The Great Game

Memories 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.

Shoulda Known...

The 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.

Odds and Ends

Of 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.

Ron Santo

A 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.

The Man

The 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.

My Oh My...

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.

A Green Place Around Home

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.

So Long Bobby

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.

Among the Best Ever

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.

A Class Act

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.

Who Said That?

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.

More Baseball

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.

The Shot Heard Round the World

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.

Idaho Baseball

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.

The Understudy

The Anti-Strasburg Everyone showed up last night at National's Park in the center of our political universe - Washington, D.C. - to see a star perform, but the understudy got the call and ended up taking the bows. Talk about a no-win situation. It was like the hot and sticky sell-out crowd of 40,043 bought standing room only tickets to see a Broadway show with a big name star. Instead they got the kid from summer stock. The fickle faithful were expecting something magical; think Yul Brenner strutting his stuff in The King and I. Instead they got a skinny, ex-Mariner who has rarely strutted much stuff and has often had to slink off the stage under fire. Its not very generous to boo a guy, as many of the Stephen Strasburg-crazed D.C. baseball fans did last night, who scattered three singles, struck out six and didn't gave up a run in five innings, while shutting down the division leader. Understudies get no respect. When Miguel Batista took the mound for his on-field warm-up last night, the guy next to me said what 40,042 other baseball fans were thinking: "where's the kid, where's Strasburg?" Strasburg, who has been the talk of baseball since joining the Nationals earlier this season "couldn't get loose" before the game and the general manager nixed his appearance. His understudy was ready. Batista, having gotten the call fifteen minutes before game time, obviously knew his part. "Imagine, if you go there to see Miss Universe," he said after the game, "and you end up having Miss Iowa, you might get those kind of boos. But it's OK. They had to understand that as an organization we have to make sure the kid is fine." Miss Iowa showed some class, got a 3-0 win and, after an MRI, it looks like the kid is fine. One of the great things about sports is the "on any given day" factor. Last night was Miguel Batista's given day. I admit to being one of the 40,000-plus who panted into the ball yard last night yearning to marvel at the 98 mile an hour fastball and the devastating curve of the young guy who has captivated the baseball world since the Nationals brought him up to the show earlier this season. Instead, I witnessed something even better, a 39-year old pitcher in the twilight of a mediocre career rising to the moment. Strasburg has been getting more ink - and hype - inside the Beltway than a ban on earmarks and maybe he deserves it. (The Beltway's "must read" political writer, Mike Allen of Politico, featured the Strasburg Scratch in his morning email along with the news that White House stars Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod where among the disappointed 40,043.) But last night, at least for a few precious innings, a guy who hadn't won a game since George W. Bush was in the White House made a statement. I know, I know, the last minute substitution was no doubt a prudent precaution to protect a franchise player with a long career ahead of him, but who can't get loose in 90 degree weather with 85 percent humidity? That guy next to me, even with a couple of beers, could have gone three innings in that heat. With water - or was it beer - dripping down my forehead, I had to wonder if a 17-year-old Bob Feller ever had trouble "getting loose?" The 40,043 were reminded last night that "baseball is a business" and there is no effective liability reform that can protect against a young and sore arm. Still, I hope someone bought Miguel Batista a steak and a beer after the game. I have a feeling he was pretty lose last night. The understudy pulled it off. And, you gotta love that.

You Build It...They Do Come

Time to Get Serious About a New Stadium The Boise Hawks open their home season tonight. The Northwest League affiliate of the hapless - why does that word fit so well - Chicago Cubs play Salem-Keiser at aging Memorial Stadium. The stadium, near the Ada County Fairgrounds is actually in Garden City, and it is, did I mention this, aging? I'll be in my third base box, but I'll be thinking, as I do every year at this time, about the need for a new, improved venue that could, I believe, accomplish several important objectives for the community. It's time for Boise to get on with the plan. Here's a partial list of what a new, multi-purpose stadium could mean for Boise and southwestern Idaho.

1. We all know the community - and southwest Idaho - needs some economic development activity. A new, multi-purpose stadium in the right location would be first and foremost an economic development tool.
2. Boise needs to take serious steps to secure minor league baseball for the long haul and if the community ever aspires to move up - and why not - to Triple AAA, Memorial Stadium isn't going to cut it. Some of us can remember the Boise minor league team playing at the old field at Borah High School - you couldn't get a beer - and the move to the Fairgrounds location was like moving from a sandlot to Yankee Stadium, but now its time to re-think the location, quality and attractiveness of a stadium that could be home to the Hawks, maybe a minor league soccer franchise, local high school sports, concerts and more.
3. New, well-conceived stadium projects have shown that they can revitalize a neighborhood that needs a shot in the arm. There are many potential locations and it's probably too early in the assessment process to focus on any one site, but the City of Boise owns land along the Connector, west of downtown that needs to be seriously evaluated. Goodness knows that neighborhood, now the domain of abandoned auto dealerships and vacant lots, could use us a little love.

I remember a dinner with Mayor-elect Dave Bieter more than six years ago where the subject of a new stadium came up. The mayor has had plenty of priorities over those months, but now seems generally willing to think the multi-purpose stadium idea through. Good. It will take his leadership and the involvement of an enthusiastic community to move this idea forward.

The ownership of the Hawks have played a constructive role in this early discussion and have done some preliminary market analysis. More needs to be done, but it does seem clear that the Hawks could be the prime tenant for a new facility. If this effort is to get to first base and beyond a broad community need will need to be met. In other words, it is more than baseball, as important as I think that must be in the discussion.

Reno made a play for Triple AAA baseball and got it with a new downtown ballpark that anchors a redevelopment effort. Eugene (and the University of Oregon) built a new facility for the venerable Emeralds, a team long in the same league with Boise. Missoula finally got behind a new ballpark - the Beach Boys play there in August - and the Pioneer League Osprey seem sure to stay for a long time. Oklahoma City used the iconic Bricktown Ballpark to further renew an historic area in the heart of downtown. The list goes on and on.

I love Boise and have for the nearly 35 years I've been here. The city has so much going for it - great parks, new libraries, the Greenbelt, a nationally prominent college football team, a tremendous arts community with theater, music and more, the Foothills and the Boise River. Now, its time for a great, multi-purpose stadium venue to lock in professional baseball, attract minor league soccer, showcase high school sports and serve as a community venue for concerts and more.

Knowing Boise as I do, I know we'll have the predictable debate over what role government institutions should play in drafting and pushing a new stadium plan. Here is a fact: these developments just don't happen without a robust private-public partnership and a vast amount of community involvement.

Boise needs to take the next step and, with the Hawks opening another season tonight, its time to engage a community-wide conversation, make a plan and do something big and important for the city and the region.

That's Baseball

Griffey Quits...Ump Blows It Quite a day in baseball yesterday. Ken Griffey, Jr. made a good call and an umpire in Detroit didn't. The good call first. Perhaps the hardest thing in baseball, politics, business, you name it, is knowing when to hang it up. Most of us stay too long, sitting on our past accomplishments, talking too much about the good ol' days, hanging on when we should make way. Quitting is hard. Knowing when to quit is harder still. Ken Griffey is - was - a pro. He must have known at age 40, when most of us think we're hitting our prime, that he was finished. Sure, he could have held on until the end of the season. Mariner fans love the guy, and we have little enough to celebrate at the moment, but I think it was time Junior took the bow and made for the showers. He knew when to quit. I want to remember Griffey in his prime, jumping up against that ugly outfield wall in the old Kingdome pulling in a fly ball or dropping the bat at home plate after one of the most perfect swings in baseball history sent one of his 630 home runs into a bullpen in some ballpark. Griffey had a Willie Mays quality to him - they both wore number 24 - that before all the injuries, made him a joy to watch, in part, because he seemed to be having so much fun playing a little kid's game. As the New York Times noted, Griffey was as good as any in his generation, a sure-fire first ballot Hall of Famer, and no taint of scandal, no personal excess and limited ego. He was the real deal, a natural. I'll miss The Kid, but to everything there is a season and it was time. Griffey's announcement in Seattle was overshadowed by umpire Jim Joyce's blown call in Detroit that cost Armando Gallarraga a perfect game. To Joyce's never ending credit he was in anguish after the game telling reporters that he missed the call "from here to the wall" and "kicked the s--t out of it." Predictably, everyone has an opinion about what to do ranging from more technology to aid the umps, a bad idea, to a suggestion from that loudmouth Keith Olbermann that the Commissioner ought to intervene. A really bad idea. Come on. Baseball, its been correctly said, is a game of inches played on a huge expanse of grass and dirt. Few things in baseball are perfect, which is part of the reason it is such a perfect game. Baseball is a game of judgment and error. You're a brilliant hitter if you fail only seven out of ten times. In what other game would a ball that hits the foul pole on its way out of the park be declared fair? There is no crying in baseball and no do overs, either. I love the Tigers and I hate it when one of the boys in blue impacts a game, but that is the game. We've already had two perfect games in this long season and its only the first week in June. Perhaps the baseball gods just deemed three in a season one too many. And, by the way, how about Jim Joyce for Congress. At least the guy can fess up to a mistake.