Notes #476 — A Convenient Amnesia

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

#476                                                                                                            FEBRUARY 12, 2009
                                         A CONVENIENT AMNESIA
 

            I think we’ve all read or heard some variation of George Santayana’s, “Those who fail to remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”  Santayana, despite that name which will mean delays at the airport check-in, was a born-in-Spain American (1863-1952), who thought and wrote in the wake of the Civil War, a voice for common sense and reason, in society, art and science; I don’t think he ever got to baseball, and that’s baseball’s loss. He was a Bostonian, until he returned to Europe in 1912, with the Sox on top.
 

            Anyway, events of This Week in Baseball reminded me of George’s famous saying. Did Baseball, capital B, learn and remember anything from its cover-up of the strangling presence of gambling, in the first decades of last century — uncovered (but then covered right up again) when the “Black Sox scandal” broke? Apparently, it did not. And so we are “treated” today to stories of juicing from seasons past, with the Magic Number now 104 — that is apparently how many players tested positive in 2003, when there was no penalty for juicing, just the threat of wait’ll next year if you don’t change your evil ways.
 

            On the heels of Alex Rodriguez’ admission that he, too, inhaled, comes the plea of Miguel Tejada, that he failed to give a Committee names. Good grief. I write below about the ghosts of the Black Sox stalking the earth, but Senator McCarthy, too?  I was not surprised by A-Rod’s admission, and cannot be surprised anymore, I think. We have gone through a time when anything goes , because, well, those who might have guarded the game better were not doing their duty. Kinda like the Wall Street thing in that regard. Baseball owners are, after all, CEOs with bottom lines, out to maximize profits, and nothing draws fans like the long ball — baseball learned and remembered that from Babe Ruth. What do you mean, he looks bulked up?  Look at his workout regimen. Don’t ask me what his trainers give him, look at the box score!
 

            Even more disturbing to me, in some ways, is the prosecution of Miguel Tejada. More on that below. In the wake of the Black Sox scandal, some editors called for the government to step in and take over baseball — since the owners had proved incompetent in policing it properly. Baseball’s answer was to hire a federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who continued to work as a judge, by the way, until forced off the bench, to be full-time Commish. Landis was a marvel at image-repair and spin-control, but no one accused him of being extremely fair.  Or consistent.
 

            In his 1966 The Hustler’s Handbook , the late Bill Veeck (with Ed Linn) bemoaned the way the Commissioner’s post had evolved. Baseball had become a giant corporation, run by men in gray suits. “Corporations don’t want to be regulated. They don’t want a commissioner with any powers. They want [Ford] Frick. They like Frick.”
 

There is no reason why the Commissioner himself shouldn’t be a colorful, and, even controversial figure. He should not be a figurehead, he should be a fountainhead — a fountainhead of ideas. He should tour the cities — as Landis did — bringing publicity and the impact of his personality wherever he goes.
 

            Veeck’s other opinions on the Commish are in the “Harry’s Diary” chapter of Handbook , must reading for anyone mildly interested in the Black Sox. And that’s a great context for his views. Can we imagine Bud Selig on tour today? Not any more than we can remember the president before Obama strolling the country. [Note: One more idea — elect a new Commish every four years.] Veeck did not agree with Landis on everything, that is certain, but he liked his color and dynamic personality and his decisiveness.
 

            Yet I cannot imagine even Judge Landis handing the steroid mess any better than his successors. The Commish is, after all, an employee of the owners, the “magnates,” and if they are not bothered by the way things are going, the Commish will not likely make any waves. Even if they would be “in the best interests of baseball.”  So it goes.
 

THE RESURRECTION OF BUCK WEAVER?  
 

            Forget that book title — the Black Sox cannot be buried. Or at least they will not stay buried. And I think that’s a good thing.
 

            The latest B-Soxer to come back to life appears to be Buck Weaver — in the form of Miguel Tejada.
 

            You thought the Swede was a hard guy. How about the FBI? They have charged Tejada — and I understand that he has already pleaded guilty — with lying to Congress. (If I was a political guy, I’d insert here instances of when Congress itself probably lied, without getting penalized.) What did Miguel do, or fail to do?  Apparently he refused to name teammates who were juicing. Put another way, he refused to squeal or rat on his friends. Put yet another way, he is guilty of excessive loyalty, or possibly misguided loyalty. It’s all how you look at it.
 

            I look at it through the lens of the B-Sox scandal.
 

            When I started talking to groups about my B-Sox research, I was surprised at first when I got questions about the steroid mess. After a while, I knew the questions were coming. Because the way baseball dealt with gambling, and the way they dealt with the increasing use of “performance-enhancing substances,” is remarkably similar. They closed their eyes, for as long as that was possible, because it looked like it was good for the game, at least at the box office. Eject gamblers from what today would be luxury boxes? No way. Major league baseball, personified by Bud Selig, stood in the limelight, holding high the bulky arms of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998, relieved that so many fans had forgotten the Strike that Selig presided over a few years before. Selig was there again, congratulating Barry Bonds when he soared past McGwire’s 70 and then Aaron’s 755. Whatever these guys were taking may not have been good for them, but it sure was good for baseball.
 

            That was then. This is now. The first of the Eight Men Out to reappear was Shoeless Joe Jackson, a superstar left fielder with impeccable Cooperstown credentials, ambushed by leaked grand jury testimony, then promptly condemned my the media, and made a kind of poster boy for all the strangling of baseball by gambling, that baseball itself had failed to curb. Jackson took the form of Barry Bonds — substitute steroids for gambling, and you will recognize Jackson at once.
 

            And now Buck Weaver is with us. Like Tejada, Buck Weaver knew what was going on, but failed to turn informant. Never mind that his team already knew – and Buck knew that because his manager had spoken to the team about it. Buck would never give up Kid Gleason, either, but to accuse his teammates when he was not that certain himself about who was in or out of the scheme, or if any teammate was going through with the fix, was unthinkable. As I’ve written before, Buck needed a strong advocate, like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman , to stand up to Baseball. Instead, he was “bunched together” (in Comiskey’s phrase) with seven others, first in the rumors, then in the late September 1920 indictments (yes, Baseball had kept the Fix buried almost a year), then in the 1921 trial, and finally in the banishment by Judge Landis that overturned the verdict of a jury.
 

            My newspaper says Miguel Tejada “unlawfully withheld pertinent information” — and hundreds of players, coaches, trainers, managers, executives and league officials — even the Commish — didn’t?  Landis’ 1921 edict condemned Buck Weaver for associating with gamblers in 1919. Hugh Fullerton, who tried to blow the whistle on the Fix louder than anyone, was among the reporters who noted that if Baseball applied that rule retroactively to all players — and not just Buck Weaver — every team would be gutted, because association with gamblers was commonplace until the B-Sox scandal broke.
 

            Would Buck Weaver today be advised by his lawyers to plead guilty and throw himself at the mercy of the courts, and of MLB? A better question might be, would Buck ever do that? Or would he continue to stand on the principle that teammates do not inform on teammates?  Especially not during witch hunts, and if you think Congress is incapable of that, google Senator Joe McCarthy. Know any Communists, Buck? How about you, Miguel? Anyone in the locker room talking disloyally about their team? Their government?
 

            Maybe other Black Sox players have returned, too. Swede Risberg, in the form of Jose Canseco?  Risberg reacted to the tarnishing of Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, at the end of 1926, by calling to public attention, and Judge Landis’, a little deal in 1917 that involved many players on the Detroit and Chicago teams. In other words, why single out a few high-profile players, when there are teams — no, make that whole leagues — you might want to check out. Chick Gandil supported Risberg, as others have suggested that Canseco’s grim picture of widespread juicing is not that far off the mark. So maybe Chick is back with us, too.
 

            What about A-Rod?  Maybe he is Eddie Cicotte reincarnate, a superstar who admitted that he did wrong, but moved on. Cicotte’s confession effectively ended the cover-up of the Fix. Eddie said he took a $10,000 bribe, and hit the first batter he faced in the 1919 Series — but played to win after that. That is not exactly the way it went down in the press (the media of that era), but that was Eddie’s story, told after he won over twenty games again, in the 1920 season. Alex Rodriguez, ‘fessing up to juicing in his Texas years, might be a little Cicottish, but I suspect that he will be treated a bit differently.
 

            Of course he will, and let’s be clear about one thing here: taking bribes to play baseball to lose , is a whole lot different than taking substances, legal or not, in order to become a stronger player, to helping one’s team to win more games.
 

            Cases can be made that whatever else they did, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver said that they played the 1919 Series to win. (Leaked statements suggesting that Jackson let up or struck out in the clutch, turned out to be absent from his testimony.) But Jackson took $5,000 (he said he showed it to his team right after the Series and was told to keep it); and Buck Weaver did sit in on a meeting or two where the Fix was discussed. Making both of them eternally controversial.
 

            Is that the ultimate fate of Barry Bonds, Tejada, Roger Clemens, and others?  To become, like Pete Rose, logs on the hot stove fire, to be debated forever, like Ruth’s Called Shot?  To get more attention by being outside the Baseball Hall of Fame?
 

            I hope not. What has happened in “the steroid era” — and do we know for sure it has ended? — has changed baseball. But baseball has always changed, despite that sermon by James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams . Sluggers of the deadball era, like Gavvy Cravath or Home Run Baker, had every right to complain when a livelier ball increased home run production in the 1920s. MLB lowered the pitching mound five inches when hurlers got the upper hand in 1968. If the distance between bases someday shrinks by two feet, Rickey Henderson will have a right to object, as his stolen-base marks fall. Baseball will change, Ray. Sorry.
 

            What just might help baseball the most, would be Bud Selig coming clean about what Baseball knew, and when they knew it. To continue to focus on the players — the lowest level of employees — without any accounting for management, is absurd. Mr Selig might then resign, since we cannot vote him out, and call on Baseball to move ahead, in a true bipartisan partnership, players and owners. It’s what the game needs now.
 

FANTASY ISLAND REVISITED  
 

            Last issue ( Notes #475 ), I described an innovation that could make the Baseball Hall of Fame bustle with fans — and former ballplayers — all year round. In a conversation with a fellow fan about my ideas, I came up with a few more. I wrote:
 

For example, during New York Yankee Week , all living former (and current) Yankees will be invited to visit Cooperstown. Players will be asked to participate on panels, scattered at various times throughout each week, at the Hall, or if space is an issue, at the local high school auditorium. For the original franchises with long histories, like the Yankees, the panels will feature different eras or decades. All are open to fans who are visiting the Hall that day, and fans will be encouraged to ask questions and share their memories.
 

            What I want to add is this. The panels will be televised to various places, theaters and auditoriums throughout the country, especially (in the example above) in New York — or especially in Boston, during Red Sox Week , etc. Videoconferencing is easy these days, so fans from all over the country could participate , asking questions or adding stories. Needless to say, these sessions could also be on the internet, one of the ESPN cable channels, and, well, all kinds of places.
 

            If you missed one — you can but the DVD. Maybe your library will stock them all. Maybe these things will cause libraries to be built. Certainly, the sale of the live sessions and the recordings will make all of the ideas of Reunion Weeksdo-able, that is, affordable, and probably profitable.
 

            So profitablethat the holdings of the Hall of Fame’s library will be digitized, so fans can look up on line a gazillion more things about players past and present.
 

DAYS OF OUR LIVES  
 

            On January 30, my desk calendar informed me that Mike Marshall holds the record for most appearances in a season in both leagues — 106 in 1974 wearing Dodger blue, and in 1979 he pitched in 90 games as a Twin. Or maybe he is a twin, identical, or a triplet, and those seasons were really a con job? Anyway, his record gets you thinking about other records set in two leagues … or maybe more, counting the old Federal League and the major leagues before 1900.
 

            With those two Iron Man seasons, you might expect Marshall to be up at the top of the all-time games list. But he’s not, he was #17 in 1990 (when my Big Mac was published), and retired, so he may be lower today. Game appearances is not something a player can control, of course, he must be called in by his manager, he can’t just take the mound himself because he’s feeling good. And that raises a question that some computer (human or hardware), somewhere, might be able to answer: which manager made the most trips to the mound, in his term as skipper?  We’ll count only those when he made a pitching change.
 

            February 3, I was served up a thought-provoking multiple-choice question: How many first basemen have hit 500 home runs?  The choices: 8, 9, 4 or 6.
 

            This is one where you can argue with your calendar, over the definition of first baseman. For example, although Ernie Banks played more games at first than at shortstop (I knew that), it was pretty close, and his big HR seasons came when he played SS. And some of the guys they counted hit a lot as DH. Anyway, the answer they wanted was Eight: McGwire, Killebrew (who played a lot of 3B), Palmiero, Foxx, McCovey, Frank Thomas, Banks, and Eddie Murray.
 

            The surprise on the list, for me, was Rafael Palmiero. I just don’t think of him as a 500 Club guy, any more than I think of Brady Anderson as a 50-HR guy. But Raffy hit 569.
 

            On the 6th, there was a tale about Billy Martin complaining that a Seattle batter was hitting outside the (batter’s) box, and he was right, manager Maury Wills had instructed the Seattle groundskeeper to extend the box an extra foot, to 7′ long. That reminded me of how Roberto Clemente would “erase” the back of the box in his early at bats, so it would be invisible eventually, permitting him an extra inch or so late in the game.
 

            On the weekend of February 7-8, I was asked which manager had the best World Series record — Mack, Stengel, Huggins or McCarthy. Massa Joe — won 30, lost 13 games with the Yanks and the Cubs, winning 7 of 9 Series. How come he never comes up when that “ex-Cub factor” is discussed?
 

            On the 9th, Rule 4.03c came up — permitting strange shifts in the field; only the pitcher and catcher are in fixed positions, the other seven only need to be in fair territory. So when will some manager dress his infielders in armor (under their unis) and station them just out of range from the batter’s swing, a kind of wall against ANY sort of hit? Anywhere in fair territory, says 4.03c.
 

            I finally caught my calendar in error, on February 12. “Did I know,” it asked, “that Yogi Berra played for ten world championship teams, more than any other player in history?”  But among the ten listed was the Yankees of 1960 . Not so fast, Yogi.
It is true that Yogi’s WS stats look like a career for many other players — 259 AB, 71 H, and so on, in 14 Octobers. And among those 14 Series were just four losers: 1955, 1957, 1960 , and 1963. My calendar missed 1961.  
 

A BASEBALL MEMOIR?  
 

            I get asked this a lot, what’s my favorite baseball book?  And I usually mention The Brothers K by David James Duncan, always adding, “but it’s not really a baseball book” — it’s just a terrific novel in which baseball plays a role.
 

            The Crowd Sounds Happy by Nicholas Dawidoff (Pantheon, 2008), the author of The Catcher Was a Spy (on Moe Berg), is not really a baseball book, either, yet I unhesitatingly recommend it to baseball readers, especially Red Sox fans.
 

            Crowd is a memoir of Dawidoff, most of it taking place before he enters high school, and very little after he graduates. It is a terrific read — his childhood recollections are just dazzling in their detail and emotion. The subtitle, “A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball,” fits, but not in the way you might expect. Dawidoff’s family is broken, he lives in New Haven with his mother, a teacher, and his two-years-younger sister; but he spends time with his aunt, uncle, and cousins, his grandparents on the holidays, and once every month or so, with his father in New York City. The madness is his father’s, and this book makes you wonder if things might have turned out much differently if his mental illness was treated today, instead of in the 1960s and 70s and 80s.
 

            There is a lot of baseball in the book, yet not so much that I cannot suggest it to my wife. I think she’ll be able to skim through the “pure baseball” sections, which are few and short, and may even grasp better than me, the role baseball finally plays in Dawidoff’s coming-of-age.
 

            The book burrows deep into the psyche of the Red Sox fan, and it probably helps the reader if he knows some Sox fans, and has talked some baseball with them, before 2004. The Sox victory in 2004 inspires the epilogue, “Listening to a Ballgame, I Hear Life,” and at the end, I wondered if that shift in October 2004, when the Red Sox came back from three games down to the Yankees, and surged to a world championship — if that watershed event might even have been the catalyst for the book.
 

            If that was the case, I’m thankful that it did. Because his memories of childhood are rich, and even though Dawidoff is nearly a generation younger than me, those recollections, painted so delicately and examined so thoughtfully, will inevitably make readers look back themselves and wonder if they could ever touch the child within with such skill and grace. The adjectives on the book jacket all seem to be deserved: “haunting, painful and gleaming as a sharp knife, tender, wincing, a father-son story like no other, an uncommonly frank self-portrait.”  Or as James Joyce might put it, a portrait of the author as a young fan.
 

ANATOMY POSTPONED  
 

            Some months ago, I received a copy of Anatomy of Baseball , edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner, with a foreword by Yogi Berra, because of all those World Series appearances, I guess. Anatomy was released last spring by Southern Methodist University Press.  It’s more anthology than anatomy (thank goodness), and I don’t know why it is taking me so long to muddle through. I think I got off on the wrong spike, or something.
 

            Kevin Baker’s “At the Park” bats leadoff, and that seemed to be a problem, for readers whose baseball is not NY-centric. For the record, Babe Ruth was not handed over to the Jesuits — if he had, he may never have played baseball (but been a helluva football player, maybe). But Willie Mays is “the all-time best”  — now I like Willie a lot, but the , instead of my or one of the ? Anyway, this skimming thru history was just too thin, unsatisfying.
 

            Batting second, Stefan Fatsis, and a nearly twenty-page essay (biography) on his glove. I’ve met Stefan and like his stuff, but he’s not Roger Angell (he’s in the book, too), and when he tries to be, he falls short, as I often do myself. This mix of facts and anecdotes reminded me that I never got THAT attached to my various gloves or mitts.
 

            Next, Susan Perabo’s “My Brilliant Career,” showing a rich fantasy life but a superficial treatment of the issues involving women in baseball. Then, cleanup, George Plimpton’s “Field of Dreams,” stereotypes galore about playing right field, all as if Roberto Clemente had never shown how exciting RF can be played.
 

            Michael Shapiro’s essay on The Southworths followed, and was memorable, a father-son baseball story that rings true; good wood. But then I found myself skimming, looking forward to Roger Angell as the closer, only to find an essay “On the Ball” that was fun reading in 1976, but something fresh for this book might have been better. I don’t know.
 

            This is one of those books, I think, where the mood of the reader determines all. Twenty years ago, or even ten, I think I’d have enjoyed this much more. But these days, it takes more to get my attention, or rather, my praise. I’m over-exposed, no doubt about that. Maybe baseball books never get old — as Yogi put it in his foreword — but this one was not as young as I like.