Junior Slips Quietly Away

Junior was, is, and always will be pure baseball gold. A first ballot Hall of Famer as a human being and as a baseball player. It is true that the injuries robbed him of more than enough playing time to have grabbed the all-time home run record. But, he played with an enthusiasm, grace and integrity that sets him far above the current record holder and above most ball players.

Thanks for the joy and the memories Junior. See ya’ in Cooperstown!

Hank Bauer was always one of my favorites, too. Good player, good manager. Interesting guy.

You mention Joe Torre. While I agree that he was a good and above average major leaguer, he was in no way a boderline HOF’er. I think you’re stretching it a little there.

It's probably easy to forget just how good a player Joe Torre was. However, by the Bill James measurements for the Hall regarding position players---the Batting Standards and the Batting Monitor---Joe Torre meets 40 percent of the batting standards by which you would spot a Hall of Famer with the average Hall of Famer meeting 50 percent of them, while scoring a 90 on the Monitor where an average Hall of Famer would score 100.

Torre was also a nine-time All-Star---in an era in which fans did not vote for the All-Star teams, having lost the vote after ballot-box stuffing out of Cincinnati in the 1950s, and in which there was no way to get away with accusations of favouritism sentimental or otherwise considering that he was never selected to an All-Star team likely to be managed by his own manager.

Defence? Torre was an above-average defencive player at three positions at which he played more than five hundred games apiece during his career, even though he wasn't necessarily a great defencive player at any of them. But if you can play defence anywhere above your league average at three defencive positions two of which may be the two most demanding in baseball (though I'm never entirely sure whether center field shouldn't be tied with third base at least) . . .

That sure looks like a borderline Hall of Famer to a lot of people. Including me. I don't know if I'd advocate making him a Hall of Famer on his playing record alone, but Joe Torre was awful close to having been a Hall of Fame-caliber player.

[Torre] is an interesting case in managing. Before he became manager of the Yankees he had a below .500 managerial record. Did he all of the sudden become a genius [sic] when he managed the Yankees or did being able to spend on anyone he want help out?

Torre has a precedent as a Yankee manager who didn't win a thing in the major leagues until he became a Yankee manager: Casey Stengel. Stengel got one opportunity pre-Yankee that Torre didn't get: in the years when the Pacific Coast League really was as good as a third major league in all but name, Stengel got to manage the Oakland Oaks to a league title. It's how he got on the Yankee radar in the first place.

There's an argument that with some if not quite a few managers you're not going to make your kind of baseball work unless you have the kind of players who can execute that kind of baseball. With his pre-Oaks clubs, Stengel had maybe one or two such players to work with. With the Yankees, he had those players practically at his beckon call. He also had something most managers today don't have anymore---Stengel made as many of the personnel moves as the front office when he saw players who couldn't execute to his liking and chances to get those who could. Managers had that kind of authority in Stengel's generation; they really haven't in Torre's. (Hell, they can't even discipline players in Torre's generation the way they could in Stengel's, and managers today who think about such discipline often as not run into recalcitrance in the front office.)

But whatever his kind of baseball is, Torre didn't have those players in New York (with the Mets), Atlanta (one fluke division winner notwithstanding), or St. Louis; with the Yankees, he did. And when he did, he won.

Don't make the mistake (God knows how many make the mistake), though, of thinking that all he needed was the Steinbrenner money to win with those Yankees. The nucleus of those World Series winners was a) homegrown talent (believe it or not, and I do wish people would look it up for themselves rather than refuse to let the facts get in the way of a pleasant prejudice) and b) shrewd horse trading. Let's put it this way: Balance between the years in which the Yankees won those World Series with Torre at the helm and the years in which they didn't---the Series winners were dominated by the homegrowns and the traded-fors; the clubs who got nudged or shoved out of the postseason or lost Series had more of the actual or alleged Big Signings on them. (And anyone who thinks mere spending equals championship clubs ought to take a real close look at whatever's passing for my New York Mess---er, Mets---these days . . . )

Some managers make an impact, some don't. (Some don't even get the chance, really, if you know anything about how the Oakland Athletics in the Billy Beane era have been doing business: Beane makes it plain enough that his manager is going to manage but one way---Beane's way.)

I hate seeing great players diminished, too. I don't think Ted Williams was that badly diminished by his time managing the Senators, even if he was up against an impossible wall after his Manager of the Year season. (You'd almost wish to be the fly on the wall when Teddy Ballgame was learning he was going to be getting such help as the falling Denny McLain, to name one example . . . )

Frank Robinson may have been a better manager than his overall won-lost record. He nearly won a division title with the 1989 Baltimore Orioles and he took the 2002 Montreal Expos to a second-place finish in a year that the Atlanta Braves broke away from the pack. He was certainly a more successful manager than Ted Williams in terms of winning percentage, but I'm not entirely convinced that either man would have turned out the same way had either or both been afforded better or at least different players.

And I'll guarantee you that neither one of them would have blown a pennant by burning out his regulars or his pitching staff. (Leo Durocher, anyone?)

I almost don't want to think of what would have happened if Charlie Lau or Walt Hriniak had ever caught hold of people like Mel Ott, Stan Musial, Ty Cobb (you think that split-handed grip would have flown with Churlish Charlie or Uncle Walt?), Hank Aaron (the reverse-handed grip he started his career using), Mike Schmidt (I can just hear Churlish Charlie now: Sit on it, Swivelhips!), Jack Clark (The Ripper used to pump his back leg as he launched into his swing, a kind of secondary power generator and a lot of his bombs weren't mere homers, they were conversation pieces), or Darryl Strawberry (who had an almost Ott-like front leg kick when he swung) . . .

Junior just generated so much bat speed that if he got square on the ball it was going to go a long way. Different kind of power since he was a long skinny kid. And yet you couldn’t really tie him up by pitching inside.

His kind of bat speed wasn't just good for hitting for distance---he was quick enough to hit one down the lines if need be, hard enough to elude an oncoming outfielder. He was also pretty good at dumping balls into the gaps if he took a pitcher's measure and figured he wasn't going to get much of anything to try driving the distance.

As for pitching him inside, the only way to get him out inside was to pitch him above the belt. You pitch him inside between his belt and his knees and, when his swing was right, one of two things would happen: a) He'd rip one right down the right field line; or, b) he'd fist it the other way and usually find himself a hole for a hit. And not necessarily a single base, considering his speed . . .

Prettiest swing I ever saw: A dead heat between Junior and the Straw. Ugliest swing I ever saw: Rich Gedman, for a time the Red Sox's catcher.

Most monstrous home run I ever saw: Dave Kingman, in spring training 1975, watching a contest between the Mets and the Yankees---whose pitcher was the freshly-made-millionaire Catfish Hunter. Kingman caught hold of a Hunter slider and drove it over the wall, out of the yard, higher than the six tall palm trees behind left field, and the ball didn't land until it reached second base on the practise field behind the field on which the game was played. Not even the blast Jack Clark hit to break Los Angeles's heart when Tommy Lasorda decided it was smart to pitch to him with first base open and the Dodgers an out away from the 1985 World Series---and they still don't know whether that one landed in Pasadena or in Casey Stengel's old back yard in Glendale---was that monstrous. Not even the punt Darryl Strawberry hit in Shea Stadium to lead off the bottom of the eighth in Game Seven, 1986 Series, to give the Mets a very badly-needed first insurance run (Jesse Orosco's shocking fake-bunt RBI single provided the other insurance later in the inning) was that monstrous.

Best line I ever saw about such a bomb: Roger Angell, about the Kingman shot: It occurred to me that the real impact of Kingman's blow was to speed Hunter's acceptance by his new teammates. There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a three-million-dollar executive seem loveable.

I’ll tell you what, if you could send Joe Torres to my Pittsburgh Pirates and just make them a .500 team, you would make me a believer that managers have a great impact on the game... : )

I think one problem that a lot of great players have is that they get frustrated their players can’t do the things like they could. I heard a story once about the splendid splinter when he went to the mound to visit his pitcher. I can’t remember who it was. Anyways, Ted told him to just keep throwing him the slider. Kept insisting on it. The pitcher figured that since Ted was probably the best pure hitter to ever play the game and the only pitch that gave him some trouble was a slider, everyone else must have trouble with that pitch also.

If only the pitcher in question could have thrown the slider the way the pitchers who bedeviled the Splinter threw it to him . . .

Some managers, whatever kind of players they were, have no clue about pitching even when they become manager. Classic examples: Tommy Lasorda (who was a pitcher himself, once, and really should have known better) and Pete Rose. Anyone who wanted to beat Lasorda or Rose just had to force his way into the L.A. or the Cincinnati bullpen, where their relievers would be gassed when they got into the game with their managers having no clue that warming them up, sitting them down, warming them up again, and repeating that a few times before finally bringing them in, blissfully ignorant of the possibility that those pitchers might already have thrown enough pitches to equal a complete-game start.

"I liked Pete," Whitey Herzog once wrote, "but I loved managing against him."

The White Rat went the opposite way: his rule was that if he warmed you up in the pen but didn't bring you in, you had the rest of the day or night off. He wasn't going to gas his bullpen like that. No relief pitcher on a Herzog-managed team ever experienced fatigue or arm or shoulder trouble, but whenever he got relievers back from Rose or Lasorda teams, he'd hear stories about how they were wrecking the bullpen staffs. (Going to the Dodgers may have been the worst thing that ever happened to Todd Worrell, and nobody should wonder that the once-famous Cincinnati "Nasty Boys" bullpen trio of Dibble, Charlton, and Myers all experienced arm and shoulder miseries later in their careers: they'd first joined up when Rose was still managing the Reds . . . )

p.s. From what I’ve seen of this year’s Pirates I could give you Casey Stengel and they wouldn’t become a .500 team.