Category Archives: baseball

Look at this!

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What would Ted Kluszewski think? Major League Baseball has unveiled—that seems to be the appropriate word—a uniform design that features pants so sheer they appear to reveal players’ underpants. (A New Yorker piece about the new duds was headlined “I See England, I See France.”) Connor McKnight, who hosts pre- and post-game shows on the Chicago White Sox Network, told NPR that player reaction is running “anywhere from incensed to really embarrassed.”

“When you’re on display for the nation and for your fans to watch,” McKnight said, “you don’t want to be quite as on display as a lot of players have been” during this Spring Training season.

Oh; Ted Kluszewski. He was a slugging first baseman in the 1950s, an All-Star for the Cincinnati Reds during the peak of his 15-year Big League career. No Givenchy, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior; no designer of haute couture. But Kluszewski did make a bold baseball fashion statement by exposing more than was traditional on the ball field.

He bared his bulging biceps by cutting off the sleeves of his uniform top. In some quarters, the exhibition of his considerable muscles was reckoned to be an intimidation factor on opposing pitchers, though Kluszewski claimed that full sleeves merely constricted his ability to swing a bat. And he insisted he would not compromise his swing.

It is a fact that baseball players—all athletes, really—often correlate performance with attire, both physically and psychologically. A sort of dress-for-success conviction. In his best-selling 1974 book, “Ball Four,” pitcher Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season, he wrote that former Yankee teammate Joe Pepitone “refused to take the field if his uniform isn’t skintight.” And another, Phil Linz, “used to say that he didn’t know why, but he could run faster in tight pants.”

Bouton quoted Dick Stuart, a contemporary, believing an even harder-to-substantiate claim that he could add 20 points to his batting average “if he knows he looks good.”

There was a 1994 Seinfeld episode purported to address more practical terms. In response to player complaints that the polyester uniforms then in style were too hot, George Costanza convinced Yankee manager Buck Showalter to dress the team in cotton—with the predictable gag result that the cotton outfits shrank and severely hampered player effectiveness.

In the real world of competitive attire, college football went through a period in the 1970s when tear-away jerseys were a thing, allowing ball-carriers to run through finger-tip tackling, leaving behind only a ripped piece of cloth. And that bit of dressing down led to the so-called crop-top jersey which exposed stomachs, made famous by Georgia’s Herschel Walker and Alabama’s Johnny Musso. But it hardly was a good look for some of the more corpulent linemen, and the style has long-since been banned by the NCAA.

But now we have another occasion, apparently, of sporting attire that allows too much to be seen. In his New Yorker report on baseball’s sartorial innovation, Zach Helfand noted that “sheer is hot. Sheer is in.” But while league officials contend that the new uniforms improve mobility by providing 24 percent more stretch (and thus more comfort), Helfand wrote that “some people were scandalized….a few players, caught bending over, or just sitting down, displayed silhouettes of genitals which were remarkable for their clarity and detail. One player reportedly resorted to buying his own pants at Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

The whole episode conjures some weird vision of baseball players, during their walk-up to the batter’s box, red-carpet-like, being queried, “Who are you wearing?” With the possible response, “Fruit of the Loom.”

There have been player grumbles, beyond the see-through situation, that the new clothes are chintzy; that, instead of pants being tailored to individual players, there merely are four cuts to choose from: Slim, standard, athletic (whatever that means) and muscular. Logos and lettering no longer appear to be stitched on; rather, are apparently cheap patches. Sports uniform maven Paul Lukas, on his uni-watch.com site, meanwhile spotted at least three teams whose road jerseys and pants were of different shades of gray. Not so dapper.

Designed and produced by two giants of the sports gear and memorabilia businesses (which will get no free advertisement here), the latest Big League get-ups nevertheless have not only failed to impress the wearers but also major-league designers. Transparency’s trendiness aside.

One, Isaac Mizrahi, told the New Yorker, “If you like bodies—and I like bodies—to some extent, you’re kind of excited when you first hear something like this. But this? This has a creep connotation. It’s none of our business.”

Here’s the pitch…

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So baseball will reconnoiter its physical arrangement of pitcher-to-hitter. Big news. An experiment to be conducted in an independent minor league will extend the traditional 60-foot, six-inch separation of the game’s primary antagonists by one foot. This, under the scrutiny of the Majors’ mad scientists, apparently desperate for more action, more balls in play.

Will moving the pitcher’s mound back one foot curb the recent proliferation of strikeouts? Will it juice up a sport futzing around with various schemes to speed its pace and rope in a generation of younger fans drawn to the non-stop chaos of football and basketball?

Or will it be messing with a sacred balance, tilting a competitive edge away from pitchers and mollycoddling batsmen? (At a time, ironically, when there also are complaints of too many home runs.) Also: Might the change produce more runs and further lengthen already endless games?

Two fairly outrageous thoughts came to mind upon reading the move-the-mound plan:

The first was having come across an article, years ago, by someone named Eisenstein, who suggested that the home run is a dull play and that balls hit over outfield fences should be outs. It seemed sacrilegious enough that I should immediately poll some players about the idea.

One of them was Atlanta Braves outfielder Dale Murphy who, at the time, was walloping homers at a Ruthian pace. Murphy politely dismissed the home-runs-are-outs proposal as silly. On the other hand, the Braves’ dominant relief pitcher, Bruce Sutter, who that night had served up a grand slam to New York Mets catcher Gary Carter, suggested that “when they hit it out, it should be a double play.”

Then, as now, one man’s RBI is another man’s hanging curve.

The other reflection regarding this mound-relocation trial balloon had to do with my long-ago attendance at a 19th-Century re-enactment of a game of Base Ball (it was two words then) at one of those “living museum” restoration villages. On display was a reminder that there is nothing new about the sport’s moving targets on rules and specifications.

In 1859, shortly before the first professional league was formed, there was no sliding into bases permitted. No stealing. No bunting. No arguing with the umpire (in his top hat, white shirt, black vest and bowtie). No cursing (25-cent fine; roughly $800 in 2021 money). No popcorn and Cracker Jack.

The pitcher—then called the “bowler”—threw underhand and the batter—“striker”—was permitted to call for his preferred location of the pitch. Fly balls fielded on one bounce were outs.

Things change. It hasn’t been that long ago that basketball poobahs considered raising the basket to counter the increasing size of players. But soon settled instead on the three-point shot to open the court. It’s not exactly ancient history that the NFL literally moved the goalposts—from the front to the rear of the end zone—to offset the escalating length and accuracy of kickers. Then moved the scrimmage line back for extra-point attempts.

Long, long ago, pitchers were a mere 50 feet from home plate. Foul balls didn’t count as strikes. Batters were allowed four strikes and weren’t awarded a walk until the ninth ball. As recently as 1969, the strike zone was shrunk—from top-of-the-shoulder, bottom-of-the-knee to armpit and top-of-the-knee—and the pitcher’s mound was lowered by five inches.

All manner of inconsistencies forever persist in baseball—odd-shaped playing fields that turn long outs into homers; the thin air of parks at altitude that add distance to fly balls; “the wind blowing out” in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. With the pitcher’s mound an additional foot distant from home plate, will that tamper with the physics of when curveballs break on their way to the batter? Will it physically wear down pitchers attempting to get their fastballs through that extra foot before the batter can react?

In 2008, there was a rumpus over Japanese pitchers claiming to throw a revolutionary “gyroball,” which was said to change directions horizontally and therefore bring an entirely new challenge to hitters. But David Coburn, head of the research department at Popular Mechanics, whose editors had released a book explaining why a curveball curves, wrote that the gyroball was “The Bigfoot of baseball, an urban legend born in a Japanese lab and racing across the Internet…either the first new pitch in nearly four decades or a complete and total sham.”

The pitch hasn’t been heard of since.

Will the 61-foot, six-inch pitcher-to-hitter dynamic ruin careers? Save baseball? Mean anything at all? Will some sub-committee on analytics—part of a committee on velocity, rotation, launch angle and tobacco-chewing—be able to recommend parameters that are beyond reproach by any athlete, fan, manager, GM and owner?

Robert Adair, the Yale professor who authored “Physics and Baseball,” once gave me this definitive answer to these related matters: “Seeing as how I’m one of them, I would say that if you want something really stupid, get an intellectual to tell you about it.”

Because, what it all will boil down to is players—pitchers and hitters, within the prescribed rules—just doing what they do best.

Home runs weren’t all that happened

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Let’s say you are the target of senseless hate and that, having survived, you are advised to simply forget about it. Let it go. Move on.

Think of Henry Aaron, the baseball Hall of Famer who died this week at 86. In 1974, when Aaron—a Black man—was about to surpass baseball folk hero Babe Ruth as the sport’s home run king, insults and death threats rained down on Aaron and his family. Racism, pure and simple.

And, once the whole troubled affair was over—once Aaron had his record 715th homer and reasonable people gave him the acclaim he deserved—there was a widely held expectation that he simply should get over what he described as “a living hell” during his pursuit of the revered Ruth standard.

Except there was the reality of the situation, months of what essentially amounted to arguments for Ruth’s white privilege.

“All those letters I received,” Aaron said during a telephone conversation 20 years after the fact. “People have said to me. ‘Why don’t you destroy them? Get rid of them?’

“I said, ‘Why should I? This is for real.’ People need to realize it could happen again. I keep those letters so that my children, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will know what I went through.”

And now it’s 2021 and some arguments persist that an emphasis on healing pre-empts accountability.

During that 1994 phone interview, arranged to mark the 20th anniversary of No. 715, Aaron reminded of what was painfully obvious, that he merely had been “out there playing baseball in 1974.” Just going about his business. Not leading some insurrection, not attempting to cancel hallowed sports history. Yet he routinely was subjected to bigoted outrage.

“I need to keep those letters,” he said, “to let people know: This happened.”

Five years later, Aaron at last was feeling more appreciated and a bit immortal when his old team, the Atlanta Braves, staged a small pre-game celebration on the 25th anniversary of No. 715. I happened to be in Atlanta that April 8, assigned to cover a New York Knicks basketball game the next night, and was able to finagle a press credential to the event.

A quarter century before, Aaron had felt slighted when then-baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn skipped Aaron’s momentous game in favor of addressing some booster group in Ohio. But for the 1999 remembrance, commissioner Bud Selig was there. He had known Aaron since both were 20 years old, Aaron as a rookie for the then-Milwaukee Braves at a time when Selig’s father provided cars for Braves’ players.

Selig unveiled a new “Hank Aaron Award” to be annually presented to the best hitter in each league and Aaron declared, “This tops it all.”

Aaron was 65 then. “My grandchildren, my great-grandchildren, will forever be able to say their father had an award named in his honor,” he said. He told the large Atlanta crowd that night, “I know some of you weren’t born when I hit that home run, but I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

Still, he kept those letters from the early ‘70s. “Was baseball ready to accept what I did 25 years ago?” he asked during a brief chat before that ceremony. “I don’t know, but I did it. All those things were happening so quickly then. I don’t think America was ready to accept what was happening in baseball.”

His wife, Billye, compared the “overwhelming” 1999 tribute to the unsettling atmosphere around his ’74 homer. “This is joyous,” she said. “We were a little out of sorts 25 years ago. We didn’t know what would happen. It was an odd kind of feeling: What will be? This makes up for it. Yes.”

Aaron was such a dangerous hitter during his 23 Major League seasons that opposing pitchers, respecting his ability to cause them trouble, called him “Bad Henry.” (Aaron preferred being called “Henry” to “Hank,” but once admitted late in life that it was quicker to sign autographs with the shorter version.) One rival pitcher, Curt Simmons, famously said that “trying to throw a fastball past Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.”

In the end, he was more Ruthian than Ruth. But…

“If I were white,” Aaron once said of setting the home run record, “all America would be proud of me. But I’m Black.”

Now, at his death, the tributes are rolling in. But don’t forget any of the history. As he said, this happened.

If fans had a choice….

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What is so different about Major League Baseball’s current absence, not counting the familiar owners- vs.-players wrangle over money, is the total lack of options for sports spectators. Three previous work stoppages resulted in cancelled games, but in each of those cases—in 1972, 1981 and 1994-95—other forms of sporting frivolity were readily available.

There was some shock in ’72 over history’s first player strike, which left big-league parks briefly empty from April 1 to 13. That unprecedented labor action by professional jocks disrupted “normal” routine, but it certainly was not in a league with the real-world crises of 2020—a global pandemic, crashing economy and roiling demonstrations against racial injustice.

Think of this: ESPN has been so desperate for sports news that its website’s lead headline on Tuesday ballyhooed, “Bucs release photos of Tom Brady in his new uniform.”

In April of ’72, among the plentiful alternative sporting entertainment in a MLB-free nation were NBA and/or NHL playoffs progressing in 13 major-league cities. It happens I was on assignment in Los Angeles for Newsday at the time, covering the NBA semifinals between the Lakers and Milwaukee Bucks. Yet even on an off day in that series, I found live baseball—with a decidedly big-league feel—on the University of Southern California campus.

SC was the reigning national collegiate champion then, playing a non-conference game against nearby Westmont College. One of the game’s umpires was Emmett Ashford, who had been MLB’s first black umpire and regularly worked SC games following his retirement from the Bigs two years earlier.

There was a high school lad sitting behind home plate that day, having set up a microphone and tape recorder to work on his play-by-play voice. Instead of referring to the teams as SC and Westmont, he called them the Angels and the Twins. So when SC outfielder Fred Lynn, who two years later would make his debut with the Boston Red Sox and went on to play 17 years in the Majors, struck out, poor Tony Oliva—a 15-year veteran with the Twins then on strike with his fellow pros—got blamed for it by the prep announcer.

That SC team resembled the L.A. Dodgers of 1972, relying on pitching and, in that particular game, going hitless until the sixth inning. The SC coach, for that year and 44 others, was Rod Dedeaux, who won 11 NCAA titles and played annual exhibitions against the Dodgers. (SC won their 1971 meeting, 10-9, before 31,000 fans.)

Dedeaux’s close relationship with Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda brought offers (which Dedeaux declined) to join the Dodger coaching staff. Besides Lynn, Dedeaux’s former SC players who enjoyed significant big-league success included Tom Seaver, Mark McGwire, Dave Kingman, Ron Fairly, Don Buford, Roy Smalley, Steve Kemp and Randy Johnson. Kingman was among the handful of striking players who worked out at SC during the work stoppage.

Back to the future: The coronavirus—the monster under our beds—is still there, and now baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is frightening the sport’s followers with noises about cancelling the 2020 season to show the players’ union who’s boss.

Other pro sports may return to action before the Majors do, which has moved fivethirtyeight.com to ask whether MLB’s labor fight might remind potential customers that there will be other choices out there soon.

“If history is any guide,” fivethirtyeight concluded, “a labor dispute isn’t likely to dampen enthusiasm for the game for long. In the past, fans have returned—and often quickly.” The piece cited a 3.7 percent drop in attendance in 1972 that was reversed with a 6.8 increase the next season. And “fans weren’t likely to attend games in a shortened 2020 season anyway because of COVID-19 concerns.”

Still, when the NBA comes back. And the NHL. And the NFL. And USC….

Applauding the story: David Price

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It is a cardinal rule of sports journalism: No cheering in the press box. Don’t take sides. Check your partiality at the door. Let the fans be fans and just report.

It’s not that hard, really. We Knights of the Keyboard, as Hall of Fame Red Sox slugger Ted Williams sarcastically called the sporting press, most often are too busy juggling game developments, deadlines, statistics and the English language to have time or energy for rooting. Plus, it doesn’t take long in the business to understand there is no direct line between a jock’s admirable athletic skill and moral virtue. That tends to dull favoritism.

What we cheer for is the story. So now, from a distance—officially retired, and only catching glimpses of the World Series on television—I might have given in to my pre-teen fandom for the Dodgers against the Red Sox. I certainly retain a clear bias regarding the Dodgers’ classic uniforms. (Love the red numbers.)

But the way the narrative played out, with an especially nice ending for Red Sox pitcher David Price, I found it easy to muster a quiet hoorah for a fellow who years ago made a good impression in what, for him, was a decidedly uncomfortable situation.

That was July 9, 2011. I was one of a handful of Newsday scribes assigned to Yankee Stadium in anticipation of Yankee favorite Derek Jeter’s pursuit of a 3,000th career base hit. A big deal. My job, specifically—if Jeter were to produce that hit—was to talk to Jeter’s victim, whichever Tampa Bay Rays pitcher surrendered the hit.

That turned out to be Price.

“I’d rather not be the answer to this trivia question,” he said hours after the fact. “But I am. It’s tough, but he’s one of the best hitters who ever played baseball, so he was going to do it to somebody, and it just happened to be me.”

All the fuss that day was about Jeter, of course, but there always is another side to the tale. In covering sports, I often am reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus excitedly reports to Charlie Brown about watching a televised football game in which the home team conjures an improbable last-second victory.

Linus details how the home team is behind, 6-0, stuck on its own one-yard line with three seconds to play, when the quarterback throws a perfect pass and the receiver avoids four tacklers and somehow scores.

With the decisive extra point, “The fans went wild,” Linus reports. “You should’ve seen them. Thousands of people ran onto the field, laughing and screaming. The players and the fans were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and dancing and everything. It was fantastic!”

Charlie Brown says, “How did the other team feel?”

So I was one in a small clutch of reporters who approached David Price that July day to ask how he felt to be the defeated antagonist in a stadium full of laughing, hugging, dancing Yankees and their fans.

Price noted how unavoidable the Jeter commotion was. “It was everywhere,” he said. “I mean, walking out of the tunnel and looking at all the signs saying, ‘Congratulations, Jeter.’”

Jeter had singled off Price in the first inning for his 2,999th hit, and when he stepped to the plate in the third inning, “You’ve got 50,000 people screaming for Jeter to get a hit,” Price said. On top of that, Price was supplied a baseball marked with a “J-3” in the event Jeter would strike his 3,000th hit in that at-bat.

Sure enough, Jeter made a 3-and-2 Price curveball disappear over the leftfield fence to lift the Yanks into a 1-1 tie. “I really didn’t care,” Price said, “if the guy got [No. 3,000] off me, as long as he didn’t drive in a run or score a run. And he did all those things.”

His response was to “tip his cap” to Jeter. He reminded that, in his major league debut three years earlier, he had given up a home run to Jeter, who hardly was known for hitting homers. The thing was, Price certainly didn’t ask for sympathy; rather, he described pitching before a full house in what he called “the grandest stage in baseball” was what “any player could ask for.”

In his 11 big-league seasons, Price twice led the league in earned run average and once in strikeouts and has complied an envious won-lost record of 143-75. But because, in sports, coming up short in the highest-visibility occasions is too casually equated with deficient character, he has had to endure years of public scorn for a 2-10 post-season record prior to this fall.

Now, he’s the answer to another trivia question: Who twice beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, including in the title-clinching game? That’s worthy of a good cheer from a long-ago Dodgers fan.

Tim Tebow: Fake news?

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There are two kinds of people in the world. Those immune to Tebow Fatigue. And the rest of us weary souls.

It is now going on five years that Tim Tebow, his glory days as a Heisman Trophy winner and a brief flash of pro football success well behind him, has been vainly chasing a second act of athletic prominence. Rejected by four NFL teams, Tebow has turned to baseball, laboring on the sport’s lowest-rung, at 29, amid aspirants a decade younger than he is.

And, while his Sisyphean toil may not be fake news, it long ago began to feel like a transposed version of crying-wolf headlines. Over and over, there have been urgent prophecies, never fulfilled, of Tebow as savior or—at least—change agent.

Just months after his NFL apotheosis in a 2011 playoff victory, Tebow was traded by the Denver Broncos to the New York Jets, who spent all of the next season threatening to match the public relations hullaballoo by unleashing him in place of struggling quarterback Mark Sanchez, or as a runner-passer in the Wildcat formation, or as a receiver, or possibly as a running back.

Nothing ever came of any of that. Tebow, the erstwhile miracle man, mostly sat on the bench, was released after the season, spent one training camp with Philadelphia and another with New England but never played another NFL game. Always with much fanfare. Now, in what must be considered his athletic second language, Tebow is attempting to learn professional baseball with the Mets’ Class A farm team, the delightfully named Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies.

Jay Busbee of Yahoo! Sports wrote this week that Tebow “is playing baseball and nobody knows why.” His .143 batting average through April 19, against bush-league pitching, hardly forecasts big-time potential. So there are only his credentials as a celebrity—these days, mostly famous for being famous—that keep him in the public eye and make him the biggest attraction at the Columbia ballpark.

Come see the old Florida Gator star quarterback tackle another sport! (And don’t forget to stop in the gift shop on the way out for your Tebow Fireflies’ replica jersey.)

Surely, part of the narrative is Tebow’s recognition factor beyond sports, through his conspicuous displays of Christian faith. And even if his prayerful kneeling after football touchdowns—“Tebowing,” which he trademarked in 2012—wasn’t necessarily embraced for religious implications, it provided a fad to be widely mimicked.

The pose also was compared sarcastically to Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker.” So, segueing from that, let us ponder the puzzlement of the ongoing publicity glut.

Really: Why? Tebow hardly is the first jock to attempt a football-baseball transition. Apart from Deion Sanders—who is the only man to play in both the World Series and Super Bowl—Bo Jackson, D.J. Dozier, Drew Henson, Chad Hutchinson, Brian Jordan and Matt Kinzer are just some recent names on a long list of men who reached the top level in both sports. Plenty others—including two former Heisman winners, Chris Weinke and Ricky Williams—worked both the NFL and baseball’s minors.

One of those was John Elway. In 1982, the summer before the Stanford quarterback was made the NFL’s No. 1 draft choice, Elway dabbled in the minors with the Yankees’ Class A team in Oneonta, N.Y., while Yankee boss George Steinbrenner was convinced Elway would be his Major League right fielder within three years. Yet there wasn’t nearly the fuss made over him that the more limited Tebow is experiencing.

Elway, furthermore, was a can’t-miss NFL star, who followed his 16-year Hall of Fame career with the Denver Broncos by becoming the team’s general manager–and is the man, skeptical of the quarterback skills of one Tim Tebow, who sent Tebow packing in that 2012 trade to the Jets.

Here’s another argument—flimsy, I admit—why the Tebow story feels overdone. If one will accept a spelling quirk, there already has been a Tebow—Tebeau—in the Major Leagues. Three, in fact, in the late 1800s. George Tebeau (.269 average over six years), his brother Patsy (.279 in 13 years) and Pussy—so called, apparently, because his initials were C.A.T.; Charles Alston Tebeau—who was no relation to the other two. Pussy played only two games and hit .500, for the old Cleveland Spiders of the National League.

Anyway, now we have Tim Tebow, a Firefly. Yes, he’s generating plenty of light. But hardly delivering a shock. There is a big difference between a lightning bug and lightning. End of story.

Locker room banter, hazing and respectful reactions

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Let’s think about the weekend’s massive protest marches in terms of physics. For every action, according to Newton’s third law, there is an opposite and equal reaction.

It just might take a while. So a presidential candidate was exposed for his vulgar bragging about sexual assault in an October revelation and, about three months later—after scores of more indignities, and after the serial aggressor has become president and sworn to reverse “American carnage”—demonstrations organized by women turned up in at least 500 U.S. cities with 3.7 million participants. That’s one of every 100 Americans (my wife among them).

The marchers, including men and children as well as women, voiced a variety of agendas and fears, but it might be safe to say that all were responding to the new executive’s repeated aversion to “political correctness.” Which is, after all, simply a commitment to showing respect to all individuals and groups.

I come from a mostly male-dominated world, having worked as a sports journalist for roughly a half century. In that environment, especially regarding team sports, there certainly is a history of boys’ club exclusion and assumed dominance. But the difference between that, and our president’s argument that his molestation of women was “just locker room banter,” is that we have arrived at 2017 with a gradual expectation of chivalrous conduct.

A case in point would be the long, long overdue new Major League Baseball prohibition, announced in December, targeting the practice of veteran players forcing rookie teammates to dress as women in annual end-of-the-season hazing rituals.

That, too, took a while. It has been 11 years since Long Island’s Adelphi University invited hundreds of coaches and school administrators to a five-hour conference on hazing. My Newsday editor, in fact, still considered it to be a cute thing the following year when he assigned me to chronicle that “time-honored tradition” as the Yankees required rookies to dress as Wizard of Oz characters, including Dorothy, the Wicked Witch and other females.

Sports psychologist Susan Lipkins, an expert on the dangers of hazing, noted that by compelling men to dress as women, it sent the message that to be a woman is less than to be a man, thereby denigrating both the male dressing as a woman and women in general.

Anyway, in October—about the time that Hollywood Access audio tape surfaced of our future leader’s crass (and, in fact, criminal) claims—the New York Mets’ veterans ordered rookie teammates to don wigs, dresses and fake breasts as characters from the movie “A League of Their Own.” And to publicly fetch coffee in that attire for the old pros.

Maybe it took the outrage expressed by a handful of female sportswriters to finally move baseball officials to assume the role of adults and put an end to such bad behavior, after more than 30 years of rookies being ordered to wear tutus, cheerleader costumes or the outfits of female superheroes during the team’s final road trip.

“Before the ‘lighten up, it’s just a joke’ crowd has the chance to chime in,” Julie DiCaro wrote on the CBS Chicago web site at the time, “think about this: What if the rookies were all dressed in blackface as a joke? What if they were all dressed like Negro League players? Is that OK? “

That prompted SUNY-Oswego professor Brian Moritz, on his Sportsmediaguy.com web site, to question the “The Casual Sexism of the NY Mets.” Although, he admitted, a little late.

Some players continued to rationalize it as a harmless fraternal initiation. As “team-bonding.” As “fun.” (Something like “locker room banter” to them, no doubt, not to be nixed by “political correctness.”)

But any expert on hazing will argue that it is fun at someone else’s expense, that it is a means of reinforcing a pecking order of power and status. One of those experts, Roger Rees, told me years ago that hazing “legitimizes anti-social behavior” when sports, ideally, is supposed to “teach self-respect and respect for others.” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson, a former Marine aware of similar practices in the military, was among those who strongly backed the MLB ruling to end what he call something “divisive [that] undercuts morale.”

Divisive and undercutting morale? Hmmm. Forward…march.

Bonds, Clemens, fame and notoriety

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This shouldn’t be complicated. According to the dictionary definition of “fame,” neither Barry Bonds nor Roger Clemens requires the blessing of self-important baseball scribes to qualify for inclusion among the sport’s most widely known players.

Still, the annual Hall of Fame voting this week raised the topic again. Should Bonds and Clemens eventually be inducted into Cooperstown? Are they getting closer each year?

Listen: Bonds and Clemens already have their fame. By doing what they did, as arguably their generation’s most dominant hitter and pitcher, they long ago achieved far-reaching acclaim. And they did so, according to overwhelming evidence, powered by banned substances, which only served to raise their public conspicuousness. (“Fame” also can mean recognition of an unfavorable kind; notoriety.)

So, a couple of modest proposals:

1. Take away the St. Peter-at-the-Pearly-Gates function of the Baseball Writers Association of America. The organization was founded in 1908 to improve the writing conditions of baseball reporters. To subsequently empower its members to canonize ballplayers—to make news, rather than reporting it—is a perversion of journalism.

Too much attention is paid to the BBWAA members’ arguments over what weight should be       given to players’ moral behavior, especially since the writers have demonstrated a sliding           scale of acceptance, as indicated by the yearly increase in the number of votes for Bonds and     Clemens. Baseball historian John Thorn has argued that the system “permits sportswriters…to   see themselves as guardians of a sacred portal, the last best hope for truth and justice. And       it’s all hogwash and baloney.”

2. Take away the “sacred portal.” In no way should Bonds or Clemens get a pass for having cheated their way to grand statistical accomplishments. (Just as Major League Baseball should not get off the hook for having turned a blind eye to steroid use for years after other sports organizations tested and penalized juicers.) So, by demystifying Cooperstown—by dispensing with the venerated status for really good athletes by hanging their plaques in a reverential hall, conferring on them the title of Great Men—there would be no need to confuse exceptional baseball skill with a place in Heaven. (Angels—from the Los Angeles team—could still qualify for acknowledgement.)

The museum aspect of Cooperstown’s Hall already is a fabulous depository of baseball history and artifacts, good and bad. Even persona non grata figures Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose have some personal items in the museum, so the records of Bonds and Clemens—the complete records, with statistics alongside reports of their misdeeds—would have their place.

Baseball is unquestionably a significant piece of our culture, something to celebrate. But hero worship is a risky thing, just as consigning reality—good or bad—to the dustbin solves nothing. Better to skip the BBWAA’s editorial judgments and accept that Bonds and Clemens already made their own fame.

The Cubs, the curse and daytime baseball

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cubssun

Could it be that the final curse the star-crossed Cubs had to reverse was Major League Baseball’s building revolt against the last guardians of daytime baseball?

Let’s, for the moment, put aside the Billy Goat thing in 1945, Steve Bartman’s (quite reasonable) reach for a foul ball in 2003, the black cat moment in 1969, Babe Ruth’s called shot in 1932, Leon Durham’s fielding flub in 1984. When the Cubs, after 112 years of only afternoon home games, attempted their first night contest at Wrigley Field on Aug. 8, 1988, a fourth-inning downpour wiped out the proceedings.

“Someone up there seems to take day baseball seriously,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized the next day, throwing in the quote from a fan convinced that the heavens’ negative retort to artificial illumination “proves the Cubs are cursed.”

Another 28 years on, the Cubs at last have broken that evil spell on the sport’s biggest stage.

To review: In 1982, then-Cubs general manager Dallas Green first proposed lights for the Friendly Confines. Television, he said, was dictating that the team play at night, and he said that if the Cubs were to make the playoffs, they would be forced to move post-season home games to the rival White Sox’ crosstown Comiskey Park. Or possibly St. Louis.

He hinted—darkly—that, without the installation of permanent lights at Wrigley, the club would have no choice but to move, mentioning a tract of undeveloped land in the Schaumburg suburb, Northwest of the city. About that time, Major League Baseball decreed that, should the Cubs ever return to the World Series for the first time since 1945, their home games would be shifted to an alternate, lighted site.

Sure enough, in 1984, in the midst of Green’s campaign to light up Wrigley, the last outdoor World Series day game was played. San Diego (which had benefited mightily from the Leon Durham error in the league championship series) at Detroit.

(Wrigley before lights)

(Wrigley before lights)

Now, think of Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub. Not, specifically, the “Let’s play two” Banks, always eager to go extra innings; more generally, the perpetually sunny-disposition Banks.

Think of C.U.B.S.—Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine—a 1980s neighborhood group on Chicago’s North Side that fought against the establishment of night baseball for the Cubs.

Think of a widely held notion at the time that putting lights at Wrigley was akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. Think of Bill Veeck, the brilliant baseball executive who had been a Wrigley Field popcorn vendor as a boy and later was responsible for creating the distinctive touch of covering Wrigley’s outfield walls with ivy. To Veeck, Wrigley’s special charm was its commitment to day games, to “make people discover how lovely it is to come and sit in the sun and enjoy a game.”

When C.U.B.S. mobilized protests, its members said they would accept temporary lighting as long as the vast majority of games remained in the afternoon. But Dallas Green called them “inflexible.” In 1985, Green declared that the Cubs would be gone from Wrigley “in five years” unless permanent lights were installed. “We’re dead to this neighborhood,” he said then.

(Cincinnati's Crosley Field, May 24, 1935)

(Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, May 24, 1935)

The first Major League regular-season game played at night was on May 24, 1935, in Cincinnati. By 1939, every team except the Cubs had installed permanent lighting, though it wasn’t until 1971 that a World Series game started after sundown—Baltimore at Pittsburgh.

So maybe MLB won out with the entire 2016 Cubs-Cleveland Indians World Series played under the lights. Did you notice, though, that when the Cubs finally threw off the hex of championship disappointment after 108 years, it was morning? 12:57 a.m.

 

The Cubs fan litmus test. And Hillary Clinton.

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hillary

Are you with the Cubs in this partisan fight? If so, should you be required to show your papers? Does it matter whether you were born a Cubs fan—as opposed to being a previously undecided outsider just become drawn to trickle-down excitement?

It’s just baseball. And yet it is abundantly clear that some people out there believe there should be a litmus test. That being a member of the Cubs party now should be restricted to those who can provide indisputable proof. (Photo IDs, maybe?) That they be required to have experienced the Cubs’ overwrought mythology, to know how it feels to be Tantalus or Sisyphus, to have gone through at least a significant part of the team’s 108 years of solitude.

Here’s an example: Hillary Clinton. According to GOP.com, she is “Bandwagon Hillary.” She is “jumping on Chicago’s bandwagon [and] like with every other matter….switches allegiance with sports teams like positions on issues.” GOP.com reminded that, when she was running for the Senate in New York in 2000, she claimed she had “always been a Yankees fan.”

cubs

We probably shouldn’t be allowing World Series loyalties to be leaching into the contentious White House campaign. But it is a given that sports-team passions can get a bit manic around championship time. (If you don’t believe it, listen to sports talk radio.) And just as true is the time-honored tradition of politicians using sports identity to demonstrate their regular-folks bona fides.

Still, I’m going to defend Clinton’s right to declare herself a Cubs fan. First of all, isn’t everybody drawn to the long-suffering Cubs now? Outside of Cleveland Indians territory, anyway? Check out this map, a World Series sendup of the ubiquitous red state/blue state presidential election forecasts, that is circulating on the Internet.

map

Beyond the fairly universal appeal of the Cubs’ Halley’s Comet-like star turn, there is data to support Clinton’s logical and lengthy connection to the team. She was born in Chicago (two years into the Cubs’ 71-year absence from the World Series) and raised in the city’s Park Ridge suburb, less than 10 miles from the Cubs’ historic Wrigley Field home. Her father was a Cubs fan. Her brothers, with whom she watched plenty of Cubs’ games on television, were Cubs fans.

In 1993, when she was First Lady, Clinton was offered membership in the Emil Verban Memorial Society, an exclusive club of Washington-based Cubs fans named for a Cubs infielder from the late 1940s and early 50s who was said to epitomize the team by being “competent but obscure and typifying the team’s work ethic.”

emilshirtemil

That a player such as Verban, who hit .095 in 1950, should be fervently embraced in that forgiving way is yet another indication of Cub allegiance, especially since society members were among the nation’s most successful folks—Ronald Reagan, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will among them.

What some commentators and Republican Party operatives object to, regarding Clinton’s fandom, is that she indeed admitted to rooting for the Yankees in general—and Mickey Mantle in particular—as a child, in part because she admitted that a Cubs fan so often needs the fallback of having a team that wins once in a while.

Among those who have questioned Clinton on the matter is Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet in a recent column, and political commentator Chris Matthews, who had asked when she donned a Yankee cap during her Senate campaign, “Doesn’t she know she looks like a fraud?”

This protestation of multi-team fandom, unreasonable to my mind, recalls the late Bill Searby, one of my first bosses at Newsday in the early 1970s. The way his colleagues told it, Searby had taken advantage of the G.I. Bill to complete his education after his service days, and wound up attending several colleges. As the scores came over the wire on football Saturdays, more than one winner would prompt Searby to exult: “That’s my team!”

“Which one?” his co-workers would snicker. I think they were jealous.