Platform for My Candidacy for Baseball Commissioner: Bullpen Carts, 'Staches, and Shorts

Via my friend Miles, these two lists from Sports Illustrated: 25 Things We Miss in Baseball and 10 Things We Don't Miss in Baseball.

About the things we miss list: Absolutely yes to bringing back the golf cart for relief pitchers. I actually just mentioned this to a friend the other day before seeing the list. Bring back the bullpen cart! (For a history of this phenomenon, read this.)

I give other enthusiastic thumbs up to more organ music and less piped-in Limp Bizkit (good luck), World Series day games, and quality mustaches. (Corresponding to the meathead music in stadiums now is the meathead facial hair that many players sport.)

Miles points out that two of the items on the otherwise solid "good riddance" list would actually be fun to have back -- at least for a week or two. First, players smoking in the dugouts. Wow. I forgot this ever existed, but it wasn't even that long ago, based on this photo:


That's Dave Parker in the front. Not sure who the dude behind him is, but it looks like he might be smoking one of those funny cigarettes.

Second, ugly uniforms. Yes, overall it's good for the national psyche that these were thrown in the dust bin (especially that time the White Sox wore shorts), but come on, for a week or two, these would be fun to have back. Enjoy this gallery of hideousness from my childhood:

The Catch

Even non-sports fans among you have probably seen this, but it's too good not to post. In the history of Major League Baseball, there have been only 18 perfect games, in which the pitcher retires 27 hitters in a row. Three up, three down every inning -- no hits, no walks, no errors. I don't know exactly how many baseball games have been played since 1880, but the general answer is tons. So something that's happened only 18 times in that span is pretty special.

Yesterday, Mark Buehrle of the White Sox became the 18th to do it. And in great baseball fashion, the real story might be a 31-year-old journeyman outfielder named Dewayne Wise, who has a .211 lifetime batting average in less than 600 career at-bats in the big leagues. But Wise will rightfully be remembered for a long, long time for the catch he made in the ninth inning to preserve the perfect game. The clip below shows the entire last inning. Watch it for Wise's catch, off the first batter, at the very least. Unbelievable. Thanks to Buehrle's pace, the whole clip isn't very long. Anyone who thinks baseball drags too much must love Buehrle, who gets the ball, pitches, gets the ball, pitches, gets the ball, pitches. I heard on the radio yesterday that his total time on the mound for the game was 32 minutes. (More after the clip.)



The most famous non-perfect game in baseball history belongs to Harvey Haddix. In 1959, pitching for the Pirates, Haddix took a perfect game against the Braves into the 13th inning (!) before losing. The Baseball Project, a rock group that includes Peter Buck of R.E.M., have a funny song named after Haddix, which argues that his effort should be considered an official perfect game. (I disagree.) You can hear the song on the band's MySpace page. It's the second one listed on the player at right, so you have to click on it. Also, a rapper seems to have embedded his own clip to automatically play in the comments below, so you'll have to pause that before listening to "Harvey Haddix." Complicated enough?

Diamond-Inspired Design

Thanks to my friend Miles, I discovered Flip Flop Fly Ball, a site that combines "a love of baseball plus a love of infographics." Two examples of the beautiful work there below. Click to enlarge:

A-Nough Already

Alex Rodriguez is the apotheosis of athletes as P.R. outlets. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy so much as a non-guy, a walking press release. With one major, tragic difference: press releases don’t have nerves. Rodriguez is like early-’70s Woody Allen trapped in the body of a world-class athlete.

As anyone who was reading this blog way back in March 2007 knows, I take the steroids issue seriously. But I’m having a really hard time getting worked up about this story. Of course, the New York press, whose steno pads and radio booths are always set to Stun, have no such problem.

The New York Times wrote: "the fact that (Rodriguez) is now admitting he took performance-enhancing substances for several seasons will damage his image and his legacy as a player."

True. But when do the era and the sport get equally damaged? Hundreds of players took these drugs. It isn’t like only the three best players in the game took them and that fully explains their dominance. The sport did an awful job of policing itself. And the players’ union, which has a record of successful bullying that makes the UAW look like the Washington Generals, continues to ignore the minority of players who wisely want to open up the books on cheaters.

But to keep acting shocked when it's discovered that players used in the past is ridiculous. Shock? The Mark McGwire scandal broke in 1998.

Besides, what exactly do steroids do? Hitting home runs takes strength, but in order to utilize that strength, you have to do a lot of complicated things right before the bat even hits the ball. I’m not defending Bonds, or any steroid users, but if just pumping yourself up with steroids was what it took to win seven MVP awards in baseball, we might see people like this winning them. (Apologies to the woman in that photo, who I’m not accusing of using. The only thing that would lead me to suspect she does is that she looks like the offspring of this and this.)

Hank Aaron himself, being a bit too gracious, still makes the point:

I don’t know if Barry would have hit as many home runs or hit them as far — if that’s the case that he did use steroids — but I still don’t think it has anything to do with him having the kind of baseball career that he had. . . . He could have had an excellent career, regardless of what he did. So it would be something that I don’t think the commissioner would like to get involved in, really.

It’s something the fans like to get involved in, and have. If the sport won’t punish its cheaters, the fans will. (Has a great player ever been missed in his sport less than Bonds was last year?)

After the strike and the lost World Series of 1994, baseball was widely believed to have tampered with its balls (er...), making it easier to hit home runs. And stadiums got smaller over the past two decades. On the other hand, I’m sure many of the players on steroids were pitchers (hi, Roger), making it, presumably, correspondingly more difficult to hit home runs off of them. In short, when you add up all the variables it’s hardly clear what exact impact steroids have had on the game. And when steroids of a different kind are routinely used to help players get over injuries, etc., the picture becomes even more muddled. What is clear is that using certain drugs is cheating, and that Major League Baseball -- led by its uber-schmucks, Bud Selig and Donald Fehr -- has no idea how to crack down with any efficiency, effectiveness, or guts.

Given the sport’s history -- with its earlier institutionalized racism, its various recreational drugs, and the pitchers (some of them in the Hall of Fame) who brag about having scuffed the ball in all kinds of innovative ways -- it’s not like the steroid scandal has to be a uniquely terrible chapter. But that’s only if it’s contained. If baseball would stop protecting its cheaters, and implement a strong, sensible testing policy, maybe we could move past this nonsense.

Hall Monitor

While I'm thinking about baseball, please allow me two more thoughts on this year's Hall of Fame voting:

1. Two people voted for Jay Bell, and these people should have their voting rights rescinded immediately. Yes, someone also voted for Jesse Orosco, but I can give that person a pass -- Orosco was involved in a few memorable moments, and he managed to pitch until he was 237 years old. But Jay Bell?

2. Players receiving less than 5% of the vote aren’t eligible to be considered again, and that’s the fate of pitcher David Cone. This surprises me. I’m not saying Cone is a Hall of Famer, but the way this silly system works, there’s a lesser honor in just hanging around for a few ballots. Cone's 2,668 strikeouts are good for 22nd all-time. He won a Cy Young Award, and finished in the top five in voting three other times. In League Championship Series, he was 5-1; in World Series, he was 5-0 with a 2.12. ERA. He pitched a perfect game, which has only happened 17 times in Major League history. As Wikipedia helpfully points out, “more people have orbited the moon than have pitched a Major League Baseball perfect game.” Granted, one of those perfect games was pitched by Len Barker, who belongs in the HOF as much as I do. But Cone was a big-game pitcher, and I think he deserves, at least, to linger.

The Inimitable Rickey

Halls of Fame are inherently ridiculous. The more heated the debate about a certain player’s credentials, the more meaningless it is. The whole point is to enshrine greatness, and if we have to spend 10 years arguing about whether or not you were great, you probably weren’t.

Rickey Henderson was great. He will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame later this year. His combination of power and speed changed the way the game was played. Well, that might be too grand. But it certainly changed the way the games in which he participated were played. He’s the all-time leader in stolen bases, and his 1,406 swipes is currently the record in baseball hardest to imagine being approached, much less surpassed. The last time he led the league in the category he was pushing 40 years old.

His arrogance and difficult personality are as legendary as his talent. Roger Angell, who’s seen his share of baseball, recently wrote about Henderson on one of The New Yorker’s blogs:

Everything about him made you wince and gasp at the same time. How does a major-league ballplayer, for instance, end up playing for nine different teams, while also rejoining his first team, the Oakland Athletics, four times? Why would a major-league outfielder insist on grabbing oncoming flyballs with an angry-looking one-handed slicing motion, as if they were, well, horseflies? . . . It was all on purpose, of course. Rickey’s plan, from the first day, was to get into the minds of the other team’s pitcher and the other team’s manager and the other team’s infielders, and their fans, too, and get them thinking about Rickey instead of the business at hand. . . . This is still happening. Twenty-eight baseball writers voting in this year’s Hall of Fame election failed to put Rickey Henderson’s name in any of the ten available slots on their ballots. Thinking about Rickey again, they’d lost their minds.

Henderson is also -- and this counts in baseball maybe more than any other walk of life -- a character for the ages. This site lists 25 memorable non-playing moments from his career. It’s just a start, but a good one. It includes his infamous habit of referring to himself in the third person:

This wasn’t too long ago, I think it was the year he ended up playing with the Red Sox. Anyway, he called San Diego GM Kevin Towers and left the following message: “This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey. Rickey wants to play baseball.”

His conversations with himself:

This one happened in Seattle. Rickey struck out and as the next batter was walking past him, he heard Henderson say, “Don’t worry, Rickey, you’re still the best.”

And his sense of humor (expressed, of course, in tandem with his arrogance):

During a contract holdout with Oakland in the early 1990s, Henderson said, “If they want to pay me like Mike Gallego, I’ll play like Gallego.”

Henderson is a world-class flake, no doubt, but I’ve always liked him. Among other things, he had a terribly hard time leaving the game, and I always find that poignant, especially when the game defines someone to themselves as much as it seemed to define Rickey. Along those lines, I highly recommend this New Yorker profile from three years ago, which followed Henderson during his time as a San Diego Surf Dawg, when, at 46, he was playing in the minor league for the minor leagues, hoping for one last shot at the bigs. It includes this detail, which immediately brought back a crystal-clear image of how he plied his craft:

He said that the final touch was the slide. Before Henderson, the great base stealers typically went feet first. Henderson decided that it would be faster—not to mention more daring and stylish—to go in head first, the way Pete Rose, who was never a major base stealer, occasionally did. Yet each time Henderson tried the head-first slide he would bounce violently, brutally pounding his body. Then, one day, while he was flying to a game, he noticed that the pilot landed the plane in turbulence without a single bump. Henderson recalled, “I asked the pilot, I said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said the key is coming in low to the ground, rather than dropping suddenly. I was, like, ‘Dang. That’s it!’ ” After that, Henderson said, he lowered his body gradually to the ground, like an airplane.

(Via Miles)