Notes #454 — August

                             NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
                                           Observations from Outside the Lines
                                     By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
 

#454                                                                                                                    AUGUST 8, 2008
                                                                      AUGUST
 

            I recently observed to several Met-fan friends that my summer has become even more relaxing lately. The great thing about being a Pirate fan, is that we are spared the stress and worry of being in a pennant race. No need to stay up late for scores, to check in at ESPN hourly, to fret over a magic number . Pirate fans live in a kind of Hawaii … baseball happens, but it is a long way off. We enjoy the sun, the shade, the breeze.
 

            Every season, there are fans for whom baseball fades away by August, as their teams stumble and finally give up hope of winning enough to play on after the season ends. In the case of the Pirates, the white flag seems to have gone up, and another sub-.500 season seems secure. I will survive, I can live on the memories piled up as late as 1992, when the Pirates were winning a lot more than they were losing. But I don’t know about the next generation.
 

            (If I was superstitious — and who isn’t? — I’d be wondering if I am a jinx for the Pirates. I started doing Notes in March 1993, so I’ve never really covered a pennant race here from the inside. The one season that the Pirates flirted with .500, and were actually contending, in a very weak division, I was on a kind of sabbatical from Notes . So everything in Notes dealing with pennant races has been from memory, or from the vantage point of an outsider fan.)
 

            August. The season is over the hump, rolling downhill now, heading for the September homestretch. I’ve had a great summer already, so whatever August yields is bonus. I see maybe one more issue of Notes coming before I take some time off for an Adirondack vacation, away from the internet and e-mail and baseball. Once upon a time, I almost dreaded these August trips north, away from civilization. Because the Pirates were in the chase , and it was hard to get scores and standings, pulling in radio games was a challenge, the TV almost useless, the newspapers never current. It was painfully delicious, of course. Any fan in exile knows that scores earned are twice as nice.
 

            Anyway, I will end this issue with a couple August memories from the Notes archive. Before that, a little obligatory farewell to Yankee Stadium; a note on the new museum in Greenville, SC; a short meditation on the men of baseball’s end game; and a review of a review, sort of. Enjoy.
 

 

A LAST LOOK BACK AT YANKEE STADIUM  
 

            I wrote “House Call” in June 1994, after my first-ever visit to Yankee Stadium, the previous Memorial Day (Monday, May 30). I still recall the shock of the price of a hot dog, but I didn’t write about that at the time. I saw another game at the Stadium in 1994 — my last.
 

            Maybe my favorite Stadium story comes from my late father-in-law, Alfred Washburn. In 1961, he decided that his two pre-teen sons should be baptized into baseball, so he took them to a late-season game in the Bronx, traveling several hours from Gloversville, NY. (For a long time, I believed this was the only major league game that Alf ever saw, but it wasn’t.)  As chance would have it, one of the hometown players homered that day, and the reaction of the fans present perplexed Alf. Do they ALWAYS react that way?  No, only when Maris breaks Ruth’s record.
 

 

HOUSE CALL  (from NOTES #69, June 6, 1994)
 

            “If Yankee Stadium is the House that Ruth Built, then in Cooperstown is the one he furnished.”  I made that observation around 1965, and later worked it into my poem on the Hall of Fame. I’ve since visited the Hall countless times, but — even though I’ve lived in Upstate 20 summers — I had never made the trip down to The Stadium. Until last Memorial Day, that is. It wasn’t a pilgrimage — but it wasn’t just another visit to a ballpark, either.
 
            Growing up in Pittsburgh, Yankee Stadium had the image of Mount Olympus: gods lived there, they wore pin-striped suits and went about winning pennants in a correspondingly businesslike way. They ganged up in Rows on NL champs (like the ’27 Pirates) and murdered them. Today it was Mantle & Maris, but they were just the latest generation of dominators, their line was well-known, traced back through DiMaggio and Dickey to Ruth and Gehrig, and the power of these titans raised up those around them, Meusel and Combs and Lazzeri and Henrich and Crosetti and now Berra and Howard and there was no end in sight.
 

            This mythic view was qualified forever by the 1960 World Series, however, when my Bucs, after being shut out 10-0 by Ford in Game 3 (which followed on the heels of a 16-3 shellacking at Forbes), came back to win Games 4 & 5, by 3-2 and 5-2 scores. Both wins ended with tiny Roy Face on the Yankee Stadium mound, lost in those dark shadows that played havoc with color TVs, snuffing out the Bronx bombs before the fuses could even be lit.
 

            After 1960, The Stadium became again what it was before, the place where half of October’s Games would be played, but it could never again intimidate me; it was safe, there were no gods.
 

            Only in recent summers have I become curious to visit The Stadium, but I’ve always acted too late to book seats on the several bus tours to the Bronx from Utica each season. When I was shut out again this spring — and I called in April , the earliest ever, I phoned Don Drumm, who writes a local column (“The Fan”) and often comments there on his drives south for Yankee games.
 

            By chance, he was planning on a Memorial Day trip, with his wife Heather; there was plenty of room in his Chevy wagon for me and my kids. (My wife Barbara had seen her quota for 1994 already, a game at Camden Yards.)  Thanks to ESPN, I suspect, it was a 4 PM start — perfect. We hit the road about 8:30 AM and were back just after midnight, a holiday spent entirely with the Yankees-White Sox game at its center.
 

            Don had cheered at both the Old and New stadiums many times, and so he proved to be a marvelous guide, which I appreciate when I visit The City, as surely as the city slickers appreciate guides when they prowl the Adirondacks. I was sorry that more of the old wasn’t around, but I was hardly let down by the new.
 

            While I intended to root for the home team, I found myself impressed by the ChiSox, who took the lead off Jim Abbott with two stolen bases by Lance Johnson (following one of his four hits), built it on a 3-run dinger by Darrin Jackson (it carried suspiciously) following a bruising liner off Abbott by Frank Thomas (a terrifying thought, isn’t it?), produced three exciting triples (two by that Lance guy), and impolitely muffled the two most popular Yanks, Mattingly (5 LOB) and O’Neill (who started the day at .456, but 0-fer-4’d.)
 

            The short porch in right was littered with rabbit balls during BP, but during the game, the Bronxians kept falling short: 18 outfield putouts (half by Lance — he was all over.)  Just one keeper there all day (Daryl Boston’s) — Jackson’s was heaved back, and the ball was soon followed by a dozen or two pairs of socks — the giveaway du jour . We sat in the upper deck behind home, by the way, a fine perch. Lots of fouls to our left and right, none our way.
 

            Beats me why only 30,000 showed up to watch two division-leading teams go at it, on a perfect holiday afternoon. But then, we pulled into the Stadium lot right off the highway, we might as well have been on Mars as in the Bronx, for all we saw of the surroundings.
 

            On the island, the fans who did show were well-behaved, and proudly attired: lots of pinstripes, and an amazing variety of Yankee caps were visible everywhere. New Yorkers … inhabitants of the melting pot, where the struggle goes on to lose or find or maintain an identity, and one’s own accent, even as The City’s colors each voice. At the Stadium, it ain’t over till the Thin Man sings, and (win or lose) Sinatra starts belting out New York , New York after the final out. The song says much about the way the city sees itself, I think. Win or lose, New Yorkers , and proud of it. Successful, because to survive is to succeed. Celebrate it, carpe diem, top of the heap, House That Ruth Built.
 

 

SPEAKING OF HOUSES  
 

            Click on www.shoelessjoejacksonmuseum.orgfor a look at some great photos, taken at the grand opening of the SJJ Museum last June. I was not on the program, but I’m in one of the photos. I’m told that it is having a fine rookie season so far.
 

            Again, one of my hopes for the museum is that it becomes a magnet for new information, that will shed new light on the events of Fall 1919 and the months that followed.
 

            Another magnet — for people who can help sort out the new material — would be a SABR Research Committee, focused on the “Black Sox Scandal.”  Look for news about that here in Notes , later this year. (I long ago rejected “the Black Sox Scandal” as an accurate label for the monkey business of 1919 ff … but it is the term that is still best understood by most people.)
 

 

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LEE SMITH?  
 

            When this Mr Smith retired from baseball, he had 478 saves. To put that in perspective, Rollie Fingers and Dennis Eckersley, two pitchers in the Hall of Fame, had 341 and 390 saves, respectively. Rich Gossage, the most recent HOF inductee, had 310. It was the ascent of the Goose that brought the question about Lee Smith to my mind.
 

            Let me say up front that I’m not sure that the “save” is, all by itself, a stat that means so much that the all-time leaders ought to be HOF shoo-ins. We all know that sometimes a pitcher is awarded a save for less-than-stellar work, while a fellow hurler who pitched out of an earlier jam, and delivered the game to the “closer,” gets the recognition of a “Hold” or no recognition at all. On the other hand, it does take some talent to finish a game, to get those last, often elusive, final outs. So if Lee Smith’s stack of 478 saves impresses me, so does his 802 Games Finished.
 

            That’s right — 802. Eck finished 577, Gossage 681, Fingers 709. Mariano Rivera is over 700, but I doubt he’ll pass Lee Smith in this category. John Franco had 774, Trevor Hoffman, still slinging, has over 750, to go with his 548 saves: HOF shoo-in?
 

            Briefly, Smith pitched in 1,022 games (20 more than Goose), had an ERA of 3.03 (Goose was 3.01), and in his 18 seasons, he made the All Star team seven times (Goose was there nine times in 22 summers).  Weighing against Smith: just 1,289 innings pitched (to Goose’s 1,809; 37 games as a starter); and his W-L record was 71-92 (40-51 in his first eight seasons, in a Cub uniform. Rollie Fingers W-L percentage was below .500, too; so was 300-saver Bruce Sutter’s).
 

            When I asked a couple of extremely knowledgeable friends if it was just me who was bothered that Gossage soared into the Hall past Lee Smith, it touched off a lengthy and complicated debate between them (which may still be raging somewhere in cyberspace). It was the kind of debate I’d like to think goes on about every candidate for Cooperstown, but I suspect that it does not.
 

            Since reading Bill James’book ( The Politics of Glory was its original title), I realize that “Whatever Happened to Lee Smith?” is probably not the best question to ask about the Hall, and who gets in and who gets ignored. Sure, there may be others more deserving than Smith. But Smith is who was on my mind, last month, in all the Cooperstown hoopla over Rich Gossage.
 

            Maybe a better question would be this: Would Lee Smith have been on the stage, greeting the Goose, if he had racked up those 478 saves while wearing Yankee pinstripes? In that uniform, he might have tallied a few more in the post-season, too. And been a household name, like, well, Mariano Rivera, who will finish his career (someday) with over 500 saves; he’s around 470 now.
 

            If the answer to that question is painfully obvious, then you might go on to ask if Ken Boyer or Ron Santo would be in the Hall, if they played in New York Yankee uniforms. Or Al Oliver, Vada Pinson, and the list goes on.
 

            Last issue, I mentioned that I didn’t mind at all, the Hall honoring Buck O’Neil with a bronze statue; and I suggested that it be captioned, “The Storyteller.”  Maybe the Hall can commission another statue — it could be Lee Smith (in my mind, he is always on the mound, right arm dangling low, as he squints at his catcher for the sign for what could be the last pitch of the game) … or Ken Boyer … or maybe a six-pack of players who will never have bronze plaques. The caption could be, The Politics of Glory .
 

 

ONE THAT SLIPPED PAST  
 

            Thanx to Bill Simon who recently told me that he had seen a review of Burying the Black Sox by Steve Reiss, in the Journal of Sport History (Summer 2007). And then he sent me a copy. I still collect these things, and try to mention or reprint them here in Notes . So far, I have fifty-some for Burying .
 

            I don’t have the electronic version of the JSH review, or else I’d include it here. So I’ll just comment briefly on the review by Reiss.
 

            A few minor corrections about his intro: I have not written widely about baseball over the past two decades — only since 1989. And I edit NOTES from the Shadows, not NEWS — there is not enough news here to warrant a newsletter.
 

            Regarding Burying the Black Sox : “Carney has produced a volume based on extremely thorough research, revisiting nearly every book or secondary essay written on the subject, and thoroughly immersed himself in primary and secondary sources, including some never before examined.”  Well, to be honest, I never thought much about whether my sources were primary or secondary; I’m sure most were the latter. And I doubt that I used any source that had been never before examined ; I did find some material that had not been seen in a very long time (I’m thinking of Collyer’s Eye , the Milwaukee trial material, some Fullerton columns, and some Ban Johnson papers).
 

            Another correction: I did not write Burying “as a corrective to Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out ” (1963, not ’65), “whose fascinating work lacks sound historical apparatus and tells stories as if he was sitting in the room.”  I simply disregarded Eight Men Out , and only became somewhat familiar with it after I had been “on the B-Sox trail” for many months. Had I read it before my research, I may never have gotten hooked on the topic. That is the tragedy of 8MO , I think (and how many other books that are regarded as history ?) — because Asinof writes so well, and seems so sure that his version is the version of events, readers may accept his answers, without working out the problems for themselves.
 

            Reiss thinks baseball was “the national game” since before the civil war, so he disagrees with my view that it was just becoming the national sport in 1919. (I usually point out here that gambling was the national pastime all along, and still is.) Well, I don’t think baseball was so rooted after WW I — which is why the owners only scheduled 140 games for the summer of 1919. No one knew if fan interest had survived. Turned out it did.
 

            Reiss seems certain that Joe Jackson was born on July 16, 1889. Well, I have biographies that have 1887, and so I thought “around 1888” was the safest to go with. I really didn’t care what year he was born, and if folks writing his biographies disagreed, imagine the time it would take to track it down.
 

            As for the “Roster” that was tacked on in front of the book, that is a roster of players in the B-Sox story (including not just the ballplayers, but the National Commission, the fixers, reporters, judges and lawyers); what would including the full rosters of the Reds and White Sox add?
 

            “The text cries out for an editor. The book is poorly organized.”  Well, I did not exactly cry out to Potomac for an editor, but I was wide open to organizing my material differently. I was keenly aware that there were a number of ways to go — chronologically, for example. Reiss may be right about the organization, but I wish he had said how he might have done it. A problem for any editor — and I switched mid-stream with Potomac, when my first editor left for a new position — was that the events surrounding the fix of the 1919 WS were complicated, and few people had attempted to cover them all. I think Burying was the first book to focus on the cover-up. Hardly any books go into detail about the fixers/gamblers, because so little is known for certain. In the end, I was comfortable with the outline I chose, and most readers and reviewers appear to be, too. The only change Potomac suggested, was to cut in half, the two longest chapters (the one on the undoing of the cover-up, and the one on the players: Chapter 5 became 5/6, chapter 6 became 7/8).
 

            Reiss ends his review this way: “Fans interested in Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox and historians trying to get closer to the truth of the aftermath will find the book informative. Carney reveals what else happened and answers the questions that fascinate any baseball fan wondering about baseball’s original dilemma over guilt or innocence.”  Well, I’m not sure if I answered a lot of questions. And I’m not sure if “dilemma” fits baseball’s predicament in 1919 (or today), it seems that the industry acted predictably, covering up until that strategy was no longer viable, then controlling the spin.
 

            On the whole, I’m glad I decided against writing yet another biography of some Yankee great. The B-Sox are lots more fun.
 

 

From the NOTES ARCHIVE: #111, September 3, 1995
 

 

COOLER NIGHTS
 

            Summer is ending, the school year kneels in the on deck circle, the short-season NY-Penn League starts its playoffs, and MLB anticipates the climax of Cal’s Streak — before focusing on the stretch run (in the NL West, anyway) and the perplexing competition among also-rans for the first wild card spots in modern ML history. That’s the mood of this issue — a mixed roster of essays, articles and poems, a kind of old-fashioned Notes . Baseball ’95 started with “Play ball!” being shouted not by an umpire, but a judge, and there’s been a tinge of gloom at the top all summer, from where I sit — not a fan’s year, although I’m sure the feeling is quite upbeat in Cleveland and Colorado and other oases, where the excitement generated by success on the diamond has lit up the summer.
 

            Despite the mood we get into when MLB ’95 is the topic, baseball has continued to be baseball, providing moments of dazzle in most games … and events so totally unpredictable, that we can only shake our heads in wonder — the near no-hitter by the out of it Pirate’s Paul Wagner, plagued this summer with poor support and an erratic, losing arm, over the wild-card-chasing Rockies, who turn into Murderer’s Row against the Bucs and many other teams.
 

            We love baseball because it is such a slave to the law of averages, and we love it more when that law is shattered.  When the team that has not rallied for a win in their last ups all season, suddenly erupts to salvage one, against a pen that had not leaked one away — until now. When the easy-out infielder churns out a 4-4-4-4 for the boxscore, or the league’s superstar novas into an 0-for-37 slump.
 

            Or when a slugger hits three homers off the same pitcher — twice. Or when an outfielder ends the game with a remarkable catch, lit up by a blast of lightning — twice. Both those events are mentioned later in this issue. The list is endless, like a certain childhood summer … that’s in here, too!
 

THE END OF SUMMER  
 

            What is more melancholy than the last games of summer, which start with the stadium lights on? Fans are now in long pants and carrying jackets, like we did last April. We’ve come full circle, another season winds down. The symmetry reminds me of how the footsteps of grandparents (or greats) slow to match those first footsteps of their toddler grandchildren.
 

            Once upon a time, a summer was one-seventh or one-eighth of all the summers I knew, was so much of all the life I had. Maybe that’s why it seemed endless…. Next summer will be my fiftieth, a much tinier fraction, and yes, they do go faster these days. It seems like I just put the screens in our windows and doors. The chilly air that creeps in at the sixth or seventh innings, reminds me that I’ll soon replace them with the storms. So it goes.
 

            Last spring, the air was cool but crisp with hope. Our team was all potential, anything was possible, we were all good enough to dream of pennants. The last breezes of summer are sober, the season has almost played itself out now, we know where we’ll finish. Out of it .
 

            Any summer must be the best summer of all, for somebody, for fans of the teams that cross the finish line ahead, or for players for whom things all came together. In Utica, we see kids at the threshold. Stars all of their summers up till this one, in amateur leagues or college ball, they have been tested. Some will move up, some will be given another chance (back here again next spring, or elsewhere), while some will end their careers as ballplayers and move on with their lives. Gave it a shot .
 

            The fans and players of any summer make memories, and the best ones ripen in the cool night air, like leaves finding their colors before they fall. Memories in or out of the scorecard, maybe not even connected to what we did or saw between the lines. They will serve to warm us some in the winters of our lives, to help us muddle through till the fields are green again, and our pencils are sharpened, and the jackets we wear in the late innings feel so good, because they are so light , like spring air.
 

 

DOG DAYS  
 

            Thanks to my office calendar, I can report that all of these events happened in August :  an All Star Game (8/3/59), the first radio broadcast (8/5/21, Harold Arlin of KDKA Pittsburgh), the founding of SABR (8/10/71, in Cooperstown’s Natl. BB Library), the death of Ray Chapman (8/16/20), the Eddie Gaedel stunt (8/19/51), the first use of an electronic P.A. system (8/25/29 — the ump was wired!), the first TV broadcast (8/26/39, Red Barber at Ebbets Field on W2XBS), and Hank Sauer hitting three HRs off Curt Simmons (8/28/50) — a feat that Hank Sauer duplicated two summers later off — Curt Simmons.  You could look it up. I looked it up, and found my calendar was wrong, Hank’s second trifecta off Curt, in 1952, came in June, not August. Now I’m suspicious about all those other dates!   Let me know if you spot any errors, please!