Andrus Center

Put Away the Rye Bread…

Frankly, I’m getting tired of writing about old baseball guys leaving the game or dying. I’m just flat tired of it. And now, Niehaus.

I loved Sparky Anderson and he died. I loved Bobby Cox and he retired. Lou Piniella is done. Ernie Harwell, the great Ernie, died in May. Now Dave. Winter is almost here and spring seems a distant, faint hope and now comes the news that Dave Niehaus, the Hall of Fame voice of the Mariners, is gone.

It is not a comforting thought to contemplate no more long summer nights with Niehaus narrating another meaningless Mariners game, while I love every minute. I hate it. I’m going to miss Dave Niehaus as much as any old player who has left not to be replaced.

If you read nothing else about baseball this winter, read Art Thiel’s tribute to Niehaus in yesterday’s Seattle Times. Here’s the money line: “It’s a damn shame that the Mariners never lived up to their play-by-play man.”

That’s how good Niehaus was and how much he meant to this hapless franchise. Jay Buhner said he heard the news and wept for the first time since his mom died. Jay came up with a line I wish I would have said. Niehaus, he said, “could call a sunset.” Yup.

Think about the Mariners and what comes to mind? Junior, for sure, and Randy Johnson – we called him Cousin Randy in our house – but the real continuity of the Seattle ball club was more the voice of the play-by-play guy than any player or accomplishment. Niehaus was the Mariners in that rare way that a great voice and baseball play-by-play guy becomes the franchise. Harwell did it in Detroit and Harry Caray in Chicago. Red Barber once played that role for the Dodgers and Mel Allen for that team in the Bronx. Jon Miller is the voice of the Giants (and unbelievably no longer the voice of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN) and Vin Scully may be the best (and only?) reason to listen to a Dodger game.

Niehaus was like that for Seattle.

The players loved him, little kids, too. Nothing against the cast of characters that has surrounded Niehaus all these years, but during a long Mariners outing, I always found myself waiting for him to get back on the air. The play on the field wasn’t going to be any better, but the game would be. Damn.

It is often said, usually correctly, that no one is irreplaceable. Niehaus was, irreplaceable that is. Oh sure, someone will sit in the seat in the spring, put on the headset and pull the mic in close, but he won’t be Dave. As Art Thiel said, the Mariners have lost the one thing they got right – their voice.

Damn.

The Giants Win

Like most baseball fans, I gained my appreciation of the game from my dad. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately what with a big election coming down and the Giants in the World Series. We would have visited – we didn’t talk, we visited – about both, but mostly we would have visited about the baseball.

He would have remembered Bill Terry and Carl Hubbell and given a nod to that catch Mays made in ’54 at the old Polo Grounds the last time the Giants won the whole thing. But, mostly I can hear him marvel at the pitching and the story he loved to tell about the great feat of the great Hubbell.

“You know,” he would have said, “Carl Hubbell once struck out five future Hall of Famers in a row in the All Star Game. Imagine that. Striking out Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons and Joe Cronin one after the other. Amazing.”

He would have picked the Giants to beat the Rangers because “good pitching beats good hitting in a short series every time.” Once again, the old man had it right. He would have marveled at Timmy, but would have disapproved of his hairstyle.

I’ve liked the Giants as long as I’ve liked baseball, so the World Series win over the equally worthy Texas Rangers will be a great memory for a long time. I particularly like this team because it is so clearly a team. So many baseball teams, even great ones, seem like a mere collection of individuals wearing the same uniform.

Baseball, at its best, is still a team game where the power hitting first baseman can lay down a bunt and where the role playing shortstop wins the MVP, or where the rookie catcher can praise the freaky pitcher, but then acknowledge the importance of bringing in the equally freaky closer to end the last game of a magical season.

So, as Detroit Tiger fan Art Hill once suggested in his book I Don’t Care If I Ever Come Back, the season has ended just like that and we can become consumed again with politics, the economy, war and elections. Baseball’s well-lighted place that keeps the demons away until dawn has vanished, but thankfully not completely.

“Our character and our culture are reflected in this grand game,” in the words of the late, great Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti. “It would be foolish to think that all our national experience is reflected in any single institution, even our loftiest, but it would not be wrong to claim for baseball a capacity to cherish individuality and inspire cohesion in a way that is a hallmark of our loftiest institutions. Nor would it be misguided to think that, however vestigial the remnants of our best hopes, we can still find, if we wish to, a moment called a game when those hopes have life, when each of us, those who are in and those out, has a chance to gather, in a green place around home.”

April will come and none too soon.

An All-Time Great

The rap against Bobby Cox, the 25 year manager of the Atlanta Braves, has always been that he won only one World Series. Never mind the more than 2,500 wins, all the Division and National League titles, Cox has not been a big winner on the biggest stage in baseball – the World Serious.

Phooey.

Cox, who says he’ll hang it up at age 70 when this season ends, deserves to take a victory lap as one of the greatest managers the game has ever produced. The record speaks for itself: a .557 winning percentage over a lifetime in the dugout, five pennants, four times manager of the year (and in both leagues) and a classic, classic baseball guy. That winning percentage put Cox just behind the legendary John McGraw and Joe McCarthy at number three all-time in most games over .500. No one has ever had more first place finishes – 15. Talk about consistency and longevity. In the years Cox has managed in Atlanta, the Cubs and Red have each had 11 different managers. The Marlins and Astros ten each.

Here’s the great Braves lefthander Tom Glavine on Cox: “It’s very simple what he expects out of you. Show up on time, play the game right, wear you’re uniform the right way. And if you can’t do that then you’re going to have problems with anybody…Because things were so simple and so easy to follow, it lent itself to there not being a lot of drama.”

ESPN’s Jason Stark has written a great piece on Cox and this sentence stands out: “Cox…has set a record that might never be broken: We’ve never heard a single player rip him. Not one. Not ever.”

If a player has criticized Cox, says Brave president John Schuerholz, “I’ve never seen it. I’ve never heard it.”

That is the essence of why Cox has been such a star in the dugout – he’s a leader. You don’t see a Braves player failing to run out a pop fly or showing up wearing their uniform like some bum pulling down $5 million a year. Cox set standards, treated his guys like adults and expected them to behave accordingly. It also doesn’t hurt to have your manager enjoy an occasional Cohiba. Cox is a baseball throwback, but there is nothing out of style or old fashioned about leadership or style.

Get the plaque ready for Cooperstown. This guy is headed there and really deserves it.

Ichiro…a Hitting Machine

One of my great baseball memories was watching a batting practice session in Arizona several years ago. It was just one of those typically perfect March days when the boys of summer are getting ready in the sunshine of the desert. It was fun to watch the Mariners take their cuts, until the slender right fielder stepped into the batting cage. Then the hitting became a clinic.

He drove the first pitch on a line down the left field line, the second pitch in the gap in left center, the third batting practice fastball straight into center field and so on. The guy had such control of the bat and such perfect timing that he could literally drive the ball wherever he wanted – and he did. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a better display of raw, professional baseball hitting ever.

The fact that No. 51 established an all-time Major League record last week by getting his 200th hit for the tenth consecutive season has to put Ichiro Suzuki into the ranks of the all-time greatest hitters of a baseball. The great one is a hitting machine.

Ty Cobb needed 18 seasons to get 10 seasons of at least 200 hits and the all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, took 15 years. Ichiro did it in ten straight years with the Mariners. Remarkable.

Seattle Times columnist Larry Stone speculates that Ichi could get 3,500 total hits by the time he quits, still short of Rose’s record, but remarkable considering he came to the U.S. Major Leagues at age 27. As Stone notes, had he been playing since, say, age 22 – he played 9 seasons in Japan before coming to Seattle – he’d be knocking on Rose’s door right now. Ichiro has also, generally speaking, had more at bats per season that Rose and doesn’t walk as much.

The old baseball adage holds that the really great players can do it all – hit for average, hit for power, run the bases, play defense and throw the ball with speed and accuracy. I’ve seen Ichiro jack a few, but he’s clearly not – nor has he tried to be – a power hitter. Still he has 90 homers and has always been a threat to leave the park every time he goes to the plate.

I rank him as one of the true impact players of his age. Barry Bonds – illegal drugs aside – was always an impact player, so too Mays and Clemente. Those types of players can impact a game just by being in the line up. Ichiro is in that class.

He is also the quiet, professional that shuns the spotlight and plays the great game with respect for its traditions, both in the U.S. and in Japan.

One of the first times I saw him I thought you must be joking. This guy’s mechanics are all wrong. He can look perfectly awful swinging at a pitch and stepping in the bucket. He flings the bat at the ball. He falls away from the plate. He just gets 200 hits every year.

He may not always look great slapping a base hit to the opposite field, but Ichiro is among the greatest hitters ever.

Nice Words for a Dodger?

I don’t like the Yankees or the Dodgers. Never have. But I gotta say a word or two about the class act that recently announced he was taking off the Dodger blue at the end of the season and – do you believe this – retiring.

Joe Torre is plain and simple a class act. I’ll never understand what happened in New York that caused bad blood to develop between Joe and the pinstriper’s management. What the guy didn’t win enough for you? Through thick and thin, Torre kept his temper, showed his class and keep the media spotlight from frying him and his players.

All Torre did was win in New York – every year in the playoffs, ten Eastern
Division titles, six American League pennants and four World Series rings. He obviously didn’t have the same talent or budget in LA, especially after the dysfunctional Dodger owners decided to split the sheets, or was it air the dirty laundry?

The guy was a player, too. A Gold Glove catcher, National League MVP and a batting title. He’s the only guy to have 2,000 wins as a manager and 2,000 hits as a player. He also didn’t take himself too seriously even when he looked like the world was resting on those broad, Italian shoulders.

Torre holds the National League record for grounding into double plays in a single game. He did it four times in a game in 1975. His comment: “I’d like to thank Félix Millán for making all of this possible.” Millán was hitting in front of Torre that day and singled all four times.

One of my partners tells a story about a friend of his who once saw Torre sharing a bottle of wine with some other guys in a Seattle restaurant after a game. The friend thinks he’ll big-time the Yankee manager and sends over another bottle of what Torre and his friends are drinking, then nearly passes out when he gets the bill. Torre obviously had class when it came to selecting a bottle of wine, too.

Torre will have a chance to manage again, I suspect. He certainly deserves another job, if he wants one. He’ll look better in anything but pinstripes and Dodger Blue. Or, if he wants, Torre can go to the broadcast booth or, I can dream, replace Bud Selig. Or, he can really retire, spend time with his family and not sleep 100-plus nights a year in a hotel room.

As the Giants, Padres and Rockies battle to the wire in the National League West, I regret that Torre’s team, as much as I dislike them, aren’t in the hunt. He deserves that.

Baseball has few enough really classy acts. Joe Torre is one of the best.

You Can Look It Up…Maybe

A few days ago I attributed the line “you can look it up” to the Hall of Fame New York Yankee catcher, Yogi Berra. A loyal and close reader gently suggested that I needed to “look it up.” That quote, he said, really came from Casey Stengel, who managed the Bronx Bombers, Mets and others.

After a little research, I’m frankly not sure who said “you can look it up.” It certainly sounds like something either of the memorable speakers of the English language could have said at the end of a sentence about something to do with the great game.

My research did turn up an article about how difficult it is to trace the origin of well-known quotes. Frankly, that didn’t help much because, if I read the piece correctly, you can’t always look it up. Such things are not always, well a sure thing.

I did find the “official” site for Casey Stengel and a whole page of quotes by and about the great manager. My favorite: “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.” Or this: “Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa.”

There is an official Yogi site, too, where you can buy his book – “I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said.” One collection of Berra quotes has this classic from, obviously, Yogi’s history of war and politics: “Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”

I did learn this in the search for the origin of the “look it up” quote: In a 1941 short story, the great James Thurber wrote about a three-foot adult (politicallhy incorrect – a midget) being sent to bat in a baseball game. Some claim – but only some – that the Thurber story was the inspiration for baseball owner Bill Veeck’s stunt when he sent three-foot something Eddie Gaudel to the plate in a St. Louis Browns game in 1951. Gaudel got no official at bat. He walked.

You can, oh, never mind.

The title of Thurber’s story? Of course it was – You Could Look It Up.

Piniella, the Pirates and Peaking

Whenever I think about Sweet Lou Piniella, who managed his last game Sunday, I remember reading a piece a few years back about the fact that Piniella would often wake up in the middle of the night worrying about what went wrong on the field and how to avoid the misfortune from happening again. Unfortunately, I know the feeling. I’m a post-midnight, middle-of-the-night worrier, too.

But, I digress. In one of these 4:00 a.m. moments, as recounted in the story, Piniella, always worried about his pitching staff, hit upon the notion of going with a four-man rather than a five-man rotation. His next comment was priceless.

”Now at four in the morning it seemed to work for me,” Piniella said. “Whether it works at 7 o’clock at night or 1:30 in the afternoon, I’m not sure.” Exactly. What seems like gold at 4:00 a.m. often looks like something a lot less valuable in the cold light of day.

In any event, we may never know if another of Lou’s middle-of-the-night brainstorms is a keeper, since he vows he is done with the dugout and, finally, really going to hang it up. It has been quite a ride for the one-time Yankee outfielder and American and National League manager of World Series winners and also rans. By all accounts, Piniella is a nice guy with a Hall of Fame temper on the diamond. I’ll miss seeing him pull a base out of the infield and try to turn it into a Frisbee.

The Pirates

The hapless Pittsburgh Pirates – you know you’ve become hopeless when the that word hapless is the only adjective that seems to work in front of your name. The hapless Bucs have – here we are in late August – ensured that they will endure their 18th consecutive losing season. Since 1992, there has never been a point in any season when the once-stories Pittsburgh franchise was more than seven games over .500. This year, the Pirates ensured a losing season faster than ever. Some record that.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a great photo a fan holding a sign reading, “I’m a Cubs fan, I came to Pittsburgh to feel better.” Ouch.

If all that losing wasn’t bad enough, the Associated Press obtained club documents that show while Pittsburgh fans were agonizing over all those sub-.500 years, the guys in the front office were some how able to make just north of $29 million bucks the last two seasons. Who says losing doesn’t pay? Obviously, the Pirate owners weren’t spending any of their money on baseball players. It wasn’t always so.

Back when Joe L. Brown run the front office the Pirates won two World Series titles and five Division titles. Brown, who died last week at 91, was one of the best baseball people most folks never heard of. Brown was the Pirates GM from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

As the New York Times noted in its obit: “In building the 1960 champions, Mr. Brown blended (Roberto) Clemente, (Bill) Mazeroski, Dick Groat and pitchers Bob Friend, Vern Law and Roy Face with players he obtained in trades: center fielder Bill Virdon, third baseman Don Hoak, catchers Smoky Burgess and Hal Smith, and pitchers Harvey Haddix and Vinegar Bend Mizell.”

in 1971, under Brown, the Pirates fielded the first all-black starting nine in a game with the Phillies.

And…more on “the” home run

A few loyal readers pointed out that I failed to address, in my weekend post on Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world,” the controversy over whether Thomson knew what was coming that October afternoon at the Polo Grounds when he hit his famous home run off of Ralph Branca.

Joshua Prager’s book The Echoing Green makes a strong case that the Giants had spent all of the 1951 season at the Polo Grounds stealing the signs of opposing pitchers by use of a Rube Goldberg-like, but still ingenious, system of telescopes and buzzers. In Prager’s account, Giants’ hitters could get tipped off to what was coming.

Until his dying day, Thomson denied any advance knowledge that Branca was going to serve up the fastball that would be immortalized on film, in novels and in Russ Hodges’ famous “the Giants win the pennant” radio call.

It is a great story, and the “truth” will never be known with any certainty but, you know what, I don’t think it matters? And, here’s why.

It has been said, and I think it is true, that hitting a baseball being throw at you from 60 feet away at near 100 miles per hour is the single hardest thing to do in all of sports.

My dad – a baseball fan and not a golfer – used to ask, when watching the U.S. Open or the Masters on television, why the crowd had to be perfectly quiet when a golfer is preparing to hit a stationary ball sitting on the ground, while a major league hitter is expected to concentrate in front of a screaming crowd of 50,000 fans, and hit a leather rock being throw at frightening speed that could be aimed at his head or his feet or anywhere in between? Good question.

Bobby Thomson may well have known a Ralph Branca fastball was on the way. He still had to hit it and under the most intense kind of pressure. He didn’t pop it up to the shortstop, he hit it into the left field stands. End of story.

As the great novelist Don DeLillo wrote in the prologue to his book Underworld, which is set at the Polo Grounds on the afternoon of Thomson’s homer when the Giants beat the Dodgers:

“…fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to tell their grandchildren – they’ll be the gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen, pressing in with medicine breath, that they were here when it happened.”

I wasn’t there when it happened, or even born, but that doesn’t matter, either. It did happen – the most perfect home run ever – thanks to the late Bobby Thomson.

Did I mention that he was a Giant? His homer beat the Dodgers, too. What a story.

Bobby Thomson, 1923 – 2010

This life-long San Francisco Giants fan will never forget, nearly a decade ago, walking for the first time into the then-new Giants ballpark south of Mission on the shores of China Basin. It was a lovely Saturday afternoon, the perfect day for baseball. Then the history hit me like an inside fastball you can’t seem to step away from.

Just inside one of the entrances to AT&T Park, Russ Hodges’ immortal words: “the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant” are stenciled on the wall. I can still feel the goose bumps.

Bobby Thomson, of course, hit his famous 1951 home run – the most famous home run in baseball history, some say – at the long gone Polo Grounds in New York, a continent away from China Basin. But so what?

As long as there are Giants and Giant fans and baseball fans, Thomson “shot heard round the world” will be the defining moment for the great franchise and as close as we are likely to have of a single defining moment for the great game.

Bobby’s shot off the Dodgers’ Ralph Branca has followed the Giants from the weirdly shaped Polo Grounds to windy Candlestick to AT&T Park. It is just that kind of moment and has been since 1951.

Thomson has been remembered this week as a tough competitor, a man who wore his one real moment of fame with quiet dignity and as the hitter who will be forever linked with one pitcher for as long as there are baseball memories.

The great baseball writer Roger Angell remembered Thomson homer as the first “where were you” moment in the country since Pearl Harbor.

Imagine what it would be like to have your entire professional career – your entire life, really – defined by a couple of seconds captured in grainy black and white and in Hodges’ classic home run call? Thomson had a 15 year career, played for the Braves, Cubs, Red Sox and Orioles, as well as the Giants, hit .270 for his career, once lead the National League in triples – he hit 14 in 1952 – and was once traded for a pitcher named Al Schroll, but one swing at 3:58 pm on October 3, 1951 is all that really matters.

There have been other dramatic home runs – Bill Mazeroski actually won a World Series with a walk off in 1960 – but Thomson’s is still “the epic” home run. Maybe it was the time, the post-war, or the dramatic, late season comeback by the Giants, down by 14 games in August to the hated Dodgers, or maybe it was Hodges’ radio call: “There’s a long drive…it’s gonna be…I believe…”

Thomson once said “that time was frozen…it was a delicious, delicious moment.” It was, it is and it will always be.

It will always be Bobby Thomson, Number 23 on his jersey, that gracious swing, Pafko at the wall, 3:58 pm in a Polo Grounds of the mind.

My lovely, charming wife, no baseball fan she, but smart and insightful about everything, knew immediately when she walked in this morning, while I was composing this post, that I was writing about “Bobby Thomson and the home run.” Yup.

The great sportswriter Red Smith wrote some of the best lines about “the home run” when he said: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressively fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Bobby died this week. His home run – our home run – never will.

Who Were the Best Ever From Idaho?

As far as I know, none of the guys in the photo nearby – a ball club from Hailey, Idaho in about 1910 – ever made a baseball name for themselves outside of the Wood River Valley. Hailey, or Idaho for that matter, hasn’t ever been in the fast lane for pro baseball players, although the great state has produced a few genuinely talented players.

Harmon Killebrew, the “Payette Strongboy,” comes first to mind. Killebrew had a great major league career with the old Washington Senators and the later Minnesota Twins. he is 11th on the all-time home run list and did it by eating steak rather than injecting steroids. Any guy in the Hall of Fame – Harmon was elected in 1984 – should be on the “all-time, all-state” team.

Steve Crump, the columnist with the Times-News who has a fine eye for Idaho history, recently compiled his all-time list of players with at least some tie to Idaho. Crump identified three other Hall of Famers who at least had a cup of coffee in Idaho on the way to bigger things – the great Walter Johnson (played in Weiser in 1907), Reggie Jackson (played in Lewiston in 1966) and Ricky Henderson (played in Boise in 1976).

As good as Steve’s list is – and aren’t these kinds of lists fun to debate – I would argue for a mention of the late Larry Jackson, a native of Nampa, as among the all-time, all-Idaho team. Jackson, a right handed pitcher, had a 14-year career with the Cardinals, the Cubs and the Phillies and a career record of 194-183 and a highly respectable 3.40 ERA. Jackson broke in with the Cardinels at the tender age of 23 in 1955.

Another baseball great, Maury Wills, the base stealer, said of Jackson: “Larry Jackson has one hell of a slider. He also had a questionable balk move that was rough on a base runner. He got away with it, though, because he was a veteran.”

Sounds like the lament of a guy who had trouble getting a good jump. Jackson also had two career home runs back in the good old days when all pitchers had to walk to the plate.

Larry Jackson also holds the distinction of being the best Idaho baseball player to have a serious political career. Jackson served in the Idaho House of Representatives, rose to chair the Appropriations Committee, ran the state Republican Party operation and ran for governor in 1978. I remember him as a quiet, effective, open guy. I covered his political career, but wasn’t smart enough to really have a conversation about his earlier career in the big leagues.

Jackson angered a few fellow Republicans in 1986 when he endorsed Democrat Cecil D. Andrus for governor. Larry Jackson died too young in 1990.

Good ball player. Good guy.