Posted on 12/18/2010 3:24:59 PM PST by BluesDuke
In 2004, baseball was conquered by the Idiots. In 2010, >a href="http://catbirdinthenosebleedseats.blogspot.com/2010/10/move-over-idiots-meet-morons.html" target="new">it was conquered by the Morons. The San Francisco Giants, whose own manager proudly proclaimed them a gang of castoffs and misfits, one of whom proudly declared that he was always trying to fit in with "these morons" (Aubrey Huff, rescue from the Geriatric Hotel, and king of the red thong charm brigade: "I'm probably very tame compared to this group"), did something they hadn't done since their street address was Coogan's Bluff and Dwight Eisenhower's was the White House. After they beat the Philadelphia Phillies for the pennant despite being outscored by a run overall, they won a World Series with pitching richness, near-perfect timing, and an aging shortstop who wasn't even supposed to survive long enough to show up at all, never mind hitting Cliff Lee's chest-high cutter for what proved to be a World Series-winning three-run bomb, fourteen years after he'd hit a World Series-winning RBI single for another club.
The Giants won the National League West at practically the last minute, though nobody assumed it would be otherwise when the plucky San Diego Padres ran out of gas on the final weekend. Which sent the Padres into instant rebuild and their best player to the Boston Red Sox, who splashed the winter meetings with that signing and Carl Crawford's. The Phillies won the National League East, lost the National League Championship Series, and this at the end of a season in which their bullpen coach was accused of being a student of Bill Belichick. The Atlanta Braves hungered to send retiring manager Bobby Cox home a winner, won him the National League wild card, but got---in a sad summary of Cox's legendary tenure---no further than round one of the postseason. A Braves outfielder, Brooks Conrad, inadvertently revived the debate about whether declaring goats doesn't get out of hand. Nolan Ryan got thisclose to being the first man in history to win a World Series ring as a pitcher and as an owner.
The postseason otherwise went like this: Roy Halladay channeled Don Larsen, damn near. The Minnesota Twins furthered their resemblance to the 1947-53 Brooklyn Dodgers: a team that hasn't yet figured out a way to beat anything wearing Yankee pinstripes, though they may have figured out one or two more imaginative ways to lose to them. Roy Oswalt, Phillies pitcher, turned a National League Championship Series game into a track meet. The eighth-best finisher among the postseason entrants shoved the Empire Emeritus to one side in the American League Championship Series, after opening with a self-immolating bullpen that spoiled their thumping of CC Sabathia, making one and all wonder if they hadn't merely set themselves up for a letdown.
Jim Gentile was declared a tie for the American League's RBI lead---in 1961. Game Seven of the 1960 World Series became watchable in 2010 thanks to what turned out to be Bing Crosby's nerves. Derek Jeter faked his way onto base with a thespian hit-by-pitch, then bristled quietly while his agent roared, when the Yankees tried to re-sign him as a mere man and not as the face of his franchise. Cliff Lee left about $30 million Yankeebucks on the table to let the Phillies love him again. It remains to be seen, pace damn near every sportswriter with a body temperature and a blood count, whether it really does mean the greatest. rotation. in. baseball. history.
Baseball's most heralded child prodigy since Dwight Gooden lived up to the hype until his elbow earned a date with Tommy John surgery and a year off to recuperate. A former child prodigy got a torn thumb and damn near his contract voided when he decked his girl friend's father in the Citi Field family room---after the older man may have dragged his mother into the argument, thus provoking the talented if occasionally troublesome relief pitcher.
One of baseball's worst kept secrets in the 1970s was the condition of World Series hero Bernie Carbo's head. The man whose pinch hit bomb set it up for Carlton Fisk's "Hallelujah" shot told everyone in 2010 how proud he wasn't of his head in those years, and people were surprised to learn about that head, anyway. One of baseball's worst-kept secrets before and since has been judicial tyranny---among the umpires. Joe West has been one such reputed tyrant, and he got his the hard way when he purged Ozzie Guillen and Mark Buehrle over a very suspicious balk call. He was seen and raised, however, when Bob Davidson's crew ran for the cycle at Miller Park---they ran out of the yard, in order, a manager, a coach, a player, and a heckling fan.
It was a year for admitting immediate or recent mistakes, too. Just ask Jim Joyce, the anti-West, who was the first to admit he blew it when he ruled safe on an obvious out at first, as Armando Gallaraga was one out from a perfect game. Or, Mark McGwire, who admitted taking actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances once his too-often injuries got out of hand enough and his edginess about recovering from them got likewise. That was then: McGwire and Sammy Sosa chasing Roger Maris and basking in a nation's bath of love. This was now: While McGwire never alienated himself from his former club, Sammy Sosa believes the Cubs hung him out to dry after everything he'd "done" for them. Including becoming almost as pampered a problem child as a certain now-former Giants slugger. McGwire, now the Cardinals' batting instructor, was never accused of being a prima donna or hogging the spotlight; Sosa, now a non-entity in a city that once adored him, was never accused of being the type to go gently into that good gray night.
Ken Griffey, Jr. was said to have wrestled with his sleep before hanging it up while the hanging would have been better a year earlier, driving slowly home across country and toward his inevitable Hall of Fame enshrinement. (He did it the same day as Joyce's blown call, in fact.) The Kid grew old before our very eyes and ears, and only the occasional smile reminded us he was a gazelle in the outfield and a howitzer at the plate before the injuries wore him down little by little, piece by piece. His manager, who'd tried clumsily to prod him toward retiring, eventually lost the rest of the Seattle Mariners' clubhouse and his job. Pete Rose was allowed to join the fun when the Reds celebrated the 25th anniversary of his breaking Ty Cobb's career hits record, and a Los Angeles Times reporter saw fit to review the tortured life and soul of the late San Diego Padres pitcher who surrendered the record-breaking hit and may not have wanted to be a baseball player in the first place.
Lou Piniella sent himself toward retirement midway through the season, which sent his bench coach (Mike McQuade) to take the job as an interim, get it full time after the season, and sending another beloved Cub icon (Ryne Sandberg) out of the organisation for whom he became a Hall of Fame second baseman. (Sandberg was foolish enough to resent it that he did just what he'd been told, make his bones as a minor league manager if he wanted the parent club's job, and was stepped over after he'd been named Triple A Manager of the Year.) It took a divorce court judge to decide that, well, somebody has to own the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose former owner was unamused at the tawdriness of the whole affair.
Death took its usual lineup home in 2010, including but hardly limited to a blustery Cleveland shipbuilder who became, sometimes at once, a Yankee dynasty builder and a Yankee dynasty wrecker. Or, to the Yankee Stadium public address announcer who proved the voice of God to Reggie Jackson and about seven or eight generations of Yankees and their fans. Ron Santo graduated from should-be Hall of Fame third baseman to number one cheerleader in the Chicago Cubs' broadcast booth.
"I lost a ballgame," Ralph Branca likes to say about Bobby Thomson, "but I gained a friend." America lost a friend but heaven gained the man who hit the Shot Heard 'Round the World and then forged a sweet, lifetime friendship with the pitcher who threw the pennant-winning pitch. Or, the pennant-losing pitch, if you rooted for the pitcher's side. Danny McDevitt started and won the last major league baseball game ever played in Ebbets Field.
The last of the legendary Chipmunks, New York sportswriters who sought and wrote the few-holds-barred stories of the men and the minds behind the wins and losses, Maury Allen actually tried to sit on the story of the most controversial trade in baseball history: the wife and children of Yankee pitcher Fritz Peterson for the wife and children of Yankee pitcher Mike Kekich. Ralph Houk, a decorated World War II Marine and three-time pennant-winning Yankee manager, once shoved Allen around his office for no good reason other than show, and became a Yankee general manager whose conduct sometimes bordered on the criminal. (Notoriously, when he tried to fine Jim Bouton for each day Bouton held out during a contract dispute.) Yet, Houk would say of the Peterson-Kekich deal, "If you're not happy, you only go through the world one time and why go through it unhappy? Some people say you have to stay together for the sake of the kids. We've seen people living together and they're practically separated."
Bob Feller was baseball's first 20-or-under 20-game winner (it took until Gooden for that to transpire again), lost three prime seasons to World War II, declared there wasn't a Negro League player to be found that could play major league baseball, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame on the same day as the first man to affirm that his former observation was a lie. Mike Cuellar was one of the first four 20-game winners to do it in the same starting rotation. Gil McDougald was a dynastic Yankee jack-of-all-trades (an All-Star at three different infield positions) who almost quit baseball after his line drive drilled Herb Score . . . and eventually suffered deafness thanks to a line drive that hit him behind his ear two years earlier---in batting practise.
Robin Roberts won 20 or more for six straight with slowly descending Philadelphia Phillies teams, remade himself into a craft pitcher after those overworking Philadelphia seasons burned him out, and went to the Hall of Fame. Oh, yes: He was also one of the three movers and shakers behind hiring Marvin Miller (who was snubbed---again---for the Hall of Fame) to run the Players' Association. Bob Shaw had a career year for the 1959 "Go-Go" White Sox and drove his manager nuts with a question unrelated to his pitching prowess, sort of, when he was seen in his bachelor days with a different girl for each meal of the day: I've got to find out whether he is the lousiest lay on earth or the cheapest sonofabitch in baseball---why else wouldn't a girl date him twice?
"We try every way we can do to kill this game," Sparky Anderson once said (and your servant rarely tires of quoting it), "but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it." The man who said it went to his reward not knowing whether baseball government, which has become enamoured yet again of further diluted (read: expanded) postseason play, will make it into a lie.
The boys of summer need their voices, and Ernie Harwell's was one of the warmest of the season. They also need their human antidepressants, and Jose Lima may have been the most potent of them. He shone now and then as a pitcher, shone always as a man and cheerleader, and shone like Times Square on New Year's Eve when he shut out the Cardinals in the Dodgers' lone 2004 postseason win. "I'm pitching with my heart," he whooped after the game. It's been Lima Time in heaven since, but it's been quiet time on earth for losing baseball's biggest heart---to a massive heart attack.
Enjoyed watching that 1960 World Series game 7.
Enjoyed watching that 1960 World Series game 7.I did, too. As much as I still enjoy watching the 2004 American League Championship Series, Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series (it might have broken a Red Sox fan's heart yet again, but even I, a Red Sox fan, have to admit it might have been the greatest baseball game ever played), and others. Now, I wonder how soon Game Seven of the 1960 Series will be offered for sale . . .
Game 7 is already available for purchase:
Thanks!!
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