Andrus Center

Andrus Center, Baseball, Law and Justice, Music

Doing Well and Good

Posted on by christian

One Impressive Guy

Bill Neukom, now the managing general partner and CEO of my beloved San Francisco Giants, seems like one of those guys who has led ten great lives while the rest of us struggle to manage just one.

Perhaps best known as the most famous in-house lawyer in American business, Neukom started working at Microsoft when the software giant had a dozen employees. He stayed for 25 years and, as he modestly told a recent gathering of lawyers in Sun Valley, Idaho where he has a home, his bushel basket was positioned properly under the Microsoft tree as the stock options just kept falling. He made a bundle and is now reinvesting it in some handsome and useful ways.

Obviously, he bought into the Giants ownershipand has had an influential hand in strengthening the front office and building a scrappy team, including many cast offs, that won a World Series last year. But, that is hardly the sum of what Neukom has been spending his money on.

He donated $20 million for a new law school building at Stanford, his law school alma mater. (The Seattle Times couldn’t resist pointing out, Microsoft anti-trust decrees notwithstanding, that Attorney General Eric Holder participated in the dedication ceremony for the William H. Neukom Building in Palo Alto.)

Neukom has also used his family foundation to underwrite the critically important work of an organization you may not have heard of, but eventually will – the World Justice Project.

WJP is dedicated to leading “a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the rule of law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.” A noble sounding mission that basically boils down to this: most of the rest of the world does not embrace nor have the tradition of a justice system that is based on well-defined rules, established and transparent practices and real accountability.

Neukom, who conceived of and founded the World Justice Project while he was president of the American Bar Association (another of his many lives), simply says without adherence to what lawyers call “the rule of law” people and institutions in the developing world will never have the opportunity and equality that all of us deserve.

The World Justice Project has developed a Rule of Law Index that evaluates countries around the world and the degree to which they respect the rule of law. For example, the Philippines ranked poorly, while Singapore ranked very high. Many of the lowest marks, perhaps not surprisingly, go to countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to establishing an objective database on the level of adherence to the rule of law, the Index has generated substantial international media interest like this line from the Jordan Times: “The index ranked Jordan 15th for clear, publicized and stable laws, essential for security and investment. However, in terms of promoting greater transparency, there is room for improvement.”

Neukom and his associates have importantly cast a very bright light on a fundamental human right that most Americans (too easily perhaps) simply take for granted. The U.S. justice system, don’t get me wrong, is far from perfect, but the western notion of how courts and judges, legislatures and the media should operate, is still a model for much of the rest of the world.

Thanks to Bill Neukom, serious work is underway to move the needle on this fundamentally important issue.

When I had the opportunity to hear Neukom speak recently, I was struck by his passion for the organization he has created, but also by one personal thing he said. The money he made at Microsoft, he said, “isn’t my money.” He meant, I think, that he felt a motivation greater than many of us do to give something back. He’s living proof that you can do well and do good.

Neukom is nearly as passionate about the ball club. He’s hands on, extraordinarily knowledgeable and, after last year’s surprising World Series win, willing to concede that magic must always be laced with hard work in order to win it all. He calls himself a “lucky guy.”

“How would I describe the guy that can fire me?” former Giant player and broadcast Duane Kuiper told the San Francisco Chronicle on opening day in April. “Let’s see, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, very handsome, one of the most intelligent guys I’ve ever known. You see where this is going.”

Yup. However, in the case of Bill Neukom, super lawyer, philanthropist, baseball guy, rule of law advocate, it’s also all true.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball, Baucus, Egan, Idaho Politics, U.S. Senate

Welker & Killebrew

Posted on by christian

Commie Bashing Baseball Talent Scout

The passing of the great Harmon Killebrew recently caused a few Idaho political, history and baseball junkies to reflect on another guy from Payette, Idaho – one-term wonder Sen. Herman Welker.

Welker is mostly forgotten to history these days, and probably deserves to be, except for two or maybe three footnotes in history. The Welker footnotes:

1) Welker’s nickname, Little Joe from Idaho, references his bosom buddy status with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Commie hunting, red-baiting politician from Wisconsin who had an entire era of politics – McCarthyism – named after him. Welker was just about McCarthy’s biggest defender, even as Joe was censured by the United States Senate.

2) Welker’s re-election was derailed in 1956 by a fresh faced young Idaho Democrat by the name of Frank Church, proving my old theory that Democrats only win statewide in Idaho when Republicans screw up. One campaign sign suggested Idaho need a “sane and sober” Senator. Welker didn’t fit the bill and Church beat “Little Joe” and launched a distinguished 24 year career. (The charge against Welker was both true and unfair. He died a short time later from a brain tumor.)

3) Welker “discovered” Killebrew, then a fresh-faced teenager in Payette. Al Eisele, an editor-at-large of the D.C. paper The Hill had a nice piece recently on the Welker-Killebrew connection. As was widely reported, along with the news of Killebrew’s death from cancer, was the detail that he was scouted by Welker. The lawmaker told Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith in 1954 that he should sign the big kid from Idaho who “was the greatest slugger since Mickey Mantle.” Griffith acted on the tip, sent a scout to Idaho and rest, as they say, is Hall of Fame history.

Eisele wrote: “Welker, who often attended Senators home games, once almost came to blows with Senators manager Charlie Dressen when he shouted during a game at Griffith Stadium, ‘You, Dressen, why aren’t you playing my boy?’ Dressen responded, “Why don’t you run your U.S. Senate and let me run the Washington ball club?'”

Here is another tidbit, not so benign, from Eisele’s piece on the obscure Idaho Senator.

“There is a bizarre footnote to Welker’s Senate career. In 1954, Democratic Sen. Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a bitter enemy of McCarthy, fatally shot himself in his Senate office, ostensibly because of despondency over poor health.

“But muckraking columnist Drew Pearson later reported that shortly before Hunt killed himself, Welker and Republican Sen. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire met with Hunt and warned him that if he ran for reelection that fall, Republicans would disclose that his 20-year-old son had been arrested for soliciting prostitution from a male undercover police officer in Lafayette Square.

“Pearson’s allegation was never proven, but the incident was believed to have been the inspiration for Allen Drury’s 1959 best-selling novel, Advise and Consent, in which a senator who opposes a nominee for Secretary of State who has lied to conceal his past Communist association, commits suicide after receiving anonymous threats that his past homosexual affair will be exposed unless he stops blocking the nomination.”

If the Pearson story is true, and we’ll probably never know for sure, then the contrast between the two men from Payette, Idaho, whose names were recently linked again, could not have been more different.

Harmon Killebrew celebrated in death as a greater human being than baseball player, and he was some kind of baseball player, and Herman Welker, the man who discovered the great Killebrew, not much of Senator or judge of character, but thankfully a fine judge of baseball talent.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Harmon

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One of the Greats Passes

Just when it seems that spring may final have come, it turns out to be a sad, sad day. The Great Killebrew is gone.

I’ve always been a Minnesota Twins fan. I grew up listening to Twins games on WCCO radio in the Midwest. Brought to you, of course, from“the land of sky blue waters” by Hamms…the beer refreshing.”

Harmon was a boyhood idol. My first real baseball cap was a dark blue Twins model. My first major league game was bat day at old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. When I moved to Idaho long years ago, I actually had my first opportunity to talk with Harmon and he turned out to be just what you got on the field and at the plate: a pro and a nice guy, and those words don’t always fit in the same sentence when the subject is a professional athlete.

Killebrew was the kind of guy who would gladly stand in an airport and patiently answer questions about his career, who he hated to face and how he was doing. He never seemed hurried, just a really nice Hall of Famer from Payette with a big smile and big biceps.

Legend has it that Idaho Sen. Herman Welker, also from Payette, tipped the Washington Senators to the fact that a strong kid in Idaho was worth a look. Welker wasn’t a great or even a very good senator, but he was right about Harmon.

Welker pestered Clark Griffith, the Senators’ owner, until Griffith sent his scouting director to Payette, a little farm town hard along the Oregon border in southwestern Idaho. Harmon told the guy he was going to play football and baseball for the Oregon Ducks, but when the Senators’ scouting director (that could refer to Welker or the team) saw the 17-year old hit one 435 feet out of the park and into a “beet field, not a potato” field, Killebrew turned pro.

In the many, many remembrances that are sure to come in the days following his untimely death at 74 from cancer, most will recall that he hit is 573 home runs when a player did it legitimately. By my count, at least four guys who have passed Harmon on the all-time home run list did it with the aid of something other than a diet of Idaho potatoes.

Killebrew was old school, a gentleman, a pro, a nice guy. Jorge Posada, who knows better, melted down the other night and took himself out of the Yankee line-up rather than bat in the nine hole. Can’t imagine Harmon ever, ever pulling such a stunt. Too much class.

One manager said Harmon could hit a ball out of any park “including Yellowstone.” And no less an authority than the great Al Kaline said of Killebrew, “he’s one of the great hitters of all time.” He was…and a really, really nice guy, too.

Not surprisingly, Killebrew handled the end of his life with the same grace and dignity with which he played the great game. He simply announced a few days ago that he was ending his cancer treatment to enter hospice care and, like one of his mammoth blasts at old Tiger Stadium or Fenway, he soared away a class act to the end.

This old Twins fan is going to remember him as long as I can read a box score. Harmon Killebrew was one of the all-time greats.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Say It Ain’t So

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Where is Landis When We Need Him?

I’m not sure what to be more shocked about this morning: the breaking news that long-suffering Chicago Cubs fans may have to endure more ridicule or that the quietly inept Commissioner of Major League baseball has stepped in to bail out another of baseball’s loudly inept owners.

The story out of Chicago that the 1918 Cubs may have been the World Series throwing inspiration for the 1919 White Sox is, still and all, based on speculation. The Dodger meltdown is all too real. Old documents have turned up that suggest that White Sox players, pitcher Eddie Cicotte particularly, may have been inspired by the Cubs taking a dive against the Boston Red Sox in the 1918 series. Cicotte is hardly a character witness. He was banned from baseball for life by then-Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for cavorting with gamblers and, very likely, conspiring to lose the 1919 series to the Cincinnati Reds.

Professional baseball realized it had a problem in the wake of the “Black Sox” scandal and turned to a crusty Chicago federal judge, Landis, to assume dictatorial powers over the game in the interest of restoring integrity to the national past time.

Landis was selected by the owners – baseball had millionaire owners then, too – but he operated more as a policeman than a hand maiden. With two major National League franchises – the Mets and the Dodgers – now operating under serious financial clouds and with Roger Clemens about to follow Barry Bonds into steroid never-never land, baseball could use a commissioner who was less dedicated to holding the coats of the game’s owners than in establishing fundamental standards of conduct that, Landis-like, really protect the integrity of the enterprise.

Gamblers once spread around money to try and fix the World Series and Judge Landis drew a sharp line in the infield dirt by declaring that gambling was off limits to anyone involved in the game. Just ask Pete Rose if that precedent is as good today as it was in 1920.

Today’s baseball gamblers are guys like Frank McCourt who ran one of the great brands in sports into the ditch after using enormously leveraged money to buy the Dodgers and Fred Wilpon, the Mets principle owner, who once counted Bernie Madoff as both close friend and financial advisor.

Given the continued drug cheating and financial incompetency in baseball, a real commissioner would lay down the law, not just try to pick up the pieces. The way to keep the modern day gamblers out of the game is not to let them in the first place and, when they screw up, quickly show them the door. Baseball ownership has always been a closed shop for too many guys operating on too much leveraged money who enjoy the vanity of owning the owner’s box. All their money, their messy divorces and their felonious financial advisors aside, the game still belongs to the fans in the seats.

A real commissioner would spend more time worrying about the best interest of the folks who buy the tickets rather than the interest of some rich guy who isn’t smart enough to make money on a baseball team in Los Angeles or New York.

Landis is remembered for banning the eight White Sox players in 1920 and altogether he banned more than twenty players for gambling, selling stolen cars and other sins that brought disrespect to the game. He also banned one owner – William B. Cox of the Philadelphia Phillies – for betting on his own team. Cox remains the only owner ever banned for life.

It’s time to send some more owners to the showers – permanently. Landis knew the score. He reportedly told players, “Don’t go to those owners if you get into trouble, come to me. I’m your friend. They’re no good.”

Spoken like a real commissioner.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball, Mandela

Baseball in 1921

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 Yankees, Giants and New York Baseball

The late, great Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti once said one of the important things he learned by working on the inside of baseball was “the enormous grip this game has on people…it goes way down deep.”

I learned that lesson all over again reading a wonderful new baseball book telling the story of how the game came to be defined in 1921 as a New York game – the Yankees and Giants faced off in the 1921 World Series – and how that spectacular rivalry helped the great game bounce back from the Black Sox Scandal of 1919.

As the Los Angeles Times said in a recent review of 1921 – The Yankees, the Giants and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, “1921 was a transitional one. The nation had only recently emerged from the horrors of World War I. Prohibition was in place, although that didn’t stop Ruth and company from indulging. And why not? Ruth was widely regarded as baseball’s savior for restoring the credibility and allure of the national pastime in the aftermath of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal, in which members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. By 1921, he was the game’s pre-eminent superstar, acquiring an agent — the ubiquitous Christy Walsh — and igniting the first home-run boom.”

For a baseball junkie – and someone who loves history – 1921 is a great retreat into the formative days of the game so many of us enjoy today. And that is the value of a fine book like this – it connects my history (and yours, perhaps) to the game our fathers also loved.

My dad, a knowledgeable baseball fan, used to talk about the great Yankee teams of the 1920’s and 1930’s. No Yankee fan he, his admiration was for the franchise’s success and for the supporting cast around Ruth and Gehrig and later DiMaggio. He admired a Yankee outfielder by name of Bob Meusel, a guy with a lifetime .309 batting average, 156 career home runs and more than a thousand RBI’s. Meusel played only 11 seasons, all but one for the Yankees and often hit fifth in the line-up behind Ruth and Gehrig.

In 1921, Meusel hit .321, had 24 homers (Ruth hit a remarkable 59) and drove in 135 runs. Meusel and his brother Emil (nicknamed Irish), played against each other in the World Series that year. In 1921, these guys – and their substantial accomplishments – come alive and I can almost hear my dad, the baseball fan, weaving a story about the “old days” in baseball. A wonderful aspect of the game is that the history of baseball really allows us to appreciate an entirely different era.

Baseball in New York in 1921, with writers like Damon Runyon and Heywood Broun doing the daily reporting, was something special. (Runyon once wrote, “The race may not always be to the swift nor the victory to the strong, but that’s how you bet.”) Ruth appropriately received a lot of newspaper ink, but so too did the managers of the Yankees – Miller Huggins – and the Giants – John McGraw.

After the Yankees came on late in the session to win the American League pennant, Runyon wrote of Huggins, who rarely received the credit he was due for the success of this heavy hitters and slick pitchers, “the little manager of the New York club, tramped across the yard in the wake of his men, his head bowed in characteristic attitude. In happiness or sorrow Huggins is ever something a picture of dejection. The crowd cheered him as his familiar Charley Chapin feet lugged his small body along, and Huggins had to keep doffing his cap.”

Good book about great characters and the American game in a very interesting time.

Andrus Center, Baseball

The Great Game

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baseballMemories of Baseball

More than any other of the games that command the attention of the dedicated sports fan, baseball is a game of memory.

Memories of dads playing catch with kids, the mental image of walking up a ball park ramp for the first or the hundredth time and taking in the sight and smell of the green field, the endless records that record the history and detail of thousands of contests – all are a part of the individual recollections of so many hours spent in the magical spell of the great game.

No matter how long you play, watch, read about or reflect on baseball, you will never have it mastered. You can never exhaust the infinite prospect that you will find and enjoy something fresh and new.

Today, I know, I’ll find something fresh and new in the oldest and maybe the sweetest ballpark currently in use in the Cactus League, Phoenix Municipal Stadium. The home Oakland A’s entertain the boys of spring from Seattle this afternoon and for me it will be the unofficial start of another sweet season of memory. You can’t go to a ballpark without remembering. In a way, it may be the best part of baseball.

My baseball mentor, my dad, established this spring-time ritual of baseball memory. About this time every year he would start to recall: Mickey Cochrane, his favorite, the great A’s and Tigers catcher; Connie Mack, the manager who wore a suit and tie in the dugout; Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove, Dizzy and Daffy, and Mickey Owen’s tragically dropped third strike.

Memories.

Growing up in western Nebraska, I’m sure my dad never set foot in the old ballpark in Brooklyn, but it came home to him nevertheless in a hundred scratchy and distant radio broadcasts. He didn’t have to physically be there to know the place and I know the feeling.

I never saw the great Duke Snider play – he died a few days ago at 84 – but after reading the memories of his Dodger teammate, pitcher Ralph Branca, I can almost see him roaming center field in old and long gone Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Branca’s memories are the memories of a baseball fan.

As a general rule this Giants fan doesn’t waste much baseball admiration on a Dodger, but I make an exception for that old Brooklyn bunch – Campanella, Reese, Erskine, Hodges, Robinson and, of course, the Duke of Flatbush. They were something special. They live in our baseball memories.

Branca offered a warm and wonderful tribute to his old teammate over the weekend and it was all about memory.

“I still see Duke as a young man,” Branca wrote in the New York Times, “I see him out there in center field, racing past the ads for Van Heusen shirts and Gem razors, while executing a brilliant running catch. I see him at the plate, crushing Robin Roberts’s fastball and sending it soaring high over that crazy right-field wall at Ebbets Field. I see him rounding the bases. I see him smiling. I feel the joy of his sweet, happy soul.”

There may be no crying in baseball, but there is poetry in the memories. Great humor, too.

Greg Goossen, who also died recently, inspired a great deal of humor during his lackluster and memorable baseball career. In his too-short but very full life, the one-time catcher also promoted big-time boxing, did a stint as a private detective and served as Gene Hackman’s movie stand-in. Goossen, in what must be close to a record, if not a guaranteed laugh line, played for 37 different teams in the minor, Mexican and Major Leagues.

Goossen remarkably lead the team in hitting during the one season of the short-lived Seattle Pilots and told an interviewer he would have played his whole career in Seattle. Teammate Tommy Davis, himself well-traveled, piped up with, “You did!”

Goossen figured prominently in Jim Bouton’s baseball classic Ball Four where Bouton recounted that he and Goossen once played against each other in an International League game. Goossen was behind the plate when a hitter rolled a bunt back toward the pitcher. “First base, first base,” Goossen yelled. Ignoring those instructions the pitcher wheeled and threw to second with all runners safe.

Goossen, ticked that his simple directions had been ignored, moved back behind the plate while Bouton yelled from the opposing team dugout, “Goose, he had to consider the source.”

The Duke and the Goose, Branca and Bouton and all the rest will be there at Phoenix Muni today. That’s the way this game is played with balls and strikes, hits and ground outs…and memories. It’ll be great.

Andrus Center, Baseball

Shoulda Known…

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metsThe Mets and Madoff

As if you need another reason to dislike the serial Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, now it turns out the swindler was a New York Mets fan.

Figures.

According to a lawsuit filed against the Mets’ owners, the Wilpon boys and Saul Katz, the team and owners allegedly reaped $300 million in fictitious profits from Madoff’s various schemes. I guess in Metsland that’s at least enough to buy a journeyman left fielder.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “The suit, which also described a more than 25-year relationship between Mr. Madoff and the co-owners of the Mets, said Messrs. Wilpon, Katz and Madoff served on the boards of the same charities, and had season tickets near one another at Mets games. They traveled together with their wives when the Mets played exhibition games in Japan one year, according to the lawsuit, and Mr. Wilpon even helped Mr. Madoff when he was looking for new office space.”

In August of 1921, then-Baseball Commissioner Keneshaw Mountain Landis banned for life eight Chicago White Sox ballplayers who had been acquitted in a jury trial where they were accused of throwing the 1919 Major League Baseball World Series.

Landis, a federal judge as well as the commissioner, issued a terse statement: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will never play professional baseball.”

Alrighty then.

The Mets’ owners, as far as we know, didn’t undertake to throw games. Why would they, the Mets win so infrequently anyway, but the owners certainly did “sit in confidence” with a bunch of crooks in the person of Bernie Madoff and his crew all the while ignoring warning signs that something wasn’t right here.

The Mets’ best defense, as Buster Olney cracked, may be that “we signed Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo to $60m deals-and WE were supposed to sniff out Ponzi scheme?”

Let’s call it the stupid rich guy defense.

Commissioner Bud Selig, not that he ever would, should move immediately to ban the Met owners. The trial, the attending soap opera, the greed and avarice sure to emerge will, all by itself, be detrimental to the game.

Baseball, considering the steroids scandal and the unbelievably slack response to that outrage, could benefit from holding to a higher standard and a higher standard could start with zero tolerance for the owners of a Major League franchise sitting in confidence with one of the greatest crooks in American history.

Andrus Center, Baseball, John Kennedy, Johnson, Politics

Odds and Ends

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catchersOf No Particular Importance…

Most major league baseball teams have pitchers and catchers report to spring training round about Feb. 14. It doesn’t mark the end of winter, but perhaps the beginning of the end and that is something.

Boston has had 50 inches of snow this winter. Do you think Red Sox fans are anxious for spring?

I’m still nursing the hurt over the Diamondbacks and Rockies abandoning Tucson in favor of another spring training outpost in the Phoenix suburbs. So much for old school. Baseball in the spring has been a fixture in Tucson since 1946. Not this year. The D-backs and Colorado will share a spanking new ballpark – Salt River Fields. I’m boycotting and plan on seeing the hapless Cubs in Mesa, the A’s in their venerable little band box in Phoenix and the World Champions in downtown Scottsdale.

Hope springs eternal in the spring. Everyone is in first place on opening day.

Kennedy Memories

My old friend Joel Connelly had a nice piece recently at the Seattle P-I’s online site on memories of John Kennedy in the Northwest. Joel, a great recorder of the region’s political lore, relates a wonderful story about JFK and legendary Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson.

The Times on the Times

I’ve long believed the single most difficult thing for “the media” to do is to report on itself. Most reporters and editors are generally loathe to criticize each other, unless its someone like Bill O’Reilly tweaking Keith Olbermann. That makes this story in the New York Times reporting on dissatisfaction in Los Angeles with the L.A. Times so interesting.

Here’s the money quote. The NYT’s media critic quotes a long-time LA Times reader as saying: “We need a paper that’s more, and this is less. I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”

Analysis and comment at the Columbia Journalism Review site further dissects the Times coverage of the Times. My take: I have long admired both papers and have had my gripes with each, but the LA Times is today a far cry from what it was when Otis Chandler was in charge.

Sargent Shriver

Lots of memorials, appropriately, to the first man JFK put in charge of the Peace Corps – Sargent Shriver. The wake for the very Catholic Shriver was a classic sad and hilarious recalling of his quite remarkable life.

The serious side of Shriver is well summarized in a nice piece by Richard Reeves and the funniest story was told in Adam Clymer’s tribute at the Daily Beast.

Clymer told a story he attributed to Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of Shriver’s. “One afternoon [Shrum] and Shriver arrived at the Shriver home as Eunice was running a Special Olympics event. She had put out a wine punch for the athletes’ parents. Sarge sampled it and asked what wine was used. A servant said Eunice had told them to just take anything handy. They had opened a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48, a gift from Giscard d’Estaing, president of France when Shriver served as ambassador. Shrum reports that Shriver was momentarily nonplussed, but then smiled and said, ‘Then we’d better drink a lot of it.'”

I have no idea what a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48 is worth, but a bottle of ’82 sold at a wine auction in 2009 for $3,300. The 1948 vintage is rated as a “moderate to good vintage.”

That was some wine punch.

Andrus Center, Baseball

Ron Santo

Posted on by christian

santoA Great Cub and Good Guy

I told myself, what with the winter blahs and all, that I was done with misty eyed reminiscences about old ballplayers, at least until spring. But then Ron Santo died.

I’ve always thought of Ernie Banks as the eternal Cub and he is, but Santo – who should be in the Hall of Fame, by the way – is only a half step behind “Mr. Cub” in his lifetime of devotion to the boys on the North Side of Chicago.

In the eternal terminology of baseball, Santo was a gamer. Not elegant, not polished, just gritty and determined; a grown man loving playing a kids game and amassing fine stats over a 14-year career. A life-time .277 average, 342 home runs, numerous All Star appearances and a half dozen Gold Gloves puts Santo in rare company, indeed.

I loved the Ron Santo eulogy delivered by his long-time WGN radio broadcast partner Pat Hughes. Hughes took to calling Santo a “Cubs legend” and, as the Associated Press reported, the two broadcasters had a lot of fun together, including one hilarious moment when Santo’s hair piece caught on fire at Shea Stadium.

Hughes and Santo “were standing for the national anthem in the cramped booth when Hughes heard something ‘sizzling like bacon.’ He turned around, saw Santo’s head on fire and quickly poured a cup of water on it.

“‘He said how does it look?’ Hughes said. ‘I lied and said, ‘It doesn’t look that bad.’ It actually looked like a professional golfer had taken a pitching wedge and hit one off his head.'”

As good as he was as a ballplayer, Santo lived a long life battling diabetes. He originally didn’t tell the Cubs of his disease fearing it would prevent him playing baseball. It didn’t and considering the adversity he encountered, loosing both legs to the disease, Ron Santo turned out to be every bit as good and courageous a person as he was a ballplayer.

Everyone liked Ron Santo. Maybe that’s why he was destined to be a Chicago Cub.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

The Man

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musialThe Last Great of His Generation

There was much appropriate notice the last few days of the 90th birthday of Stan “The Man” Musial, the great outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. The single best line about Musial was uttered by the guy who may just be the current “best player in the game” – Albert Pujols, also a Cardinal. The Great Pujols told St. Louis fans never to refer to him as El Hombre. There is only one Man in St. Louis, says Albert.

Perhaps because he labored in a smaller market than Ted Williams or Joe DiMaggio, and was by all accounts a nicer guy not given to ignoring writers or marrying movie stars, Musial hasn’t always gotten the attention or worn the laurels that his lifetime .331 average and sweet left handed swing demands. It’s wonderful to listen to the late, great Cardinal broadcaster Jack Buck praise Musial not as just a great ballplayer, but a fine person.

As the Baseball Library website notes: “When he retired, Musial owned or shared 29 NL records, 17 ML records, 9 All-Star records, including most home runs (6), and almost every Cardinals career offensive record. In 1956 [Sporting News] named Musial its first Player of the Decade.”

Now, President Obama will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on The Man in a White House ceremony next year. Pretty fast company, too, Bill Russell, Yo-Yo Ma and a baseball playing ex-president George H.W. Bush.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Bernie Miklasz put together a Top 90 list of things to like about Musial. The first, according to Miklaswz, “Musial is the nicest person we’ve known. He’s devoted much of his life to making others happy. ‘I suppose it’s because I’m a you-only-live-once type, and I figure I might as well enjoy everything that happens,’ Musial said at the end of his career. ‘It’s also with me pretty much a matter of putting myself in somebody else’s place. So what I try to do is never to hurt anybody else and figure if I don’t, then I’m not likely to get hurt myself.'”

Sounds like a guy who is worthy of a Presidential Medal.