Obama Throws First Pitch, Cannot Name One Player From His Favorite Team - Who Is This Man?

David Horowitz's NewsRealBlog.com ^ | April 5, 2010 | John L. Work

[JLWORK]

In 1954 the New York Giants swept the World Series from the vaunted Cleveland Indians in four games. By that time I had fallen in love with the game of baseball – then the National Pastime. I was seven years old. Willie Mays made a spectacular, over-the-shoulder catch of a ball hit by Indians first baseman Vic Wertz to deep center field at the Polo Grounds. It is one of the greatest plays ever filmed. Dusty Rhodes, a left-handed pinch-hitter for the giants, hit three home runs in that Series. He became a hero of mine – until I heard my dad talking about Mickey Mantle.

In 1956 I was nine. My father took us one warm Spring night in May to see the New York Yankees play against the Indians at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. Mickey Mantle (pictured above on Time magazine cover) hit two home runs that night, one against the Indians’ starting pitcher Bob Lemon, and the second one against the great Hall of Famer Bob Feller. The first homer went so high that we temporarily lost sight of it as it soared above the stadium lights before it landed about twenty rows back in the right field seats. I can still name the starting lineups for both teams, and for several of my favorite major league teams thereafter.

Yesterday President Barack Obama, who claims to have become a Chicago White Sox fan when he moved there in the 1980s, (click the next link for the video and subsequent audio) threw out the first pitch in Washington, D.C. – then went to the broadcast booth for an interview. Asked by the announcer to name one of his favorite White Sox players, Obama dodged the question.

[newbie 10-21-00]

If you’re going to contiue this gag, at least spell Ortiz correctly

[BluesDuke]

He was asked who his favorite players were, while growing up. He couldn’t name anyone. Also got the name of the Cubs stadium wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, let's be reasonable. His Excellency Al-Hashish Field Marshmallow Dr. Barack Obama Dada, COD, RIP, LSMFT, Would-Be Life President of the Republic Formerly Known as the United States, and Chairman of the Organisation of Halfrican Unity, isn't the first President who blew a seemingly simple baseball question or conversation, and he won't be the last.

Jonathan Yardley says there are only two seasons, baseball season and The Void. When, toward the end of this season, George Bush was asked who he thought would win the American League East, he said, "I've given up on the Rangers." Good thinking, Mr. President. The Rangers are in the AL West.

Mr. President, read Baltimore's lips: The 1990 AL East champions open at home, forty miles from your front porch, April 2, the end of The Void.

---George F. Will, Washington Post, 5 October 1989; republished in Bunts (New York: Scribner, 1998).

Some might believe there's a slight difference between losing memory of particular players and losing memory of an entire team and the division in which it plays.

Even venerable baseball men have trouble with names.

You can forget that other fella. You can forget Waddell. The Jewish kid is the best of any of them.---Casey Stengel, who forgot Walter Johnson's name when making the case for the Jewish Kid: Sandy Koufax.

Blanchard! Do you see them white lines? They are there to hit the ball on. And them fellas in the middle are fielders.---Stengel, to a Met pinch hitter about to step up to the plate, 1962. The pinch hitter was Jim Marshall, but his resemblance to Johnny Blanchard, a Yankee product whom Stengel managed in 1960, provoked the confusion. (Incidentally, Marshall Blanchard did pretty much as Stengel instructed---he whacked a double down the right field line. Having once managed Hall of Fame outfielder Paul Waner, in Waner's waning days as a Boston Brave, Stengel was impressed enough by Waner's apparent ability to hit down the lines at will that he taught the idea to his players ever after.)

And in left field, in left field we have a splendid man, and he knows how to do it. He's been around and he swings the bat there in left field and he knows what to do. He's got a big family, the fella in left field, and hee wants to provide for them, and he's a fine outstanding player, the fella in left field, and you can be sure he'll be ready when the bell rings and that's his name, Bell!---Struggling to remember Original Met outfielder Gus Bell to a reporter before Opening Day, 1962.

None of which should be taken to imply in any way, shape, or form, that there is any comparison between His Excellency and the Ol' Perfesser . . .

[BluesDuke]

It is said that to err is human; to forgive is a Mets fan. Let’s go Mets!!

Once upon a time, Met fans---gleefully in their cups when Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley tried to dump second baseman Mike Andrews after Andrews committed a couple of tough errors in the 1973 World Series---held up banners saying, "To Err is Humank, To Forgive Is Not A's Policy."

After the hoopla boiled over and the Series went on, the first Oakland error was greeted by the famous Sign Man at Shea Stadium, Karl Ehrhart: YOU'RE FIRED!.

Which was pretty good for fans of a team who lost their first nine regular-season games in their first season and, winning their first (against former Yankee Tom Sturdivant, who'd beaten them in New York earlier for the Pittsburgh Pirates), inspired an instant gag: BREAK UP THE METS!

But to return to Leo Durocher, you can get the full story of the Cub collapse in two impeccable sources: William Furlong's Look magazine article, "How Durocher Blew the Pennant," republished in Jim Bouton's anthology of baseball managing, I Managed Good But Boy, Did They Play Bad; and, Mr. David Claerbaut's Durocher's Cubs: The Greatest Team That Didn't Win.

[Huskrrrr]

Yeah, but George Bush was able to throw a baseball across the plate.

[Man50D]

If you’re going to contiue this gag, at least spell Ortiz correctly

If you understood what you were commenting about you'd realize Kerry pronounced it Ortez.

[BluesDuke]

Yeah, but George Bush was able to throw a baseball across the plate.

You're thinking, ironically enough, of the son of the President who misplaced the team said son owned for awhile.

And there was more than one reason neither President Bush was any Ronald Reagan---Reagan, who launched his professional life nobly enough (as a baseball broadcaster, for WHO---now, there's a set of radio call letters!---in which job he created a play-by-play broadcast based on telegraph wire game updates, about which more anon), turned up in the Wrigley Field booth late season 1988, where he was welcomed by Harry Caray and quipped, "You know, Harry, I'm going to be out of a job in a few months, so I thought I might audition."

Caray then handed Reagan the mike full-time. And Reagan called an inning and a half very credibly.

Reagan's most remembered hour as a baseball broadcaster, of course, was the day he was recreating a Cub game and, when the telegraph malfunctioned, was forced to depict Billy Jurgens as continously fouling off pitches, until the wire was repaired and the news came and Reagan sheepishly announced whoops, Jurgens fouled out on the first pitch! HE dined out on that one for years.

[flying_bullet]

I was going from the colorful, unforgettable name angle. I know Yaz was a Red Sox player.

[flying_bullet]

I was going for unforgettable names and the RED Sox was a double entendre given we’re talking about 0bama.

[BluesDuke]

I was going for unforgettable names and the RED Sox was a double entendre given we’re talking about 0bama.

You should have gone for Bill (Spaceman) Lee . . . who wrote a pleasant little book a few years ago, The Little Red (Sox) Book. You could have had some real fun with that one!

[Delmont]

What still gets me is his mother went to my high school on Mercer Island, next to Seattle Wa. Mercer Island is a somewhat affluent community and he has never mentioned where his mama went to school. Even while in Seattle he mentioned briefly his mother went to “school near here” somewhere but it doesn’t sound as good, dada from Africa mama from Kansas. When he went to high school it was at Punahu, the hardest to get into and most expensive in Hawaii, there seems to be a lot he doesn’t want to talk about or can’t “remember”

[Gaffer]

He is an OCD liar. He feels a compulsive need to ‘connect’ somehow with everyone he talks to except conservative Americans; those people he hates.

[Babalu]

Thanks ... I’ll have to check out those sources. That was one hell of a year wasn’t it?

[Vigilanteman]

Good grist, but I still think people are overly hard on poor Leo. Ron Santo and other Cubs from the 1969 team have said as much. Other than Popovich, they didn't really have that great of a bench, as evidenced by the shuffle in that third outfield position. There was also no viable backup catcher to Randy Hundley, a position that really requires occasional rest. The Wrigley family was still running the team at the time and trying to win a pennant on the cheap. So I think Leo did as well as he could with what he had.

In a normal year, it would have been enough. But, face it, 1969 was not a normal year. The Mets fielded what was arguably their best team of all time. You had no name players like Al Weis and Wayne Garrett and platoon players like Don Clendenon, Art Shamsky and Ron Swoboda coming up with clutch hits at just the right times during that August-September stretch.

If you are big into baseball statistics, you should check out the Pythageroan won/loss record here. Even with normal luck, the 1969 Cubs would have finished one game ahead of one of the greatest teams in baseball rather than eight games behind.

[12Gauge687]

Yaz, as I recall, was a Red Sox not a White Sox.

[flying_bullet]

Right, Yaz was a RS. I was going for colorful and memorable baseball names, none of which 0bama could come up with, let alone White Sox players.

It was a double meaning - a RED Sox player. Get it?

[BluesDuke]

Good grist, but I still think people are overly hard on poor Leo. Ron Santo and other Cubs from the 1969 team have said as much. Other than Popovich, they didn't really have that great of a bench, as evidenced by the shuffle in that third outfield position. There was also no viable backup catcher to Randy Hundley, a position that really requires occasional rest. The Wrigley family was still running the team at the time and trying to win a pennant on the cheap. So I think Leo did as well as he could with what he had.

The problem is that most of those Cubs, even Santo, eventually admitted as well that overplaying his regulars at all, not to mention mishandling his pitching staff (he had a nasty habit of over-rotating some of his starters, most notably Ferguson Jenkins and Bill Hands, out of turn often enough that they, too, may have been gassed when they were needed most; and, he had a very weary bullpen down the stretch when he needed them the most, though he had at least two capable arms, Hank Aguirre and Ted Abernathy, to back up an exhausted Phil Regan).

Ron Santo was probably the godsend that season, he picked the right time to have the best season of his career and drive in 123 runs. As for a backup catcher, Gene Oliver wasn't much of a hitter but he knew what he was doing behind the plate, he could handle a pitching staff capably enough when you put him there, and he certainly should have been sent out to spell the stubborn Hundley more often than he was.

There were other factors, too. You may or may not remember how many close calls on the bases went against the Cubs. There was a reason for it: Durocher ramped up the ump baiting so ferociously that he alienated nearly every umpiring crew in the National League. Not to acquit the arbiters if they really were taking that out on the Cubs, but baiting them as a matter of routine is going to guarantee you trouble when you need it least.

Whether that would have been enough to overtake the Mets when they got white-hot (I wouldn't quite rate the 1969 Mets over the 1986 Mets but they were a great team) is debatable, if only because the Mets outpitched the Cubs even if you could balance all other factors out between them. Hundley himself said it years later: when the Mets came up, seemingly out of nowhere, with that pitching staff, you just knew these guys weren't kidding anymore.

Beginning with dropping a pair to the Mets on 8-9 September (Jerry Koosman beat Bill Hands; Tom Seaver beat Ferguson Jenkins), the Cubs went 8-14 to season's end. The Mets went 20-5, including a staggering nine-game winning streak (including the clinching game in which Gary Gentry beat Steve Carlton), over the same stretch.

You can get the full story in the two sources I cited earlier. Leo Durocher, an overrated manager, had a lot to answer for when it was all over (including no little clubhouse tension at various points---denouncing players as "quitters" when they turned up injured, compelling no few Cubs to stick it out no matter how badly they were hurting, wasn't exactly the way to manage a team through the thick of the first pennant race they'd seen since the end of World War II) and the Cubs had to settle for being the best team that didn't win.

[Vigilanteman]

Good observations. But I think you have to cut Leo a little slack because of the era he came from. Yes, he was post Casey Stengel, but Casey was laid-back by the time he got the job of managing the Mets and knew that his job was more entertaining than winning, an impossible job given the awful 1962 expansion team anyway.

Leo, on the other hand, was expected to win and came from an era when pitchers were expected to throw complete games and everyday players were expected to play, well, everyday.

The fact that the 1970 Cubs corrected many of these problems showed he learned, albeit too late. Had they been able to maintain something even close to the pitching power of the 1969 team, I think the 1970 team was even better.

I'd also agree with you on the 1986 Mets being better than the 1969 team in terms of raw talent and certainly a better team on paper. But it isn't team people talk much about anymore, partly over a feeling that they got the 1986 Series handed to them by Bill Buckner's famous error (another topic which I could expond upon) but more because the team members featured some pretty poor human beings-- drug users, wife beaters, etc.

[Enchante]

I seriously doubt that George H.W. Bush had any confusion about the Rangers not being in the AL East..... I’ll bet he heard the question as who will win the “American League” pennant, not a division...... I’m a lot younger than Bush, Sr. and baseball’s divisions still seem “new fangled” and strange to me, not b/c I don’t know the Rangers are not in the AL East (I’m a RED SOX fan, for God’s sake) but b/c I still tend to think of pennant-to-World Series more than the divisions (although my Red Sox can now be very thankful for MLB’s wild card).

Bush, Sr. was an avid baseball player and athlete going back to the 1940s....... I will not believe he thought the Rangers were in the “AL East” without much stronger confirmation than the usual journalistic b.s. If the anecdote is accurate at all, I’ll bet the Bush, Sr. simply missed or didn’t register the word “east” if it was actually uttered audibly.

[BluesDuke]

But I think you have to cut Leo a little slack because of the era he came from.

Gil Hodges, the 1969 Mets' manager, came from the same era (and played in no few duel-to-the-death games against Durocher's Giants), and he adjusted where necessary, even though there was no question who was the boss in his dugout or clubhouse. So did most of the managers in the Show at that time come from Durocher's earlier era. Durocher's problem was that he corrected himself, if at all, a little too late.

I'd also agree with you on the 1986 Mets being better than the 1969 team in terms of raw talent and certainly a better team on paper. But it isn't team people talk much about anymore, partly over a feeling that they got the 1986 Series handed to them by Bill Buckner's famous error (another topic which I could expond upon) but more because the team members featured some pretty poor human beings-- drug users, wife beaters, etc.

As if the 1986 Mets were the only team chock full of drug users, wife beaters, etc. (They were a more flamboyant team notwithstanding those issues, is all. The Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals of the early 1980s had the same problems with none of the 1986 Mets' visibility or notoriety unless you counted a) the infamous Royals' cocaine busts and sentences, or b) the stories about the Pirate roster at the infamous Pittsburgh drug trials.)

The 1986 Mets were a better all-around team than the 1969 club and not just on paper. On the other hand, they didn't get "handed" a World Series on Buckner's error. The real culprit: the passed ball that was called, erroneously, a a wild pitch just before the Wilson grounder, allowing the tying run to score. Aside from which, even if Buckner comes up clean with the ball, his nonexistent ankles notwithstanding, the best case scenario (I saw the play when it happened and have seen it about a thousand times since) is that the Mets end up with first and third (Wilson had the play beat; Bob Stanley was going to lose him by a step covering first on the play) and Howard Johnson coming up to hit. Either they get Johnson out to send it to a twelfth inning, or Johnson drives home Ray Knight (who could score on the error but wouldn't have scored on what would have turned out an infield hit) from third.

A hilarious post-script: A few years ago, Bill Buckner visited Shea Stadium. A stadium guard recognised him and asked if he'd like to visit with Mookie Wilson, at the time the Mets' first base coach. Buckner said, of course, and was escorted to the field. Wilson recognised him at once. As the two men approached each other, Buckner cracked, "Mookie, what do you say you hit me some grounders?"

It took a long time for poor Buckner to develop anything resembling a sense of humour about the play.

The crowning irony: Buckner's last major league home run---in a Red Sox uniform, when he returned for what proved a brief encore a couple of years after they dealt him away---was an inside-the-park job.

Forgotten fact about Leo Durocher: He spent a few years as a Dodger coach before he got the Cubs' managing job, when the team finally wised up and rid itself of the ridiculous College of Coaches concept. Before he got the Cub job, however, he was the intended target in one of baseball's most shameful episodes.

Midway in the 1964 season, the St. Louis Cardinals---struggling to keep up with the then-runaway Philadelphia Phillies, and under pressure from Branch Rickey (then a senior advisor) and possibly Harry Caray (working behind the scenes; he wouldn't have dared suggest it on the air if he knew what was good for him)---were looking for a way to dump manager Johnny Keane.

At the same time, the New York Yankees---struggling to stay in a pennant race, and facing a little too much freewheeling in the clubhouse under Yogi Berra's first regime as the team's manager---had decided to dump Berra at season's end. Even further behind the scenes, the Yankees managed somehow to reach out to Johnny Keane and determine that, if he was going to be canned by the Cardinals at season's end, he was very interested in the Yankee job: the Yankee brass liked Keane's style; Keane wasn't exactly a martinet or a tyrant but he was perceived to be a little more firm on team discipline than was Berra, who was being done in by a lot of his players running behind his back to former manager Ralph Houk, who was now the Yankee general manager.

The Cardinals were said to be looking at several candidates and one name said to be coming up frequently in their discussions was Leo Durocher. Whether Durocher ever indicated he'd be tempted to take the Cardinal job if Keane got the shiv is anybody's guess, and Durocher himself was smart enough to keep his yap shut, practically for life, on the matter.

Then the impossible happened.

The Phillies' collapse ended up in a potential three-way tie for the National League pennant, between the Phillies, the Cardinals, and the Cincinnati Reds (who surged a bit looking to bring one home in honour of Fred Hutchinson, their cancer-stricken manager who didn't live out the year, sadly enough) on the final weekend. The Cardinals had to go through the New York Mets to have a prayer and the Mets, as unlikely as it was at the time, made them work for it. They beat the Cardinals twice before the Cardinals finally won the regular season finale that meant the pennant when the Reds could polish off the Phillies but still have a little too much ground to cover if they wanted to pass the Cardinals.

The Yankees, meanwhile, put on a huge surge, played past Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, and practically won the pennant at the last minute, too. (The heroes were Mel Stottlemyre, the rookie who came up to win nine games down the stretch, a la Whitey Ford in his rookie season; and, Pedro Ramos, a late-season acquisition who became the bullpen bellwether down the stretch.)

Now you have two managers whose skids have been greased squaring off in the World Series. The Cardinals won it in seven great games.

The next day, Cardinals owner Gussie Busch called a press conference to announce he was going to rehire Johnny Keane, after all. He made his opening remarkes and handed it off to Keane . . . who handed in his resignation right then and there. Take that, Gussie! In short order, Red Schoendienst became their manager.

On the same day, the Yankees called Berra into their Manhattan offices. Berra walked in thinking he was going to be asked about his 1965 plans and hopes---and after he'd said goodbye to his players for the season (including advising a few to come in to spring training with either fewer or more pounds, depending)---and walked out with his head on a plate. And the Yankees announced, now that it was safe to do so, that Johnny Keane would be their new manager.

The sad postscript is that Keane's style of ball was alien to the Yankee style, and the stress of the Yankees' collapse in 1965 and early 1966 may have contributed to the heart attack that killed him.

[Vigilanteman]

No argument that Gil Hodges was a better manager than Leo Durocher, at least by 1969. But Lady Luck was on his side as well.

I never blamed Bill Buckner for the 1986 series error. The Red Sox could have still come back and won the 7th game. Instead the choked. I thought Buckner was one of the last of the great breed of that era. Not only did he put a lot of RBI's on the board, but he did it playing hurt. I always thought the Red Sox fans were a bunch of ungrateful snots for riding him so hard over a common error considering they likely would never have been there in the first place without Buckner's work ethic.

Interesting stuff on the 1964 season. I'd never read the whole story. Too bad about Johnny Keane taking the helm just as the franchise was falling apart. I first became a baseball fan as a youngster just as our local Minnesota Twins had their first World Series the following year and couldn't understand why Mickey Mantle got more praise than our hometown boy Roger Maris. Timing was everything, I guess. I look back to 1965 and it was clear that was when Mantle really started slipping, whereas Roger got traded to St. Louis and went on to post respectable final seasons with the 1967 and 1968 National League champs.

I guess to a kid anything which happened before they started following the game didn't count. The kids too young to remember Jimmy Carter who voted for Obozo sure proved that!