NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF
COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the
Lines
By Two Finger Carney
(carneya6@adelphia.net)
#376 JUNE
25, 2006
COMING
EVENTS:
SABR
National Convention, Seattle, June 29 - July 2
Saturday,
July 1, 2 PM: Book Signing, Elliott Bay Book Co. (Seattle)
Wednesday,
July 26, 7 PM, Cincinnati Reds HOF & Museum
Sunday,
July 30, 6 PM: SABR Regional Meeting, Cooperstown
ALL'S FAIR?
Last issue, I reviewed Game of Shadows
by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. It does not paint a pretty picture of
sports at its top level -- not just baseball, but sports in general.
It was a hard book to review for me, and I
was not satisfied with the result. I
don't think I gave enough credit to the authors for the work they did, putting
this book together. I don't think I gave my readers enough feel for the book
itself. The issues distracted me. The leaked grand jury information, and the
ethics of using it in a book, but also the issue of taking steroids and other
stuff (that's a technical term) to "enhance performance."
Soon after writing that review, I was
distracted again, this time by the ads in my local newspaper. Walgreens had a
sale on Fish Oil Concentrate, SAM-e (does Sosa know?), Glucosamine and
Chondroitin ("builds healthy joints") and CO-Q10. Eckerd's was
hawking their entire selection of "Pharmapure" vitamins & herbal
supplements, and Mason dietary supplements, which include Acidophilus (isn't
that "I Love Acid"?) The paper
carried coupons for a dollar off on any Vaseline Healthy Body Glow product,
Renewal product, or Intensive Care product.
I wondered if any or all of these
mysterious (to me) items were detectable. We assume they are legal, they are
easy to get. TV ads now prod us to ask our doctors if they will presribe stuff
we can't easily get. Better living, through chemistry?
What is my point, except the obvious one --
Americans live in a society where whole industries do well by supplying us with
appearance- and performance-enhancing stuff. Our diets seem to be in special
need of supplements. This is in the air we breathe.
So why is anyone shocked to read about
athletes taking stuff to reduce the pain from their punishing workouts, to help
their million-dollar muscles heal faster (gotta get back on the stage,
that's why we're getting paid), and yes, to give them an edge -- or rather,
to help them keep pace, if they sense they will be in the minority by not
seeking chemical assistance?
All's fair, the saying goes, in love
and war. Professional sports is a kind of war, it is competition without
the bleeding. Violence, but controlled. Conflict, recorded on paper in the
standings. Combat, complete with uniforms and weapons (the bat and ball), but
in the end, entertainment.
Since the beginning, ballplayers have
sought "an edge" in this warfare. Once upon a time, the spitball, shine
ball, emeryball, and more were perfectly legal. Batters countered by driving
nails into their bats, rubbing the surface with bone, hollowing out the wood
and refilling it with rubber balls or cork. Anything goes, as long as
you don't get caught.
As for the athletes themselves, they were
expected to take good care of themselves. Many a career has been
shortened by too much beer or hard liquor or in more recent decades, drugs.
Like Hollywood stars, some athletes have drifted in and out of rehab, either
quietly or with headlines. We stopped being shocked about this long ago. If
they do illegal drugs, they pay the price.
In a memoir about the old Pittsburgh
Pirates he knew, Les Biederman wrote that one pennant was lost, perhaps, when
outfielder Paul Waner, "Big Poison," stopped drinking. Waner had
twelve straight seasons of over .300 on his resume (his lifetime average was a
sparkling .333 in 20 summers), when his team asked him to take the pledge, in
1938. He batted .280 and the Pirates were edged out of the pennant by the Cubs.
The next season, he went back to the bottle and hit .328. Somewhere else I read
that the baseball looked like a grapefruit to Paul Waner, when he had a little
buzz on. Nothing conclusive here, but it seemed that alcohol enhanced this
guy's performance. And it was legal.
So much of baseball is mental -- ask Steve
Blass. That's why superstitions are so rampant and important to ballplayers. I
remember being upset that managers on the opposition could ask for the bat of a
player to be checked for cork -- removed from the game on suspicion.
Disrupting the relationship the player might have had with his Black Betsy.
I always thought that if nothing was found, that manager should be penalized
somehow.
*
* * * *
Game of Shadows is worth reading, if
only to learn the language needed to deal with "the steroid
issue." It is a great primer on all
the choices athletes have today -- and they will have more in the
future. And you meet Victor Conte, and who doubts that there are a lot of folks
like him in this world? What's the problem?
See what my stuff does for these people?
FAIR
AND BALANCED
Now that I've lived six decades and
counting, I am less sure of many things, but more and more convinced about a
few. One of the latter is that giving credit where credit is due, is
difficult. Sometimes it seems that hardly anyone gets the credit they
deserve.
Another growing conviction is that "fair
and balanced" is an ideal to be pursued, but one which is almost
impossible for us humans to achieve. We are all biased, opinionated, and whose
mind is truly wide open? All news
reporting seems slanted, one way or the other, and talk shows on TV, radio, and
the internet usually show their true colors, sooner or later. No one is
absolutely objective, we can only have degrees of subjectivity. Or so it seems.
In Notes #375, I wanted to
"balance" the issue (devoted mostly to Game of Shadows) with
an old essay, "I Am Baseball," which, as I recall, is a tribute to
the game's resiliency. But I'm having trouble locating it -- somehow, it has
escaped my Notes index. Nothing is perfect.
BUT, in searching for it, I came across
three different items from the NOTES Archive, and I'm serving them up
here, while the search goes on for that other essay.
From
the NOTES Archive, #103, May 25, 1995:
DIRTY
LAUNDRY
Anyone
could make superstar
If
that ugly saloon-keeper's kid
Who
winked like a con man
Could
wash the sport's black sox Clean
-- from BAMBINO in Romancing the
Horsehide
I know that my grandfather rooted for the
Pirates of Honus Wagner's day, and that he took his family out to the ballgames
at old Forbes Field in the 1920's. So he
must have survived the scandal that rocked baseball in the wake of the 1919
Series. My father was too young, his
faith was never tested.
I'm waiting to read somewhere soon a
comparison of attendance figures pre-
and post-Black Sox, vs 1994-95. Did that
hardly-original group sin so rock the baseball world that one out of five fans
stayed home? (Probably other figures,
from bookies, would be a better barometer: betting fans found other outlets.)
I have been among those who have made the
comparison between the Black Sox thing and the black-eye Strike of
'94-'95. And I have hoped along with
many other fans that the damage might be offset, interest revived, if Ruthian
heroics started happening. But lately
I've been thinking more about this.
Sure, Babe Ruth was probably more useful than Commissioner Landis for
restoring baseball's image, if not its integrity. But I'm pretty certain that
he didn't do it overnight.
And that's my point here: things take
time. The more damage done, the longer
the repairs take. So, with 1994's stats
still fresh in mind, it is tempting to hope for a 60+ HR season from somebody
in the next few years -- as if that will do it, just like Ruth's 60 made
fans forget 1919 -- I think it will take more. More than Cal eclipsing
Gehrig, too -- durability is something, all right, but most of us get sick or
injured a few times each decade, anyway, so how can we really relate to
Cal? (I once had a streak of 11+ very
healthy years, snapped suddenly by a flu bug -- incredibly, that streak
included most of my high school and college years, and the entire sixties
-- those of you who survived the sixties with me can appreciate this more.)
Every baseball writer still going
these days seems to have a prescription for the game's ills. I think the average fan can spell it out
pretty simply: the game needs leadership, partnership (an end to the war), and
intelligent marketing. Let us kids on the east coast see the end of the World
Series games. (Sacrifice a few
ratings points, for the sake of the fans.)
We don't need more lists of simple ideas like these. We desperately need
to see such simple ideas being taken seriously.
For some years now (not just since last
August 12), baseball has been doing its dirty laundry in the public eye. While this has cost baseball some fans (who
presumably never need to wash their own clothes), I take the soapsuds as a sign
of hope. There is, after all, a lot of
stains on the uniforms (and suits). It
will take time. Don't forget to bathe
before putting on the clean clothes, though, because it's not just an image
problem.
From
the NOTES Archive, #111, September 3, 1995:
BLACK
SOX VS. "THE STRIKE" -- REVISITED
In the August The Diamond Angle,
James Floto details the affect on attendance caused by the 1919 scandal of
Careless Joe and the Gang of 8, concluding that while baseball fans did sour
some in 1921, roughly 75% of the fans who stayed home did it in Chicago. (Or
maybe the Black Sox scandal was not a factor, maybe it was Prohibition --
Chicago streets were not exactly safe in those years. And of course, no beer
sold at the ballparks....)
Whatever the reason, baseball is fortunate
that the national media then, was nothing like today's, in its scope, variety,
and appetite for scandals. The Flow reminds us that many sportswriters were
paid by the ballclubs, so they had every incentive to control the spin, rather
than go for the jugular. Exposing America's heroes was considered "bad form"
rather than a raison d'etre.
Who doubts that if something remotely like
the Black Sox thing happened today, the it would be Simpsoned into a blot on
baseball so large that it the turnstiles would barely click? The Pete Rose case
is the only modern event I can think of that had some potential for that, but
Giamatti managed to keep the Dowd report out of the public eye and the
tabloids.
It occurred to me recently that "the
integrity of the game" is important to baseball not just to retain fan
interest. The games must be played on level fields, without the influence of
gamblers who seek to gain by affecting outcomes -- if not of particular games
(as was the case in the alleged incident involving Cobb and Speaker), then of a
series (like the one in October 1919) -- for the sake of gamblers! In other words, if it is suspected that the
fix is in, then the sport no longer is worth betting on, and a whole segment
of fans is lost. Ironic, that gamblers depend on the "integrity" of
games, more than the casual fans who just want to be entertained!
From
the NOTES Archive, #122, February 3, 1996:
SOUL
MAN
"To
be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make
you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can
fight, and never stop fighting."
-- e.e. cummings
When ML baseball hired its first Commish,
it was a matter of spin control. The Black Sox scandal had rocked the baseball
world -- it was no longer safe to bet on baseball. Fans were fleeing to the
horses, college football, boxing, and somewhere in the distance was the swish
of a basketball net. [Note from 2006: Boxing and horse racing had been
discredited.] Baseball never did have the stage all to itself, but suddenly it
was endangered.
We've discussed here before the things that
got fans back, clicking those turnstiles: the Ruthian Revolution (the dead-ball
czar overthrown), the end of prohibition (I'll drink to that), the civilization
of the game (becoming G-rated, or at least PG, a step up from its rowdy-ball
R-rating {profanity, violence}), the advent of radio games, and yes, the
appearance of integrity, which the scowling face of Judge Landis symbolized. Eight
men out and who's next, fellas? Don't
mess with Kenesaw!
When the Lords of the day granted the
Commish absolute authority to act "in the best interests of
baseball," I don't believe they knew what all the implications were. The
first person to hold the office sets the tone, and Landis was a tough act. It
is fun to imagine how Landis would respond today to the inevitable attacks and
questioning his decisions would receive in the media. I suspect that he'd learn
how to manipulate the media, learn how to smile when he's on camera, maybe get
a haircut.
Had Landis taken better care of himself,
he'd be 130 this year. Would he have been able to prevent Jackie Robinson from
opening the door to integration? No. But
more interesting questions to me are: how would he have dealt with expansion?
With the Designated Hitter rule, originally a 3-year AL experiment that has
spread from the top down to the roots of the game? Obviously, we would have been spared the
Strike of '94, any Commish would have done for that chore. But what about the
Wild Card, and now Interleague Plague?
For better and for worse, baseball's
Commish has guided the game through over seven decades. The position evolved
from spin doctor to Jiminy Cricket, the game's conscience and trustee, who more
and more (as the billions poured in from TV) has had to save baseball from the
Lords. The Commish, it turns out, has the role of defending baseball's
"soul" -- that which makes it baseball, Ray, distinct from
other sports. In marketing terms, the Commish is responsible for making sure
that the uniqueness of the "product" is not compromised by its
packaging, not overpriced, and not diluted into anything less than the best
quality. Not an easy job. It seems to me that the longer we are without a
Commish, the more obvious the need for one becomes. Agree?
With
the SABR Convention kneeling on deck, and Jim Bouton its keynote speaker, one
more dip into the NOTES Archive seems in order. This is from Notes #166, August
1, 1998:
SET
TIME MACHINE FOR 1969
Ball Four has been around a while now,
and my hunch is that most baseball fans have read it. I never did, altho I felt
as if I read it, because over the last 28 years, I've read so much about it,
and so many quotes or stories from it. When I finally got to it, on my
Adirondack vacation, I devoured it in two days (the 20th anniversary edition is
over 450 pages.) It was a quick read,
and a very good one.
The humor of BF holds up well.
Anyone who has worked in an organization with supervisors (coaches, managers),
middle-managers (GMs) and CEO/bosses (owners) can relate to BF as easily
as to a Dilbert cartoon. In Bouton's teammates, we will also see our fellow
coworkers or friends or neighbors -- and a bit of ourselves.
It is hard to believe there was a time when
Mickey Mantle was not as well known to fans for his hard drinking, as well as
his hard hitting. Yet when Bouton wrote about The Mick (and others) as less
than saintly role models, he caught a lot of flak. Bouton's observations of
ballplayers stupid or superstitious, managers authoritarian to a fault, and
owners clueless about how to treat or pay their employees fairly, are now
familiar to us all, and no longer unique.
A review of Ball Four would be less
interesting here, I think, than some reflections from a fan who was also
keeping a journal of sorts back then. I appreciate the difficulty of making
daily notes, of sorting out what is worth recording from what isn't, and of
deciding exactly how honest to be. A journalist is also a writer tempted to
interpret as well as to tell, and his end product will inevitably contain a
self-portrait. When the journal is destined to be a book, a lot of editing is
omitting.
I give BF high marks as a journal,
however. Bouton can see his own faults fine, and can laugh at himself as well
as others, and that is important for credibility. In the 1980 and 1990 updates,
Bouton talks some about his divorce, when he might have left readers with the
picture of himself as a fine husband and father (one son adopted from Korea.)
Those who were upset by how they were
portrayed in BF have mostly themselves to blame -- Bouton's sharpest
lampoons are quotes he could have made up, but likely just wrote down. But
their objections have some validity. If Bouton had brought a videocam into the
dugout and bullpen and locker room, had his teammates and others known they
were "on stage," they certainly would have acted and spoken
differently. Well, some would. I was more bothered by the several times when
Bouton revealed the name of a source of information, after promising not to, as
if it was somehow OK because he was doing it in a book.
While much of BF is timeless, some
of it is pure 1969. The main event that summer was not the Miracle Mets (sorry)
or the moon landing, but the Vietnam War. If Bouton is one of the more enlightened
baseball people, then Vietnam was about a zillion miles from the country of
baseball. The civil rights movement hit closer, there are blacks and Hispanics
on every team by 1969, and Bouton's comparison between the degree of
integration on the expansion Seattle Pilots, and the Houston Astros, makes me
wish Bouton had a chance to visit every clubhouse that season.
My own recollection has the nation more
painfully divided on both the war, and on race -- and blacks very divided on
the latter. It was a tense summer, and the gaps between not only the
generations, but between students and coworkers were very real --I was there --
and this must have been true of ball clubs.
Bouton does record accurately something
that frequently put these gaps in the spotlight -- and that would be the way
that men were judged back then by their hair. The line from the rock-musical Hair!
was, as we used to say, right on: "'Cause I look different, they think I'm
subversive." There was some truth
in that, of course, letting one's hair grow long was a form of protest, and
ballplayers who resisted their managers' hints to visit the barber, were
placing their roster spot at risk. But Bouton is adept at noting the hypocrisy
at work, when players with hot bats or low ERAs are left alone.
All the ingredients for the eventual civil
war between players and owners can be seen in BF. Marvin Miller had not
yet arrived, and not all players were disposed to welcome him or any union. But
the greed and lack of compassion on the part of the owners (this was long
before players could be greedy) made the later conflicts inevitable. In 1969,
players would have been satisfied with decent and fair raises (a few thousand
per year) and less regimentation (curfew checks), and probably the whole Players
Association thing never would have happened if each team had just put a keg in
their clubhouse and kept it flowing.
Ball Four seems like a book that, like
history itself, will not go quietly away. It survives because in the end, Jim
Bouton is a baseball fan. The original book ended this way: "You spend a
good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it
was the other way around all the time."
The Seattle Pilots are an unexceptional team, and while the Astros were
better in 1969, few of the names will be familiar to today's rookie fans -- Joe
Morgan, Larry Dierker -- and Jim Bouton.
You know a book is worth reading, when the
Commish (Bowie Kuhn at the time) asks the author to say it ain't so. It is easy
to see Bud Selig making the same request (unfortunately), but it is too late, Ball
Four is part of the game now. And I think, in the long run, it's for the
better.
MORE
REVIEWS
This
first item appeared last October.
STEFAN
FATSIS, Wall St Journal (online):
"Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's
Cover-up of the 1919 World Series Almost Succeeded," cites documents that
make the behavior of the lords of baseball look even dicier. The revelation
that Messrs. Comiskey and Johnson and others knew of a possible fix before the
World Series but neither tried to stop it nor postpone the games comes from a
1935 article in the Sporting News by a reporter at the center of the scandal,
Hugh Fullerton.
Here's where the story gets really juicy.
Mr. Fullerton wrote that he went to Mr. Comiskey and urged him to take action.
But the White Sox owner told him he already knew about the fix and that Mr.
Johnson wouldn't do anything about it. Mr. Fullerton then went to Mr. Johnson,
who dismissed the information as "Comiskey squealing." Mr. Fullerton's next stop was Barney
Dreyfuss, the influential owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates. "Barney was
enraged that anyone should accuse players of framing a series," he wrote.
"I lost my temper with him and with the entire baseball set-up, calling
them a bunch of whitewashing bastards who were letting a bunch of crooks get
away with it because they were afraid of losing money."
While those conversations occurred in
private, it turns out that public information was available shortly after the World
Series ended -- information upon which baseball's lords could have acted. The
most remarkable appeared in a Chicago gambling newspaper called Collyer's Eye,
issues of which were discovered last year by Black Sox sleuths in a basement of
a library at the University of Illinois. In articles beginning a week after the
final game, Collyer's Eye said the Series had been fixed, correctly named some
of the gamblers who were behind it and correctly named most of the players
later indicted. In other words, Mr. Carney says, "the names were
available. If baseball wanted to investigate, it could have called these
gamblers and players in and found out a whole lot more."
Does this all matter? Major League
Baseball's current leaders have their own set of player-behavior issues for
which they could stand to take more responsibility, and the sport has always
been reluctant to tamper with its historical record. In the Black Sox case,
commissioner after commissioner has refused to act on clemency pleas by
defenders of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Weaver.
So don't expect baseball, or the mainstream
sports media, to set the record straight. Historians will do their part and
hope that public perception someday catches up with the evidence. But myths
don't die easily. As a matter of popular culture, "We want to know, 'Say
it ain't so, Joe,' " says Mr. Klein, the Hugh Fullerton scholar. "We
don't want to know, 'Joe, you poor, stupid sucker. You're taking a bullet for
Charles Comiskey.' "
BILL
MADDEN, NY Daily News (June 25):
A new book that sheds new light on the
plight of "Shoeless Joe" Jackson is worth the commissioner's
attention in what little spare time he finds these days. If he does give it a
read, and he is able to get past the rather scathing indictment of his own
in-house historian, longtime Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman, Selig might
feel compelled to reexamine the lifetime ban (and Hall-of-Fame ineligibility)
imposed on Jackson for his alleged participation in the 1919 World Series fix
by the Chicago White Sox.
It was right around the time Pete Rose
first began petitioning Selig to have his own lifetime ban re-considered that
Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Feller implored the commissioner to give
serious consideration to reinstating Jackson who, they maintained, had done
nothing to throw games in the 1919 Series and had never even been afforded a
hearing from his "executioner," baseball's first commissioner Kenesaw
Mountain Landis.
After reading "Burying The Black Sox -
How Baseball's Cover-up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded" by
freelance baseball researcher Gene Carney, one could easily draw the conclusion
that there is an even bigger injustice than Shoeless Joe being out of the Hall
of Fame and that is the fact that Landis and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey
are in. After listening to Feller's and Williams' plea, Selig dispatched
Holtzman to research the events of the 1919 fix and its aftermath. In his
research, Holtzman came across the 1920 grand jury testimony of Jackson and the
other alleged White Sox conspirators (the testimony mysteriously disappeared at
the time of the trial, leading to charges against all the players being
dismissed) and used Jackson's admission of having received $5,000 from teammate
Lefty Williams as a "confession" of guilt in the fix.
However, as Carney points out in accusing
Holtzman of getting many of his facts wrong and essentially using that one
admission to craft his case against Jackson, there was much more to Shoeless
Joe's testimony. And too many people, Landis especially, chose to ignore it.
Specifically,
Jackson said he was given the money after the World Series and immediately took
it to Comiskey and White Sox general manager Harry Grabiner. According to
Jackson, he was told to keep the money and keep his mouth shut, also saying
that Grabiner later told him that Williams and Eddie Cicotte (the other White
Sox pitcher among the eight players permanently banned by Landis)
"wrongfully used your name."
Jackson testified to this in his subsequent
1924 trial in Milwaukee, in which he sued Comiskey for defrauding him on the
three-year contract he had signed before the 1919 season. He said he had
repeatedly tried to tell Comiskey and Grabiner what he knew about the fix (from
Williams) after the Series, only to be rebuffed. He also maintained at that
trial that he didn't know his name was involved in the fix until Williams gave
him the money.
Until now, about all we've known for sure
about Jackson and the 1919 Series is that he led all hitters with a .375
average and six RBI and committed no errors in the field. Carney notes that
Holtzman maintained Jackson had been "inept in the clutch" in the
first five games and hit .462 in the last three. By that particularly selective
logic, Carney says, Holtzman would make "fixers out of Hall of Famers
Eddie Collins and Edd Roush too."
[Credit
Bill Deane for making that observation first -- GC.]
The
fact is Comiskey clearly knew a lot more about the fix in its aftermath than
Jackson did - and chose to do nothing so as not to jeopardize his team for
1920. And Landis, empowered by the owners to take whatever measures he deemed
necessary to cleanse the game that had become rife with gambling, ignored all
of this in throwing the eight accused (though court-exonerated) White Sox
players out of the game for life in 1921 without so much as a hearing. In his
"eviction edict" Landis stated: "No player who throws a
ballgame, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked ballplayers
and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed and does
not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional
baseball."
According to Carney's research, Jackson
maintained he did none of those things, other than inform his team of money he
was given. So it would seem only right for Selig to appoint a panel of
acknowledged baseball historians to re-examine the facts, accounts and papers
in the Jackson case in order to determine once and for all whether Shoeless
Joe, third-highest hitter of all-time at .356, deserves a lifetime ban or
should be reinstated to the Hall of Fame ballot. It would certainly be a lot more than Landis
did. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and
the new things it uncovered. A valuable and important book for baseball historical
purposes.