base, he also cheerfully filled in at third base and catcher if his team needed him there). His speed even astonished those who judged him solely on his bulk. Not surprisingly, he earned three Most Valuable Player Awards in the decade, and twice hit more than 50 home runs.

Long before the advent of the “tape-measure” home run, Foxx sparked gasps at how far he could hit the ball. In the late 1960s, the retired Yankee pitching great Lefty Gomez joked that astronauts had discovered on the Moon a ball that Foxx had hit off him three decades before.

By September 1940, when he reached the 500^th home run of his career at only age 32 with the Boston Red Sox, many observers—including his worshipful younger teammate, Ted Williams—thought it entirely possible that he might surpass the once-unthinkable 714 HRs compiled by Babe Ruth.

But few baseball superstars have descended as rapidly as Foxx. In an article for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bill Jenkinson plausibly argues that the effects of a beaning in a 1934 barnstorming tour began to catch up with this superb athlete. His drinking, previously moderate, increased sharply in 1941 as the problems with vision and sinuses resulting from the beaning led him to drown out his pain.

On June 1, 1942, the Red Sox, believing he’d been fatally slowed by injury, placed him on waivers. His performance for the team that picked him up, the Chicago White Sox, was so poor (a .205 batting average) that the discouraged slugger sat out the entire 1943 season.

With WWII depleting major league rosters and with an acrimonious and costly divorce impacting his finances, Foxx was convinced to give the major leagues another try. He played a handful of games as a player-coach for the Chicago Cubs and also became interim manager of Portsmouth in the Class B Piedmont League.

In 1945, Phillies manager Ben Chapman had come to believe that Foxx’s vision was so poor that he could no longer be a viable everyday player, so his time at first base would be limited. But Foxx had performed so well in a brief stint as, of all things, a pitcher when he was coaching the minor-league Portsmouth squad that Chapman decided to press him into service in that role in the big leagues, too—even though the last time Foxx had done so with any regularity had been as a teenager.

Chapman first tried Foxx on the mound in two July games. “Double XX” performed creditably enough that Chapman took the next logical step, naming him as his starter against the seventh-place Cincinnati Reds on August 19. After having difficulty with his location, Foxx improbably won the game. After that, he pitched six more times for the Phils, all but once in relief.

Whether watching Foxx bamboozle batters on the mound or take an opposing pitcher deep, as he did in his final homerun at Forbes Field against the Pirates, fans had come to savor these infrequent flashes of glory from a player who had displayed much more in the prior two decades. He continued to attract hordes of autograph seekers and just plain well-wishers when he retired for good at the end of the season, and in 1951 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

The most notable aspect of Foxx’s post-major league career might have been his 1952 stint as manager of the Fort Wayne Daisies, a team in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. 

But unlike Jimmy Dugan, the washed-up alcoholic skipper played by Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, Foxx was a genial sort who would never dream of barking at a tearful young woman, “There’s no crying in baseball!”

(The image accompanying this post is how most people associated with baseball in his time preferred to see Foxx--in his youthful prime with the Philadelphia A's. This figure, not the broken-down one of 1945, ranks #29 on Bill James’ Top 100 baseball players, behind Mel Ott and ahead of George Brett.)

Flashback, June 1950: Ex-Yankee Skipper Joe McCarthy Manages Last Game for Bosox

Seventy years ago this week, the great career of Joe McCarthy—the first manager to win pennants in both the National and American Leagues—came to a sad, but not entirely unforeseen, end. The former skipper of the New York Yankees, who for the last 2½ years had been expected to repeat his success with the Bronx Bombers’ deeply talented rivals, the Boston Red Sox, had resigned after a disastrous stretch of games in which the Bosox fell 9½ games out of first place.

With coach Steve O’Neill replacing him for a few games after a crushing loss on June 18, McCarthy had emerged to announce he was stepping down. The official reason—ill health—would have sounded familiar to Yankee fans, as he had provided a similar factor for ending his tenure in New York.

But front-office personnel with the Yankees would have felt a sense of déjà vu when they heard a rumor about what led to his “ill health”: mounting frustration in this quiet but ferociously competitive manager that he could no longer summon the magic that had once led the Yankees to seven World Series championships from 1932 to 1943. In May 1946, that inner turmoil, along with a deteriorating relationship with team president Larry MacPhail, led him to drink more heavily, then resign. 

The same dynamic appeared to have recurred when he went to Boston. Despite two straight 96-win seasons in which the Red Sox missed the World Series by a single game (first through a one-game playoff loss to the Cleveland Indians, then the next year in the final weekend to the rival Yankees), Beantown sportswriters had taken to second-guessing his decisions. 

Then, with the Red Sox losing nine of 10 games in mid-June to the St. Louis Browns, the Cleveland Indians, and the Detroit Tigers, the sniping intensified. 

In later years, the question hanging over McCarthy’s departure was if he had truly chosen to go himself or if the decision had been precipitated by general manager Joe Cronin and team owner Tom Yawkey.

At age 63, McCarthy would never manage another game, and the loss of two straight positions due to “ill health” may have led some to wonder how much longer he might live. 

But, back at his farm in the Buffalo area and free from stress, McCarthy stopped drinking heavily and his health improved. He not only was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1967 but survived for another 20 years after that, dying at last at age 90.

The passage of time provided better perspective not only on how much McCarthy had accomplished in Boston (no Red Sox team would finish even as high as second place until the pennant-winning squad of 1967), but throughout his career. 

He had raised the performance of three different ball clubs: the Chicago Cubs (a team he took to the World Series in 1929), the Yankees and the Red Sox. Players came to appreciate his tough-but-fair manner. 

On the one hand, “Marse Joe” (a nickname bestowed on him while in Chicago) was a perfectionist who insisted on seriousness and professionalism on and off the field (players were to report for breakfast each morning), endlessly stressed fundamentals and demanded the utmost from each player, starting with his famous “Ten Commandments of Baseball. (The Ninth “Commandment”: “Do not find too much fault with the umpires. You cannot expect them to be as perfect as you are.”) 

On the other hand, he earned the undying gratitude of players by never criticizing them in front of the press.

Joe DiMaggio observed, “Never a day went by that you didn’t learn something from McCarthy.” McCarthy's career winning percentages of .615 in the regular season and .698 in the postseason remain the gold standard among managers. 

Baseball historian Bill James put it succinctly: “I believe that Joe McCarthy was the greatest manager in baseball history.”

Quote of the Day (Adrian Walker, on Alex Cora’s ‘Corrupt,’ ‘Stupid’ Sign-Stealing Scheme)

“To call this scandal ‘sign-stealing'’— a part of baseball forever — doesn't really capture the disgusting behavior involved. According to the report [from baseball commissioner Rob Manfred], [Alex] Cora had a video monitor installed just outside the dugout so players could receive intelligence from the center-field cameras and relay it — by banging on a trash can to alert hitters in the batter's box. Aside from being corrupt, it was stupid. (The Astros eventually scrapped the scheme, following Cora's departure, after several players concluded that it was more distracting than helpful.)”— Columnist Adrian Walker, “Alex Cora’s Time Is Up,” The Boston Globe, Jan. 15, 2020

This cropped photo of Alex Cora was taken Sept. 24, 2008, by Eric Kilby.

Quote of the Day (Tom Verducci, on the Yanks’ Epic ’78 Comeback Against the Red Sox)

“[Sports columnists Dick] Young and [Phil] Pepe, George [Steinbrenner] and Billy [Martin], the boozy nights, the shared buses and planes, the clubhouse friendship, the sway newspapers held with a team ... all are dead and gone now. But the Yankees’ season of 1978 endures. Four decades later the clatter of the clubhouse, the clinking of ice in a tumbler, the piercing shrill of 72-point back-page headlines and the funereal silence of Fenway in the gold and gray of an October late afternoon still echo because the Bronx Bombers came from 14 back to win it all. Memory preserves what otherwise is gone. And when we go there, how sweet the silent backward tracings.” —Tom Verducci, “14 Back,” Sports Illustrated, Sept. 24–Oct. 1, 2018

I can still remember that Monday 40 years ago today, the way I hung--first listening on the radio, then on WPIX-TV--on the news coming out of Fenway Park, hoping that my New York Yankees could somehow grab one more miracle out of that pale afternoon light, and how it arrived courtesy of a shortstop putting one over the left field Green Monster.

In any other year, the postseason games that followed—beating back a three-homer game by George Brett to hold off the Kansas City Royals, then coming back from a 0-games-to-2 deficit to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers for their second straight World Series—would have been ones for the ages. But victory over the hated Boston Red Sox in that pennant race--beyond the regular-season 162 games--was so astonishing that those later contests seemed anti-climactic. 

All the images from the shootout at Fenway are preserved, as if in amber, in my memory, and after reading so much about it over the years I doubted there was anything more to this tale that I didn’t already know. 

But the passage of four decades has liberated the tongues not just of the players at the center of the drama, but also of the stadium personnel who gasped at the whole thing and the beat writers whose printed stories—and whose disappearing stories (courtesy of a newspaper strike)—played such a role in the wildly improbable fracas that transfixed an entire city that year. 

So read Verducci’s tale, folks, and step back into the time machine with George, Billy, Reggie, Thurman—and, in his shining hour, Bucky (pictured here, of course!).

This Day in Yankee History (Righetti Lights Up Bosox in No-Hitter)

July 4, 1983—With temperatures climbing to 94 degrees, heat was in the air, but it was nothing like the heat dealt by New York Yankee pitcher Dave Righetti to the Boston Red Sox. Midway through a season in which, as has happened so often in their history, the two clubs were neck-and-neck in their division, the Yankee southpaw tossed a no-hitter, sparking his team to a 4-0 victory before more than 41,000 fans at Yankee Stadium. 

Besides occurring on Independence Day and against a hated rival, Righetti’s gem was special for several other reasons:

*It happened on the birthday of George Steinbrenner, the best kind of present that win-win-win Yankee owner could ask for;

*It was the first Yankee regular-season no-hitter since Allie Reynolds’—also against the Red Sox—on September 28, 1951.

*It was the first Yankee no-hitter since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

*It was only the fourth no-hitter ever pitched in the major leagues or their equivalent on July 4. The others were by the New York Giants’ George “Hooks” Wiltse (1908), the Detroit Tigers’ George Mullin (1912), and, in the Negro Leagues, the Pittsburgh Crawfords’ Satchel Paige (1934).

Righetti had great motivation to want to shut down the Red Sox on this day: Not only had they been punishing opposing pitchers recently (38 hits in the three prior games against the Yankees and 12 homers in their last four games), but, after 6 2/3 innings, they had broken up his prior flirtation with a no-hitter the year before. And he had an additional edge: despite a 9-3 record, he’d been passed over for the All-Star Game.

But first, the lefthander had to overcome some issues—starting with himself.

Since coming to the Yankees in a November 1978 trade involving former Bronx Bomber reliever and Cy Young Award winner Sparky Lyle, Righetti had been stuck with the “promising” tag while moving beyond it only fitfully. True, he had earned Rookie of the Year honors and been a key cog in their 1981 pennant drive, but the following season he had yielded more walks than anyone else in the American League.

His control was not pinpoint on this day, either—Righetti would walk four by the time he was done—but the Yankees neutralized the Bosox’ opportunities with sparkling defense (notably, nifty plays by outfielders Dave Winfield and Steve Kemp), and Righetti was aggressive, not just throwing fast but putting the Sox’ batters off-balance by checking locations. 

His final, ninth out came against Boston’s toughest batter: Wade Boggs. The future Hall of Famer would bat .361 that season and strike out only 36 times. 

With tension mounting on the field (Glenn Hoffman stood at second because the Yanks’ Andre Robertson had thrown wide to first base) and in the Yankee dugout (manager Billy Martin claimed later it was the only time he’d ever prayed in a baseball game), Boggs got a chance to break up both Righetti’s no-hitter and shutout in one stroke when umpire Steve Palermo called a down-and-away pitch a ball on a 1-and-2 count.

But one chance was the only one Boggs got. Unlike Larsen’s perfect game, which concluded on a called third strike, there was not the slightest dispute on the next pitch. Boggs guessed wrong on the timing and location of Righetti’s nasty slider, swung and missed. For a second, Righetti stood stunned and amazed at how his 132-pitch performance had ended, then hugged his exuberant catcher Butch Wynegar. 

The trajectories of both Righetti and the Yankees would change following that game and season. The team finished the year in third place in the AL East behind the Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers. (What little consolation they took away was that the Red Sox ended up 13 games back of them, in sixth place—a far cry from their epic season-long battle five years before.) They couldn’t imagine that it would take 12 years to get back to the post-season and not until 1996 before they would win another pennant and World Series.

During much of this era of instability, Righetti would be one of the few constants in the Bronx clubhouse, though not in the role that he and management originally projected. With Goose Gossage and George Frazier departing in the offseason, Righetti was moved over to plug the gaping hole left in the bullpen. Righetti accepted and adapted to the change, even though agent Bill Goodstein complained, in an April 1990 article on his client in Sports Illustrated, “He could probably have been a 20-game winner for five or six years and made twice as much money."

The high point in Righetti’s Yankee bullpen tenure came in 1986, when he recorded 46 saves—a high-water franchise mark for the entire pre-Rivera era. But for all his excellence, it is an open question whether the Yankees made the correct decision in converting this deeply loyal player from his starting role. 

I remember at the time that management justified this by noting that his effectiveness declined after the seventh inning, so he was better if used sooner. But this has the whiff of a move made less for sound statistical reasons than out of necessity. Starting pitching remained the Achilles’ heel of the Bombers in their lost decade out of the money. (In 1986, for instance, Dennis Rasmussen led the rotation with 18 victories, but no other starter recorded more than nine.)