Baseball posts

The journeyman who became Mr. Baseball

My father said his delivery reminded him of W.C. Fields—particularly in that great Miller Lite ad where he gets comps to a game and obliviously bothers everyone getting to his seat—only to be told, no, buddy, you're in the wrong seat. To which Bob Uecker says “Oh, I must be in the front roooow!” Dad could totally hear the W.C. Fields there. The final moments of the commercial are Uecker in the deepest section of the bleachers, far away from the action, enthusiasm undimmed.

Major League Baseball has had its share of clown princes, it's a tag you hear a lot, but I wouldn't tag Uecker with it. Neither clown nor prince seems right. He was just the funniest everyman to ever play the game.

I read his memoir, “Catcher in the Wry,” nearly 30 years ago now, and every so often I'll think of one of the cutlines in the photo section: Uecker, grimacing, as he slides into homeplate. “Here I am trying to score from second on a three-base hit; out on a close play.” He was master of self-effacement. He was famously a not-great player—six seasons, .200/.293/.287 in six seasons—and played for three teams in four cities: Braves (Milwaukee), Cardinals, Philllies, Braves (Atlanta). This is from his memoir:

When a player gets cut, well, the news is traumatic. He is face to face with that moment of final truth, that he will never put on a big league uniform again. Nor is it easy on the manager who has to break the news. ... I'll never forget how it happened to me. I went to spring training with Atlanta in 1968. The manager was Luman Harris. I opened the door to the clubhouse and Luman looked up and said calmly, “No visitors allowed.”

This story is via Joe Posnanski. Ueck was on the '64 Cardinals who came from 11 games back to win the pennant, but he didn't play in the World Series.

“I was on the disabled list,” he told Bob Costas and Joe Morgan in the booth during Game 6 of the 1995 World Series.

Costas: Fouled to the screen. Why were you on the disabled list?

Uecker: I got hepatitis.

Costas: Swing and a miss. How did you get hepatitis?

Uecker: The trainer injected me with it.

Pos says Uecker was everyone's favorite teammate: Dick Allen, Phil Niekro, Bob Gibson. He and Gibson were fined $100 each by the St. Louis Cardinals for necessitating a reshoot of the team photo. In the first version they were holding hands. In '65, Lou Brock set a then Cardinals record by stealing 60 bases and was given a plaque in a ceremony in the team clubhouse, during which Uecker turned to Tim McCarver and whispered: “If I had been in the lineup every day, that could be me out there.”

After his career he became a regular on “The Tonight Show,” beloved by Johnny, who gave him the nickname “Mr. Baseball.” He became the Milwaukee Brewers announcer in 1972 and never stopped. He did the Lite beer commercials and got his own sitcom in the '80s. He became one of the most famous fictional announcers of the game when he played Harry Doyle in the “Major League” movies: “Juuust a bit outside!” 

I like this from Bob Costas: “Baseball kept him alive. Even in his last year, when he was so ill, when he got to the ballpark and stepped on the elevator up to the press box, he would come to life. He was just happier and healthier at the ballpark.”

Touch 'em all, Ueck.

“I must be in the front roooow.” 

An unexpected surprise reading Terry Pluto's “The Curse of Rocky Colavito: A Loving Look at a Thirty-Year Slump” was getting the backstory of one-time Twins pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant, whose story reads like a compendium of baseball history. He was scouted for the Cleveland Indians by Fred Merkle of the infamous 1908 “boner” play, and during spring training the coaches were about to send him away but Hank Greenberg, the great Detroit Tigers slugger and current Cleveland GM, asked if he had anywhere else to go. When Grant said no,  Greenberg made sure he got to stay. Grant was then assigned to the minors by Yankees pitching great Red Ruffing, given a pair of spikes by Sam Mele and taken under the wing of Hall of Famer Larry Doby.

That's a lot of baseball history right there.

He sounds like a lovely person, too. Pluto begins the section with a personal childhood anecdote:

My father and I were walking out of the Stadium, and Mudcat was coming right toward us. He was wearing a nice dark suit. He carried a suitcase in one hand, a garment bag in the other, and had a third bag hanging from his shoulder. “That's Mudcat Grant,” my dad said. “Go ask him for an autograph.” I hesitated for a moment. I didn't know how to ask for an autograph. My father handed me the Indians scorecard—they were ten-cent scorecards back then, no five-dollar glossy programs. Then he gave me a pen. “Go ahead,” he said. “Go ask Mudcat to sign.” I was eight years old. As I took a couple of steps in his direction, Mudcat stopped, put down all of his bags, and said, “How you doing, little man?” I knew who Mudcat was, and I knew he was a good pitcher. I also was too scared to say a word. “Want me to sign that for you?” he asked, taking the scorecard out of my hand. “What's your name?” he asked. I told him, in a whisper. He signed the program “To Terry, best wishes, Mudcat Grant.” I whispered a thank you.

How wonderful is that? 

At the trade deadline in 1964, the Indians traded him to the Twins for George Banks and Lee Stange. “A year later he was 21-7,” Pluto writes, “and he was a World Series hero, winning two games and hitting a three-run homer.”

In 1991, after he set the all-time record for stolen bases. He would steal nearly 500 more.

In 2000 I was on the field at Mariners Park before the game to interview Edgar Martinez for The Grand Salami, an alternative program sold outside the stadium, when that year's leadoff hitter walked past me. On the field, you try to affect the demeanor that you belong, so I was downplaying a lot. I was pretending I was cooler than I was. But with that guy, I opted to feel the gravity of the moment. I reminded myself, like a father were talking to his son, “There goes one of the greatest players to ever play this game.” 

How great was Rickey Henderson? Here's how he ranks in various offensive categories:

• Games: 4th (3,081)
• Hits: 27th (3,055)
• Walks: 2nd (2,190)
• Times on Base: 4th (5,343)
• Runs: 1st (2,295)
• Stolen Bases: 1st (1,406)

He walked over 2,000 times and still got more than 3,000 hits. That's insane. As for his stolen base record? You give the No. 2 guy, Lou Brock, all of the stolen bases of the current active leader, Starling Marte, and you still wouldn't reach it. Brock has 938, more than 450 behind, and no active player has close to 450. I don't think I've ever seen such a disparity between Nos. 1 and 2 in any baseball category. There's usually somebody, somewhere in time, close to you. Not here. 

Here's another ranking worth looking at:

• bWAR: 19th (111.1)

bWAR is supposed to take everything into account, everything, and this ranking is for both pitchers and position players. And he's 19th. The bigger point is who's ahead of him. It's mostly black-and-white guys, i.e., players whose careers ended before WWII. The only untainted post-WWII guys ahead of him are the All-Timers: Mays, Aaron, Musial, Williams. The only players ahead of him who began their careers after him are the tainted trio: Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod. By this measure, untained version, Rickey Henderson is the best player of the past 50 years.

For all his great speed, not to mention power (he hit more leadoff homeruns than anyone in baseball history), he hit shockingly few triples (66, tied for 447th) and he has about 100 fewer doubles than Paul Molitor or Cal Ripken Jr. (510, 58th). He just got on, stole, scored. Again and again and again. Which is the point of the game. He got home safely more than anyone in baseball history.

He was a character, often talking about himself in the third person, and like another great baseball character, Yogi Berra, some of the stories about him are no doubt apocryphal. He didn't say everything he said, to put it in Yogi's terms. The one about John Olerud and the helmet is probably in this category. Joe Posnanski tells his favorite: about returning to the Oakland A's in 1989 and agreeing to abide by the manager's signs: hit and run, steal, etc. and if the coach swiped both arms the previous signs were taken off. But he wasn't abiding by these signs. He kept stealing. So manager Tony LaRussa angrily cornered him in the dugout, but this merely confused Rickey:

“You said if he swipes his arms, that means take off sign,'” Henderson said.

La Russa nodded.

“Well, he swiped his arms,” Rickey said. “And Rickey took off.”

But my new favorite Rickey story is the one Craig Calcaterra relays in his SubStack—via Mike Piazza's 2013 memoir. It's a good corrective for all we think we know about the man. Piazza writes:

Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out “Full share!” We’d argue for a while and he’d say, “Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!“

That's the most beautiful story with ”Fuck that!" in it that I've ever heard. 

• Joe Posnanski
• Craig Calcaterra
• New York Times
• Baseball Reference

Joe Posnanski's Rocky Colavito obit led me to a book he references, “The Curse of Rocky Colavito,” in which Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto details what went wrong with the late 1950s Cleveland Indians and why they sucked forever after. (The book was published in 1994, just before they became really, really good again, winning pennants in 1995 and 1997, albeit still without a title, and with a lot more heartache, Jose Mesa.) Here's what went wrong: GM Frank Lane. Known as “Trader Lane” or “Traitor Lane,” he's the guy who discarded the Indians' beloved right fielder.

Turns out it's worse than that. Trading Colavito wasn't the beginning, it was Lane's crescendo. This is the line in the book that stunned me:

In the spring of 1960, the only Tribe players left from the forty-man roster Lane had inherited two years earlier were [Herb] Score and Colavito.

How is that even possible? Forty guys in 2+ years?

The '57 squad wasn't great, admittedly. The year before they'd won 88 games and finished second (again) to the Yankees (again), and in '57 they finished under .500: 76-77, 6th of 8 teams. It didn't help that after the '56 season, manager Al Lopez, who was upset management had not supported his players from fan abuse, resigned, and was immediately hired by the Chicago White Sox, for whom he helped win a pennant in 1959. From 1949 to 1964, the NY Yankees won the pennant every single year—except for 1954 (Indians) and 1959 (White Sox). What do those two teams have in common? They were both managed by Al Lopez. So not necessarily the kind of guy you want to give up.

Lane was not the kind of guy you wanted to hire, but hired he was, for GM, in November 1957. He wasted no time in remaking the team in his image:

• Nov. 1957, traded Early Wynn, who won the AL Cy Young two years later
• June 1958, traded Roger Maris, who won the AL MVP in 1960 and '61, and broke Babe Ruth's homerun record in '61
• April 1960, traded Norm Cash, who led the Majors in 1961 with a .361 average, a .487 OBP and a 1.148 OPS

And yes, he got some not-bad guys for these guys, but not Cy Young Award winners, not MVPs. Cleveland didn't get a Cy Young Award winner until Gaylord Perry in 1972. They haven't had a league MVP since.

Though the Colavito trade was the crescendo, the one that made all the noise like cymbals clanging, a day later Lane also got rid of Herb Score to finish his handiwork. He became a punchline:

Comedian Bob Hope, a minor investor in the Indians for years, summed up the mood well: “I'm afraid to go to Cleveland,” said Hope. “Frank Lane might trade me.”

Here's another paragraph that spoke to me:

The Cleveland papers were savaging Lane. Ownership was very nervous because attendance dropped from 1.5 million in 1959 to 950,985 in 1960. The Plain Dealer quoted a fan as saying, “With all the trades, I don't even know this club well enough to get sore at it.”

That's me and the Mariners. In the last few years, it's felt like Jerry Dipoto was making deals to make deals, and I didn't even know the club anymore. If it works, great. But the Mariners have made the postseason once in the last 20-odd years, and we keep going through different levels of boring and hitlessness, just with different rosters of players, so there's no one to hold onto. You get both failure and unfamiliarity. If your guys fail, you care. If strangers fail, why bother? 

I'm curious what the title of a similar Mariners book would be: “The Curse of ...”? My immediate thought is “The Curse of Edgar Martinez.” The Indians are cursed because they traded away a beloved player. The Mariners are cursed because they kept a beloved player here and away from World Series glory. But that's merely first thought. It doesn't quite feel right.

I recently came across the unbelievably sad stat that the Chicago White Sox, established in 1900, never had a 40-homerun guy until Frank Thomas did it in the 1990s. That seems so White Sox. And for all of the Big Hurt's homers—and he hit 521 of them—he never led the league. But the ChiSox did kinda own the homerun title in the early 1970s: Dick Allen won it twice, and before him, Beltin' Bill Melton topped the charts in 1971.

It was a bit of a fluke. In Melton's second season, 1969, he hit 23 homers. The following year he upped it to 33, which was good enough for fifth in the American League and 15th-best in the Majors. And the very next season, he won the homerun title.

With 33.

What happened in the American League between 1970 and '71? Mostly, the big AL boppers from the previous 10 years, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Howard, aged out. Ditto Carl Yastrzemski, who went from 40 to 15. Ditto his BoSox teammate Tony Conigliaro, who is his own sad story. He went deep 36 times in 1970, including 10 times in September, was traded a month later, and played only 95 more games, hitting a total of six more homers. There was a void, in other words, and Melton stepped into it. As a result, he loomed kinda large in my youth—even over in Minnesota.

His career was surprisingly short, and always with moribund teams. He never sniffed the postseason. Here's how his teams, mostly the ChiSox, finished:

• 1968: 8th of 10
• 1969: 5th of 6
• 1970: 6th of 6
• 1971: 3rd of 6
• 1972: 2nd of 6 (!)
• 1973: 5th of 6
• 1974: 4th of 6
• 1975: 5th of 6
• 1976: 4th of 6 (California)
• 1977: 5th of 7 (Cleveland)

Yes, for a brief shining moment, in August 1972 (when Melton was injured), the White Sox were actually in the lead in the AL West. On August 26, they were up by 1.5 games. By Sept. 1, they were down 2.5 games to the resurgent Oakland A's, who not only won the division (by 5.5 games), and the pennant, and the World Series, but the next three World Series—the only non-Yankees team to do that. So the ChiSox were attempting to buck history. Didn't happen.

Melton never hit more than 33 homers, and only hit 154 with the team overall, but that was a club record until Harold Baines (and then Frank Thomas, and then...) overtook it. He never hit .280, never slugged .500, never hit 30 doubles or drove in 100, and never won a Gold Glove, but he was always solid. Apparently Melton feuded with Chicago announcer Harry Caray, which led to the trade to the Angels. But per The New York Post, Melton returned to the team in the early 1990s as a scout/ambassador, became one of Michael Jordan's hitting instructors, and then joined the broadcast booth in 1998. He stayed there for more than 20 years. He died last week, aged 79, following a brief illness. 

His 1960 Topps baseball card, before the curse.

Here's a confession for which I'll probably have to hand in my SABR card: I sometimes get Rocky Colavito and Ted Kluszewski mixed up. Both were power hitters for Ohio teams with “C” caps in the 1950s (i.e., before I was born), who got traded around and never won an MVP nor made the Hall of Fame nor crashed a big number like 500 career homeruns. Both were big (Rock: 6'3“, 190; Klu: 6'2”, 225) with names that sounded big, but Kluszewski was the guy who cut off the sleeves of his jerseys because his biceps were too big. I sometimes thought that was Colavito. Klu was Polish, a first baseman, and nearly 10 years older; Rocky was Italian, and a right fielder who grew up in New York idolizing Joe DiMaggio. 

Another difference: Kluszewski went to Indiana University, where he was discovered by the Reds groundskeeper, while Colavito never finished high school. He left at age 16 to play semipro ball. “He would spend the rest of his life telling kids not to follow in his footsteps,” Joe Posnanski writes in his beautiful obit.

Rocco Domenico Colavito was born in 1933 and came up for a cup of coffee in 1955, the year after Cleveland won a pennant. That would be a theme: missing the postseason. In his rookie season he slashed a .276/.372/.531 line, with 21 homers and more walks than strikeouts (49-46), but he finished second to White Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio in Rookie of the Year honors. That would be another theme: never quite getting the accolade. Two years later he finished third in MVP voting despite 41 homers, a 1.024 OPS, and a Major-league leading .620 slugging percentage. The next year he led the league in homers and total bases but finished fourth in MVP voting to three players on the resurgent Go-Go White Sox—including Aparicio. But he did make the cover of TIME magazine in an article about young players in the grand old game.

His trade to Detroit two days before the start of the 1960 season became the stuff of legend. He didn't want to go (he loved Cleveland), the fans didn't want him to go (Cleveland loved him), but general manager Frank Lane felt, as he said, “The home run is overrated.” Thus Colavito, the 1959 homerun champ, was traded for Harvey Kuenn, the 1959 batting champ. If you squint, and are cold-blooded, it kinda makes sense. Overall, Kuenn had led the league in hits four times, in doubles three times, and batting average once, and he was coming off that .353 season, so if you felt BA > HR, as Lane apparently did, then pull that trigger no matter what the fans felt. If you win a championship, they'll forgive you. Cf., Nomar and the 2004 Red Sox.

Cleveland didn't win a championship. They went from 89-65 in 1959, second in the league, to 76-78, fourth, and wouldn't make the postseason again until .... wait for it ... 1995. Fans traced it all to the Colavito trade. It became known as “The Curse of Rocky Colavito.” Books were written.

I love this litany of fan anger, per Posnanski, upon hearing the news:

• “My teeth almost fell out,” South Euclid's Marvin Jones said.
• “I'll never go to the ballpark again,” Robert Intorocio on 165th Street said.
• “Tie Lane to a boxcar and run him out of Cleveland,” 88th Street's William Scott suggested.
• “The most stupid thing I ever heard,” Beachwood's David Magner said.
• “I belong to one of the Rocky Colavito fan clubs,” eighth grader Carol Kickel said, “It's all over. We're going to start a new one, the Lane Haters.”

It didn't help that in 1960 Kuenn was less effective than he'd been, .308 with no power, and it also didn't help that Lane turned right around and traded him to the San Francisco Giants for Johnny Antonelli, a pitcher who went 0-4 with a 6.56 ERA and was gone, and Willie Kirkland, an outfielder who lasted three years with the team, slashing a .232/.299/.414 line. “I felt this trade would help us,” Lane said, “because it gives us a starting pitcher and an outfielder who hits with power.” Kirkland was eventually traded for half a season of Al Smith, meaning this is what the Indians got for their beloved player by bWAR:

• One season of Kuenn: 2.4
• Half a season of Antonelli: -1.1
• Three seasons of Kirkland: 3.6
• Half a season of Smith: -0.9
• TOTAL: 4.0

This is versus about 22 bWAR for the rest of Colavito's career, which included leading the league in total bases in 1962, and in RBIs in 1966. The latter was when he was back in Cleveland. He also played for the KC A's (in 1964), the White Sox ('67), and Dodgers/Yankees ('68). He never went to the postseason.

Remember in Ken Burns' “Baseball” doc when Bob Costas mentions how all his father's friends said stuff like, “You never saw DiMaggio, kid, you never saw the real thing”? Posnanski got that in Cleveland about Colavito. “The recurring theme of my Cleveland childhood was that I had arrived at the party too late,” Pos writes, “that I had missed all the good stuff, I had missed Jim Brown running through defenders, and I had missed Bob Feller and Sudden Sam McDowell throwing fastballs at the speed of sound, and I had missed Lou the Toe Groza booting the football when successful field goals felt like something of a magic trick. 'Aw,' adults would tell me, 'you shoulda seen the Rock play.'”

Except, in a way, he did. This is how he begins his obit:

When I was 10 years old—that most magical time for baseball fans—I saw a 44-year-old baseball coach (he looked so much older to me then) stand at home plate at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and throw a baseball over the centerfield wall. It remains to this day the closest I've come to actually seeing Superman fly or Spiderman climb or Bugs Bunny defy the laws of gravity (because he never studied law). The throw was a feat so mind-boggling, so utterly impossible, that for years I would actually dream about it, only in the dreams I was that coach at home plate, and I would throw the ball, and it would never come down.

The coach was Rocky Colavito.

One of the questions on today’s Immaculate Grid—or one of the squares, and yeah, I’m still doing these things every other day or so—was the intersection of a pitcher with 200+ career wins and a player born outside the U.S. I put down Bert Blyleven (Netherlands) without much thought. After I got dinged for 5%, I chastised myself for not going deeper.

Once I got the answer, I wondered if you could go deeper, since there are only 11 guys who fit that definition—and four of them are from the early years of baseball, so I don't know them. This is them chronologically:

1. Tommy Bond, Ireland
2. Jim McCormick, Scotland
3. Tony Mullane, Ireland
4. Jack Quinn, Slovakia
5. Juan Marichal, Dominican Republic
6. Luis Tiant, Cuba
7. Ferguson Jenkins, Canada
8. Bert Blyleven, Netherlands
9. Dennis Martinez, Nicaragua
10. Pedro Martinez, Dominican Republic
11. Bartolo Colon, Dominican Republic

So wait, no Fernando? No, he won just 173. How about Nomo? 123. My man King Felix? 169.

The Dominican Republic is only No. 1 on this list by a whisper—basically by the difference between Ireland and Scotland. But I assumed the DR and other Latin American countries would soon flood the list.

And then I realized: Nobody wins games anymore.

Only three active pitchers are 200+: Justin Verlander (262), Max Scherzer (216) and Clayton Kershaw (212), and a more All-American trio would be tough to find. Next guy on the list, another All-American, is Gerritt Cole, and he’s way back at 153. For foreign-born active pitchers? The DR’s Johnny Cueto is tops with 144, but he’s 38 years old and last season went 0-2 with a 7.15 ERA. I have trouble seeing him getting to 150+ let alone 200+. Then it’s two guys with 110, Carlos Carrasco from Venezuela and Yu Darvish from Japan, but they’re 37 and 38 respectively.

How about Ohtani? 38 wins. 38!

So right now I’m thinking that unless the game changes in unexpected ways, this is the list—forever and ever, amen.

Trivia question: Which foreign-born pitcher won the most games in MLB history? It’s the guy I chose, Blyleven at 287, and it’s a record that’s never going to be broken.

My grid, a Palmer away from an all-Twins sweep.

Here's a baseball trivia question with an obvious answer: Between Ted Williams hitting .388 in 1957 and Rod Carew hitting .388 in 1977, who had the highest single-season batting average in the Majors? Yes, that would be Rico Carty's .366 in 1970. Only a handful of players ever got into the .360s during that time. The others: Norm Cash in 1961 (.361), Joe Torre in '71 (.363), and Rod Carew in '74 (.364). Nice company.

I remember being impressed by that .366 number—and loving the name. Turns out he's the only “Carty” in MLB history. “Rico,” short for Ricardo, is less unique (cf., Petrocelli, among others). 

1970 was the only year he led the league in anything. Why? Injuries. Victor Mather in The New York Times has a nice obit on the man, letting us know “Carty's progress was impeded by broken bones, hamstring problems and even tuberculosis.” Mather also gives Carty's birthdate without underlining its historical significance: Sept. 1, 1939. What a world to be born into.

As a kid, he was a boxer but soon switched over to baseball. He signed with a bunch of teams, the Milwaukee Braves won him and switched him to the outfield, and in his rookie season he hit .330, second in the Majors, with 22 homeruns. Normally that's enough to win Rookie of the Year, but this was 1964 so Carty finished second to Dick Allen of the Phillies. But what a bumper crop that season: Those two plus AL Rookie of the Year Tony Oliva. 

Then injuries. He played in only 83 games in '65 (hitting .310), bounced back in '66 (hitting .326), suffered in '67 (.255), lost all of '68 and a third of '69 (.342). But in 1970, as if making up for lost time, he tore out of the gate and after two full months was hitting (wait for it) .436! He was so good, Mather lets us know, that he became the first write-in starter to the All-Star Game. It would be his only All-Star appearance.

After the 1970 season, this was Rico Carty's career split: .322/.389/.507. That's a Hall of Fame line. But then more injuries and more problems. He missed all of '71 with a broken leg, and when he returned he was diminished, hitting .277 without power for half of the '72 season. Plus he'd had an altercation with Atlanta cops in '71, and maybe with Henry Aaron sometime in there, and Atlanta wound up basically unloading him—to Texas for a pitcher named Jim Panther, who went 2-3 with a 7.63 ERA over one season and was done. Carty wasn't. He hung on throughout the 1970s, though he was basically a hot potato. Everybody wanted him but never for long.

• 08/73: Purchased by the Chicago Cubs
• 09/73: Purchased by the Oakland A's
• 12/73: Released by the Oakland A's
• 08/74: Purchased by the Cleveland Indians (from the Mexican League)
• 11/76: Drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 12/76: Traded to the Cleveland Indians
• 03/78: Traded to the Toronto Blue Jays 
• 08/78: Traded to the Oakland A's
• 10/78: Purchased by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 11/78: Granted Free Agency
• 01/79: Signed as a Free Agent by the Toronto Blue Jays
• 03/80: Released by the Toronto Blue Jays

His final career line is pretty good: .299/.369/.464. He died November 23, age 85. Rest in peace.

What's that sound? That's the news being spread, Yankees fans.

Five. That seems to be the magic number. 

The Dodgers were down 5-0 in the fifth, then scored 5 to tie it, then took the World Series in five games. 

That top of the 5th deserves looking at. I'm sure the Yankees and their fans will be staring into its abyss for a long time to come. 

Remember, at that point, the Dodgers didn't have a hit. Two walks (Lux in the 3rd, Betts in the 4th) were their only baserunners. No one got to third. 

Then Kike Hernandez did the Kike Hernandez thing by starting the Dodgers off—with a single. NLCS MVP Tommy Edman followed with an easy fly ball to center that Aaron Judge somehow dropped, doink, Charlie Brown fashion, so now there were runners on 1st and 2nd with nobody out. Will Smith followed with a slow roller to the right of shortstop Anthony Volpe, who opted to go to third for the force. Not a bad move. But Kike was fast and Volpe hurried a low throw that newbie hot-corner man Jazz Chisholm Jr. couldn't dig out. Bases juiced. 

And even then the Yankees nearly escaped unscathed. Gerritt Cole, probably the best starter on either team in this Series, apparently decided he couldn't trust his fielders anymore and did it on his own, striking out No. 9 hitter Gavin Lux and leadoff hitter Shohei Ohtani—who hasn't been himself since he dislocated his shoulder in Game 2. Then he got Mookie Betts, all-world Mookie, to hit a slow roller to first ... and Cole didn't cover the bag. Replays show he began to jog over but stopped. Did he think Anthony Rizzo had it? Well, he didn't. Betts beat him to the bag and it wasn't a contest. If Cole had made the play, it would still be 5-0 heading into the bottom of the fifth. Instead, it was 5-1, and all-world Freddie Freeman followed with a single to center to plate two; and then Teoscar Hernandez, the former Mariner who hit .350 for the Series, followed with a double in the left-center gap that a speedier centerfielder might've nabbed. And suddenly the game was tied.

A triptych of a tripup: Yankees pointing fingers.

Confession: I didn't watch any of this. I was doing work-work. I could've watched it—in fact, my wife was watching it in the next room—but I was suddenly stricken with too much anxiety. Why? Because the Yankees might win their 28th World Series? Nah. If the Yankees had won the Series I wouldn't have been happy but I would've just shrugged. Oh well, 28, what are you gonna do? No, it was the pathway they were taking, and it was a pathway through something that meant more to me than I realized: the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the only major sports team to ever come back from a three games to none deficit in a best-of-7 series to win it all. The Red Sox, of course, did it against the Yankees—the team that bought their best player, Babe Ruth, in 1919 and then became the Yankees. Back then, the Red Sox were the best team in baseball, winners of five World Series titles when the Yankees hadn't even been. How about them apples? After the trade, the Yankees would become the most successful franchise in sports history while the Red Sox wouldn't win another World Series for the rest of the century. Indeed, the next time the one-time super-successful BoSox won the pennant, 1946, the Yankees already had 14 pennants to their name and 10 championships. By the time the BoSox next won a pennant, 1967, the Yankees had 29 pennants and 20 championships. Excruciating. That's the Curse of the Bambino right there. 

That's what was so brilliant, so beautiful, about the 2004 ALCS. It was kismet. It was payback. It was history closing the loop in the most exquisite fashion possible. And it began with the smallest of things: a stolen base in the bottom of the 9th by a bench player they'd traded for midseason: Dave Roberts. Who was now the Dodgers manager. 

That was what was causing the anxiety. I'd seen a stat flashed on the screen during Game 4, with the Yankees down three games to none: All the other twentysomething times the World Series began with one team taking the first three games, it was usually a sweep, a handful of times it went to five games, but no team had ever taken it to six. The Yankees would be doing this if they won Game 5. And could they go further? Could they reopen the loop, and the wound, that history had so beautifully and exquisitely closed? By beating the team managed by the guy who had stolen that base? God, no. Please, no. So I couldn't even bear to watch it. I did sneak peeks at the score via ESPN.com and it wasn't good: 2-0, 3-0, 5-0. And then that fifth. But I couldn't even watch it then because I didn't want to screw it up. Baseball fans will understand. If something is working, you need to stick with it, even if it has nothing to do with you, even if you're the most peripheral thing within its universe. So I stayed away. I got a lot of work done. Until my wife opened the door to my office and told me, “You can come out now.” Ya putz.

I would've loved a sweep. The Yankees haven't been swept in the Series since the Reds did it in '76. Before then, Koufax in '63, the year of my birth. Losing in five, though, is actually rarer for them. The Yankees are now 27-14 in World Serieses and this is how they lost the 14:

• In eight games: 1921 (when it was best of nine)
• In seven games: 1926, 1955, 1957, 1960, 1964, 2001
• In six games: 1981, 2003
• In five games: 1942, 2024
• In four games: 1922*, 1963, 1976

* That one in 1922 was actually five games, but one ended in a tie and I don't even know how to count that. Because as the man said, “There's no tying in baseball.”** 

** The man in question is my friend Mike Busick, Mr. B, channeling Tom Hanks after that All-Star Game that ended in a tie.

I shouldn't overlook that 8th inning. The Dodgers came back in the 5th, fell back again in the 6th, and went ahead in the 8th on solid baseball. Again, Kike started them off with a sharp single. Then Edman with the seeing-eye kind that Volpe smothered but couldn't make a play on. Then a walk. Pitching change. Luke Weaver on no day's rest. Bottom of the order. But Gavin Lux hit one to center, and not only did Kike score from third but Edman advanced to third—a key play. Ohtani, with the chance again, wound up on first because of catcher's interference. So it was Mookie who hit the deep sac fly to center to put the Dodgers on top. And that's where they stayed. And that's where it ended. 

Interesting that the Dodgers won Game 5 without a homer. Before then, they'd lived and died (mostly lived) on the homer. Of the 18 runs they'd scored in the first four games, 13 had come on the long ball. This game, none. Just a lot of two-out thunder.

Freddie Freeman was the much-deserved, no-brainer MVP of the Series. He hit .300 and slugged 1.000. He hit homers in each of the first four games, including that walkoff Grand Slam to end Game 1, which set the tone for what followed. He drove in 12 runs, which ties the Series record setting by Bobby Richardson in 1960. Except Richardson did it in seven games. I love what Freddie said when they brought all those ribbies during the postgame ceremonies: Well, these guys kept getting on base.

Both Teoscar and Tommy Edman had .900+ OPSes. Shohei, no: 2-19, a single and a double. Over on the Yankees ledger, I'm glad Aaron Judge finally broke through with a 2-run homer. In the end, despite his struggles, he had the second-best OPS on the team, .832, just ahead of Giancarlo Stanton's .832. Eight of the nine Yankee regulars hit World Series homers (Stanton hit 2). The one missing? Rizzo.

The Dodgers still needed great relief work from Blake Treinen, who came in during the 6th and stuck around until the end of the 8th. Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty lasted 1.3 innings, threw 35 pitches and gave up 4 runs. Treinen lasted 2.3 innings, threw a Jackie Robinsonesque 42 pitches, and gave up zero runs. Joe Posnanski mentions that the last time Treinen threw more than 2 innings? 2018. Then, in the 9th, he handed off to starter Walker Buehler, who had never closed a game during his MLB career, and who was facing the bottom of the Yankees order: five pitches to Volpe, who grounded to third; seven pitches to Austin Wells, who struck out; and four pitches to Alex Verdugo, who struck out to end the ninth, the game, the Series and the season. And Walker Buehler spread his arms wide, “Gladiator”-like, as if to say, “Are you not amused?” 

I am. Very. Thank you, Dodgers.

Buehler, amused.

I paused before celebrating, before shouting with joy, because last night for some reason I was misjudging a lot of fly balls. I'm usually better at that. I usually know, before anyone else at Mariners Park, for example, when it's gone, and, more importantly, when it's not. Crack of the bat, people around me are all “Ooohhh!” and I'm like, “Nah, can of corn.” And it's a can of corn. Tougher when I'm sitting in a different seat than my usual, and last night I wasn't sitting in my usual TV-watching seat, so maybe it was that. I was mostly misjudging Dodgers' batters so maybe it was pure wish fulfillment, too. Dodgers also hit more to the warning track than the Yankees did. Except ... Was it Kike Hernandez's fly out to left in the ninth? Again, it seemed a mighty wallop off the bat but it barely went anywhere. A pop out. Mid-range. Maybe he broke his bat. Maybe I'm just getting to that age.

So that's why I paused even though all signs pointed to YES. But I wanted to see it go out first. And then I wanted to see it go out again. And then I wanted to watch it a billion-zillion times.

In a game in which no one could break through—the Yankees kept stranding runners while the Dodgers kept hitting it to the warning track—the Yankees, the bad guys, took a lead in the top of the tenth on a line single by Jazz Chisholm Jr. (who, if he's not taunted as “Jism” in enemy ballparks, someone's missing a beat), and Jazz promptly stole second, and then third, and then scored when Dodgers shortstop and suprise NLCS MVP Tommy Edman dove for a grounder but couldn't get it out of his glove in time to start the double play to nullify the run. 3-2, Yanks.

Bottom 10, and it was 7-8-9 hitters up, and I'm sure everyone was thinking what I was thinking: Someone has to get on so Shohei can come up. And someone did get on: With one out, Gavin Lux walked. Which brought up Edman. And I'm sure everyone was thinking what I was thinking: Don't ground into a double play, don't ground into a double play, don't ground into a double play. And he nearly did! Except defense replacement at 2B Oswaldo Cabrera overdove for the ball and everyone was safe. Now it was one out, two men on, and the top of the Dodgers lineup due up, Ohtani, Mookie, Freddie, maybe the three best players at the top of any lineup in baseball history. First and third were lefties. And Yankees manager Aaron Boone had two lefties in the bullpen: Tim Hill, a superskinny sidewinder with a wisp of a moustache, who looks more accountant than baseball player—he looks less like a Yankee than any Yankee I've ever seen—and Nestor Cortes, a starter who went 9-10 this season with a 3.77 ERA and a solid 162-39 strikeout-walk ratio, but who hadn't pitched, a TV graphic told us, since Sept. 18 (against Seattle!) because of a flexor strain in his elbow. But postgame Boone said he thought Cortes was looking good. He liked that matchup better, he said. And that's the matchup he got. 

Cortes threw only two pitches.

The first, Shohei popped up into foul territory in left field, and Alex Verdugo made a great catch, tumbling into the seats, and recalling that Jeter catch from 20 years ago. Apparently it wasn't a great pitch. Apparently it's the type of pitch Shohei usually eats for breakfast. Not this time. And a collective groan was heard throughout this great land.

Then the Yanks did the automatic-walk thing to Mookie Betts to get to the other lefty, Freddie Freeman, who'd injured his ankle in late September, but kept playing postseason baseball on it, limping around the bases. He'd hit a triple earlier in the game but he obviously wasn't 100%. And Mookie had been smashing the ball.

Even so, we were questioning that intentional walk. “Isn't he putting the winning run in scoring position?” I said to Jeff and Patricia. Jeff agreed. He didn't think much of the strategy. At this point, I was hoping for a single.

Earlier in the game, RE: Freddie, my friend Tim texted, “It just occurred to me how appropriate it is that Freeman has a bum leg,” and then included a link to Freddy Freeman, the “crippled newsboy,” as they used to say, who with one magic word could turn himself into one of the mightiest of mortal beings: Captain Marvel Jr.!

Fifteen seconds after Cortes threw his second pitch, Tim texted me that magic word: SHAZAM!

Fifteen seconds after that, I thought of the obvious precedent: hobbled Dodger comes to the plate in the final inning of Game 1 of the World Series, two outs, one run behind, and hits the walkoff homerun. It's Kirk Gibson all over again. Not quite, of course. Gibson was so hobbled he couldn't play, he was pinch-hitting, and Freeman wasn't facing the best closer in the game, and Gibson had only one man on. The bases were juiced for Freddie; Cortes couldn't walk him. But I doubt he wanted that first pitch to be a midrange fastball middle in. In his stroll toward first, Freddie raised his bat high in the air, as if saluting the game, as if offering a benediction, and then let it roll off his hand and drop to the ground, its mighty work done.

The Dodgers mighty work isn't done yet. They have three games to get to their eighth title and prevent the Yankees from getting to their 28th. But this was a helluva opening act.

Bottom of the 9th, 2 runs down, 2 outs, nobody on, 0-2 count. In a best-of-7 series where you're already down two games to none. Against a team you never beat. That was Cleveland last night.

Not enough has been made of the pain the New York Yankees have caused the Cleveland Naps/Indians/Guardians through the years. Cleveland was the first American League team to integrate, second only to the Brooklyn Dodgers, promoting Larry Doby in July 1947 and continuing with others throughout the late '40s and early '50s. The Dodgers, buoyed by such Negro League greats, became perennial pennant winners in the NL during this time but that didn't happen with the Indians. Why? The Yankees. Yes, the Indians won the World Series in 1948, only their second ever, and a third pennant in 1954, winning 111 games during the regular season but losing to the Willie Mays-led New York Giants in the World Series. Otherwise? They kept finishing second. They finished second in 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956—all to the Yankees. They could've been a dynasty. But for the Yankees. The racist Yankees.

So instead they became a symbol for such ineptitude that Hollywood had to make a movie, “Major League” in 1989, about how they beat the Yankees and won the pennant. (Shades of Douglass Wallop!) Because after '54? They didn't win the pennant for another 40 years. And in the division era they didn't come close, never finishing higher than fourth in their division between 1969 and 1993.

Ah, but then the mid-90s! Great team! They had talent everywhere: Belle, Lofton, Thome, MannyBManny, Hershiser, Omar, Baerga. They looked to be a dynasty. Instead, the Jeter-led Yankees became the dynasty. The Indians went to the Series twice and lost both times. The Yankees went to the Series four times (1996, 1998-2000) and won every time.

I could go on. George Steinbrenner came to embody the Yankees but where was he from? Cleveland. Superman came to embody a New York-like Metropolis but where was he created? Cleveland. The only player killed in a Major League baseball game was Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman, who was hit in the head by a fastball in the helmet-less days of 1920. Who threw the pitch? Joe Mays. A pitcher for the New York Yankees.

In 2017, the year after losing to the Cubs in the World Series, Cleveland got knocked out in the Division Series, 3 games to 2, by the Yankees. In the 2020 Wild Card Series? Lost 2-0 to the Yankees. In the 2022 Division Series? 3-2 to the Yankees.

Last night seemed more of the same. They were finally taking a lead into the late innings, and had the best closer in the world, Emmanuel Clase, at the ready. And with two outs in the top of the eighth, Hunter Gaddis walked Juan Soto on four pitches and so Clase was called for and got two quick strikes on Aaron Judge, but who, on the fourth pitch, hit a line shot to the opposite field. Anyone else hits that, it's an out, or a double at best. Judge is so strong it went over the wall. Tie game. And while Cleveland fans were probing this new bruise, Giancarlo Stanton gave them another one, hitting a homer to center to take the lead.

The Yanks added another in the top of the 9th, and had their new all-world closer, onetime Mariner Luke Weaver, at the ready. Jose Ramirez got on via an error but was erased in a double play. Which brought up Lane Thomas, the epitome of a journeyman. He'd been drafted in the fifth round of the 2014 draft by the Toronto Blue Jays, who, after several years in the minors, traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals for (get this) “international bonus slot money.” I didn't even know that was a thing. In three years barely playing with the Cards, he was a .100/.200/.300 player before being traded to the Washington Nationals, where, for four years playing more regularly, he was a .200/.300/.400 guy. Mid-season he wound up in Cleveland, where he was so-so. He's also the guy who hit the grand slam off of Tarik Skubal to send Cleveland here, to the ALCS, to face the Yankees yet again. But he worked the count. Down 0-2, he didn't bite, and got it back to 3-2. And then he hit a double off the top of the wall in left-center. Life!

Jhonkensky Noel? Called Big Christmas by his teammates. Another midseason player, this one a call-up. DR, 23 years old, apparently signed by Cleveland in .... 2017? When he was ... 16??? Is that legal? Big strong kid, built like a tank, but with a tendency to strike out. Not even 200 plate appearances for the season and 63 Ks. But 13 homers. Against Detroit in the ALDS he got some playing time but went 0-15. He started Game 1 of the ALCS in right field, went 1-2, but was replaced by a pinch-hitter in the seventh. He didn't play in Game 2. This time, he was the pinch-hitter, and on the second pitch sent one screaming into the chilly Cleveland night 404 feet away. And Cleveland erupted. And his bat flip! It wasn't the showy kind. He didn't hold onto it, linger over it. The opposite. He swung ferociously, and then, as if on a rubber band, snapped it back to dismiss it. He's saying This is over. It's a thing of beauty.

So now it's a tie game. Setting up the bottom of the 10th. I was almost hoping for a bloop single, to be honest. One of the Naylor brothers, Bo, led off and singled, was sacrificed to second, and would've been thrown out after a come-backer to one-time Yankees closer Clay Holmes, but Holmes opted for the certain out at first. If David Fry had singled, all of New York would've wanted Holmes' head. I could imagine the hand-wringing, the Daily News and Post headlines calling for Holmes' head. Instead, Fry sent it into the Cleveland night as well. Who is he? Not even a journeyman. He's 29 next month and this is just his second MLB season, both with Cleveland. He did well, .800 OPS, and even became an All-Star. And now this. He'll always have this. We'll always have this.

I'm not holding my breath. Momentum, as Earl Weaver famously said, is the next day's starting pitcher, and Cleveland is throwing out Gavin Williams, a 25-year-old who went 3-10 this season with an ERA near 5.00. He's another midseason guy who strikes out nearly one an inning. We'll see. Either way, it's fun now. There's life. All we want is life. And for Yankee fans to suffer crushing defeats for 100 years. 

The 2024 MLB season is down to four teams, and many are hoping for a reprise of the 2000 Subway Series (NY vs. NY), but longtime readers, or short-time readers, or people who barely glance at this blog, will know that that's not me. I want the other matchup (LA vs. CLE), for many, many reasons, and start with the obvious: Yankees Suck.

Here are the familiar numbers again, 40 and 27, the pennants and titles the Yankees hold, which is way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, WAY ahead of any other team. Second place for titles is the St. Louis Cardinals with 11, and no other team is in double digits. And, again, the Yankees have *27*. Comparatively, the Dodgers, who have had their successes, have only seven, while Guards and Mets are at just two apiece. Plus if we keep the World Series Yankee-free another season, I think we'll set a post-Babe Ruth record for pennant futility: 15 straight seasons. C'mon, people, we can do this! We're so close!

But there are other reasons I want LA-CLE. Those teams have the lowest payrolls. I mean, the Dodgers are fifth overall, and I guess Ohtani's contract is mostly deferred and so uncounted, but the two New York teams are 1 and 2. It's easy to forget, too, since they're such underdogs, but the Mets are No. 1 in payroll. The Mets. I guess they're still paying Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer? Yes and yes. They're also still paying Bobby Bonilla, who retired in 2001 and who's getting paid through 2035. Lesson there, kids: get a good financial planner.

But I also want the Dodgers because of Shohei and I want Cleveland because they haven't won it all since 1948—the longest title drought in the sport. Second place is a tie between the Padres and Brewers: est. 1969, never won. Then it's my Mariners: est. 1977, never been. Just think of the distance we've come since 1948. Rock 'n' roll didn't exist. Elvis Presley was 13 and in junior high, Martin Luther King was 19 and graduating from Morehouse College. Donald Trump was just 2! Temperamentally the same, of course.

Maybe best of all, an LA vs. CLE World Series would not only reprise the 1920 World Series (Brooklyn Robins vs. Cleveland Indians), it would be a matchup of the first two teams to break the color barrier. That'd be cool. I'm not saying the Yankees and Mets would be racist if they beat them, and denied us this, but it'd be close.

EXTRA READING:

• At the start of the season, Joe Posnanski counted down from the worst team in baseball (the Rockies) to the best, and this is where the remaining teams ranked per Joe: Dodgers (1), Yankees (10), Guardians (17), and Mets (18). This is the Poz who predicted great things for the Mariners, remember, to which Michael Schur deadpanned “Really,” speaking for everyone in Seattle. 

I wish I knew more about this photo. It was taken by my father on Camera Day, August 1970, at Met Stadium in Bloomington, Minn. Tiant was one of a dozen players with whom we got our picture taken that day, and he seems very chummy, not aloof at all, but I don't remember the moment. I do remember liking him. I do remember wondering why he only stayed with the Twins for a little while. Why did he come? Why did he go? 

He came because on Dec. 10, 1969, the Twins traded Dean Chance, Bob Miller, Ted Uhlander, and Graig Nettles*, four players in all, to the Cleveland Indians for pitchers Stan Williams and Luis Tiant. It's an odd trade. We seem interested in pitching but gave up two pitchers in the process, while the pitchers we got were coming off of off-years, Tiant particularly. In 1968, he had a season for the ages, going 21-9 and leading the American League with a miniscule 1.60 ERA. But he didn't even get one Cy Young vote because the Tigers' Denny McLain went 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA and won the Cy unanimously. Tiant's miniscule ERA wasn't even much talked up because Bob Gibson's was minisculer: 1.12 ERA, the modern record. Gibson and McLain not only won Cys but MVPs, while Tiant was all but forgotten. And the next season, after they lowered the mound, Tiant led the league in a bunch of stuff you don't want to lead the league in: walks (129) homeruns allowed (37), and losses (20).

* Yes, this was a bad trade or the Twins. Over the next 20 years, Nettles would accumulate 65 bWAR and become a legendary hot-corner defender in the World Series. He should be in the Hall of Fame—or at least have his number retired by the New York Yankees.**

** Yes, his number (No. 9) IS retired by the New York Yankees, except not in his honor. It's for an earlier wearer, Roger Maris, and I guess you can't retire it twice.***

*** Actually, you can, and the Yankees have. No. 8 is retired for both Yogi Berra and his mentor Bill Dickey. Anyway, onward.

I'm curious if Tiant was considered the big get for the Twins in that trade. Stan Williams wound up having the better season, going 10-1 from the bullpen with a 1.99 ERA. Tiant started well, going 6-0 through the first two months of the season with a 3.12 ERA, including a shutout of Detroit in April in which he gave up as many hits (3, all singles) as he got himself (3-4, including a double); but in his last start in May, he heard something pop in his right shoulder and x-rays revealed a fractured scapular. Out for two months. (Who did the Twins call up to replace him? A 19-year-old curveball pitcher named Bert Blyleven. Welcome to the Show, kid.)

So did the Twins lose confidence in Tiant after all that? They outright released him in March 1971, he was picked up by the Atlanta Braves, they released him in May, at which point the Boston Red Sox picked him up, and, into his 30s, Tiant showed everyone what they'd missed. Eventually. That year, 1971, he went 1-7 with a 4.85 ERA, but the next year he again led the Majors in ERA, 1.91, and for the next four years won 20, 22, 18 and 21 games for a Red Sox team that kept challenging for the pennant. He also went 1-0 in the '75 ALCS and 2-0 against the vaunted Big Red Machine in the magical 1975 World Series. That's when Tiant, with his twisting, second-base-facing windup, truly became a legend. He won Games 1 (five-hit shutout) and 4 (CG), and, after several days rain delay, started Game 6. But in the 5th inning, the Reds scored 3, the big blow a triple by Ken Griffey (not yet “Sr.”), and they got 2 more in the 7th. All of which set the stage for blasts by Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk. In other words, the only games the BoSox won that Series were games Tiant started. Wait, it's better: the only games the Cincinnati Reds lost in both the 1975 an '76 postseasons were those three Tiant starts. Otherwise they swept the table.

Should he be in the Hall? He lasted with the Sox until 1978, went over to the Yankees for two years, Pirates for one and Angels for one, and retired with a 229-172 record, a 3.30 ERA, an 2416 Ks, at a time when just Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson were north of 3,000. His bWAR is right on the cusp, 65.6, and Joe Posnanski, for one, thinks he should get extra points for character—as in being one: the windup, the cigars, the jovial nature, selling sausages outside Fenway. Part of Pos' argument is that guys get dinged for bad behavior (cf., Curt Schilling) so why not the opposite for good guys? Just look at that photo. If that's not an ambassador of the game, I don't know one.

FURTHER READING:

• “Despedida, El Tiante” by Joe Posnanski
• “It's October!”: The Poscast, Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur
• “Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83,” The New York Times

He's the National Gallery, he's his own salary, he's fireworks

I went to the Mariners getaway game against the Yankees on Thursday afternoon with my friend Andy, who grew up a Mariners fan but doesn't know from baseball these days (case in point: He hasn't heard of Aaron Judge), and the game wasn't awful. We didn't get swept. We won 3-2, via first-inning ineptitude by Yankees fielders, and by keeping Aaron Judge, if not Jazz Chisolm Jr., in the park. Judge hit a towering shot to dead centerfield that drews oohs and aahs from the crowd, like fireworks, but Julio Rodriguez caught it near the wall. Jazz, meanwhile, hit a liner that barely snuck over the rightfield wall for their 2.

We got our 3 in the bottom of the first: single, foul out, BB, and then a bunt by Luke Raley that the Yankees pitcher Clarke Schmidt pounced on, dropped, picked up, too late. Bases juiced. Justin Turner followed with a liner to left that was a sure sacrifice fly ... until Yankees call-up phenom Jasson [no sic] Dominguez dropped it for a run. Bases still juiced. Then we got a legit sac fly to right for our second run. The third came on a J.P. Crawford single. Three runs, one earned, I'll take it. Yankees looked bad. We'd blown the game the night before (Julio thinking Randy's bat flying at him at third meant dead ball, and it didn't, and he was picked off), which clinched another playoff berth for the Evil Empire, so maybe there was some letdown on their part this afternoon. Maybe they didn't like the blue skies in Seattle. This was my first Mariners game since Dan Wilson took over as manager and Edgar as hitting coach, and, yes, it wasn't as dispiriting as it's been. My friend Tim has crunched the numbers and they suggest we've made one small step in the standings and one giant leap at the plate. Go, Edgar!

Anyway, I was telling my father all of this when I returned home. Dad, who's been recovering from a stroke at a hospital in Minneapolis, was trotting out his usual complaints about the sinking Minnesota Twins and the managerial ineptitude of Rocco Baldelli, and between us it was a bit dispiriting; so, as I made myself a drink in the kitchen, to liven things up, to accentuate the positive as the man sang, I passed along to my father an ESPN headline I'd seen earlier: Shohei Ohtani, whom we'd been tracking all summer like all true baseball fans, had hit three homeruns and stolen two bases against the Marlins in Miami, and now sat at 51-51 in each category.

For those who don't know, there are many members of the 30-30 club (30 HRs, 30 SBs, indicative of power and speed), and there are six members of the 40-40 club, Shohei included, and now there is one member of the 50-50 Club: him. He's the only member of the 45-45 Club, too. Put it this way: between the 43-43 Club and wherever he winds up, it'll be just him. In all of baseball history. He's that much of an outlier. He's that good. 

When I told Dad the good news, he laughed, and then asked the appropriate question I hadn't considered: “How do you steal two bases when you hit three homeruns? He must've gotten some other hits.”

He did. He went 6-6. He had a day. He had a career in a day. He hit three homers, two doubles, a single, and stole two bases. He drove in 10. He had 17 total bases.

Some perspective: Only three players in baseball history have ever had more total bases in a single game. Only five have ever driven in more runs in a single game. And he did it while also becoming the first man to reach 50-50 and while also helping clinch a playoff berth for the LA Dodgers. Crazy. And one of his doubles he tried to stretch into a triple but was tossed out by a step. If he'd made it, he would've hit for the cycle. Some are wondering if it isn't the greatest game anyone's ever played. Some are wondering if he isn't the greatest player who's ever played. One thing is certain: He brings joy and amazement wherever he goes.

Oh, and next year he goes back to pitching. Since this year he's recovering from Tommy John surgery. This is his recovery year.

I remember when he first came up—or over from the Japanese leagues, in 2018, this guy who thought he could both hit and pitch at the Major League level, and was that even allowed? Wasn't that just asking for trouble? And then I saw a replay of him hitting his first triple and was just dumbfounded. Wait, the guy's FAST, too? He was tall and broadshouldered and he moved with some combo of grace and speed I'd never seen before. I remember jumping on social to extol his virtues. Are people SEEING this? And then he got injured and I guess that showed him. No. He kept going. From 2021-23, with the moribund Angels, he won two MVPs, finished second the other year, and finished fourth in Cy Young voting that same season. As a pitcher, he's gone 38-19 with a 3.01 ERA and 608 strikeouts in only 481 innings pitched. As a hitter, he keeps improving. As a baserunner, he keeps improving. In 2021, his first MVP season, he had 10 caught stealings, leading the league, against only 26 stolen bases. This season? 52 SBs against four CSs. He's leading the league in HRs, RBIs, runs scored, SLG, OPS and total bases. He's 17 TBs from 400, which would make him the first player to 400 since 2001. If you eliminate the PED years, no one's done it since Jim Rice in 1978. He belongs in a higher league. He's joy and amazement. He's fireworks. 

This season, no doubt, he'll make it three MVPs, so he'll become only the second man in baseball history, after Frank Robinson, to win MVPs in both leagues. That's nice. He'll finally get to join a club that has another member.

I heard about the death of Willie Mays when I was beginning my third week in Minneapolis helping look after and advocate for my father, who’d had a stroke at the end of May. The next morning, visiting Dad in his small room at R. Hospital in Golden Valley, I read him the long obit in The New York Times, and we reminisced about all Dad used to say about The Say-Hey Kid as a tour guide at Target Field in the 2010s. 

In one of the rooms at Target Field, I think the “Legends” room, there was a giant photo of Willie playing for the Minneapolis Millers in the spring of 1951, and most of Dad’s stories related to that time period: how Mays was hitting .477 over 35 games when he got the call to join the NY Giants; how Mays was so beloved in Minneapolis that Giants owner Horace Stoneham had to take out an advertisement apologizing to Millers’ fans for “stealing” their star; how, when Mays told Giants’ manager Leo Durocher that he didn’t think he could hit big league pitching, and then owned that he was hitting .477 for Minneapolis, Durocher supposedly replied “Do you think you could hit .2-fucking-77 for me?”; and how, after he began his career hitless in his first three games, and he again felt he couldn’t hit Major League pitching, Durocher assured him that he was his center fielder for life. “You’re the best player I ever saw,” Durocher told him, or some reasonable facsimile of that, and at R. Hospital Dad repeated it with tears in his eyes.

Dad must’ve choked up five times during our Willie Mays conversation. That’s how much he meant to people.

To Charles Schulz, Mays was the symbol of perfection:

To Joe Henry, he was a sign of a better time for America: 

But that was him
I'm almost sure
The greatest centerfielder of all time
Stooped by the burden of endless dreams
His and yours and mine

He was the subject of songs, and biographies, and Saturday morning cartoons, and he was so omnipresent when I was young, so much the sky, that in 2012, when I was telling a story about him to friends, and one of those friends, Myriam, asked, “Who’s Willie Mays?” I didn’t even know how to respond. I just stared at her. Who’s Willie Mays? I should’ve said: One of two geniuses in the world, according to Tallulah Bankhead. The other was William Shakespeare.

Do we go into the numbers? I know most of them off the top of my head. 

660 is, of course, the homerun total, which would’ve been higher had he not played at Candlestick Park, but it was still the third highest-total in MLB history when he retired. He was only the second player to hit 600, nearly 40 years after Ruth, Sept. 22, 1969. There are now nine on the list. Half are suspect.

.301 is the career batting average. Some of his contemporaries, like Mickey Mantle, wound up dipping below .300. Not Willie.

24? Number on his back, number of All-Star appearances. The latter will never be broken, the former is worn all the time in homage.

Interestingly, the true greatness of Willie Mays—in numbers—didn’t reveal itself until decades after he retired, when WAR (Wins About Replacement) was created. It’s supposed to take in all aspects of a player’s game. Mays won two MVPs, in 1954 and 1965, but by bWAR he was the best position player in the National League for 10 seasons, and the best in the entire Majors for eight seasons. In the integrated era of baseball, no one’s close.

Then there’s the catch off Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, now just known as “The Catch,” and the stories surrounding it. It was the top of the 8th, tie score, 2-2, and Cleveland got the first two guys on: walk, single. So Durocher called for reliever Don Liddle to face Wertz, who hit a shot into deep, deep center field. Mays runs back, his number 24 visible to all, and makes a catch “that must’ve looked like an optical illusion to some people,” according to  Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges. So Durocher makes another pitching change, and as Liddle hands the ball to reliever Marv Grissom, he shrugs and says, “Well, I got my guy.”

I also like the exchange between left fielder Monte Irvin and Mays as they trotted in after the Giants held the line.

Irvin: Nice going, roomie. Didn’t think you’d get that.
Mays: You kidding? Had that one all the way.

Sidenote: Wertz went 4-5 that day, with a double, a triple and two singles. He should’ve gone 5-5 in a Cleveland romp. He should’ve been the star player of the game and the series. Instead, he’s the sidenote: the guy who hit the ball that Mays caught.

In Donald Honig’s oral history “Between the Lines,” Irvin recalls another Mays catch, in Pittsburgh, that some say is greater:

He was playing in close and Rocky [Nelson] got hold of one and drove it way out into that big center field they had in old Forbes Field. Willie whirled around and took off after it. At the last second he saw he couldn't get his glove across his body in time to make the catch, so he caught it in his bare hand.

That one made the Times obit, too, for the practical joke Durocher played on Mays afterward. Leo told everyone in the dugout to not say anything, to ignore him, and so instead of back claps Mays was greeted with silence. “Leo,” Mays wound up saying, “didn’t you see what I did?” “No,” Durocher replied. “You’ll have to go out and do it again.”

The stories could go on forever. One hopes they will.