BrokenCowboy: Sports Views with a West Coast Bias

An Excerpt from The Greatest Game by Richard Bradley

What follows is an excerpt from Richard Bradley's recent book, The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78. Enjoy...

It's going to be Yaz, Goose Gossage thought. In the bottom of the ninth, it's going to be me against Yaz.

The relief pitcher was back in his hotel room after drinking beers with his teammates at Daisy Buchanan's on Newbury Street. The Yankees hung out there when they came to Boston to play the Red Sox. Thurman Munson, Lou Piniella, Sparky Lyle, Reggie Jackson, Bucky Dent -- it felt like the whole team was out drinking. The 1978 Yankees were a tough crew. They liked to party, razz one another, throw back a few -- even if they were playing the biggest game of their lives the next afternoon, which they were. It was better than sitting around at your hotel. Thinking. Getting nervous. Getting tense. You didn't want that much time to think.

But Gossage couldn't shut out thoughts of the next day. After he and his teammates drifted off to their rooms for the night, he tried to sleep, and that's when the game bored into his head and started to buzz around inside his skull. The Yankees versus the Red Sox in a one-game playoff to determine the winner of the American League East Division. The two teams with the best records in either league, and those records happened to be the same -- 99 wins and 63 losses. After 162 games, the regular season had ended in a tie. Baseball hadn't seen such an outcome for thirty years, since 1948, when the Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians took part in the first such playoff. And for almost thirty years after 1978, the sport would not see it again.

A couple of weeks before the last day of the season, when the Red Sox trailed the Yankees in the standings by two games, officials from the two teams had flipped a coin to see, in the event that there were a one-game playoff, which team would be the host. The Red Sox won the toss but didn't expect anything to come of it. Since late July the Yankees had been winning nearly three of every four games they played, and even the Red Sox players doubted that they would catch them. They were wrong. The Sox won 11 of their last 12, including their last seven straight, to stay within one of the Yankees. Then, on October 1, both teams had a game against considerably weaker opponents -- the Yankees against the mediocre Cleveland Indians, the Red Sox against the hapless Toronto Blue Jays. Much to the surprise of both the Red Sox and the Yankees, the Yankees lost. The Red Sox, however, did not.

As a result, baseball's two best teams would be facing each other in a 163rd game. The winner would take on the Kansas City Royals in the league championship series, the prelude to the World Series, but both teams were confident that whoever won this game was the best team in baseball. This game, they felt, was like an entire World Series compressed into one afternoon at Fenway Park. And that was why Richard Michael Gossage, best known as "Goose," had a feeling that, come the ninth inning, he would be on the mound. Closing out games was his specialty.

It's going to be Gator for as hard as he can go for as long as he can can go, Gossage thought. And then...

"Gator" was Ron Guidry, the team's soft-spoken, left-handed ace, who in his second full season had compiled an astonishing record of 24-3, the best in the majors and one of the best in baseball history. Game after game that 1978 season, Guidry had been almost unhittable. He threw a rising fastball in the mid-nineties, setting up a wicked slider that darted in on right-handed hitters. Guidry disguised the pitch somehow; batters couldn't see the spin on it. The slider looked like a straight-up fastball, but then, just as a batter started his swing...it made hitters look silly.

Guidry, however, had pitched just three days before, one day less than his usual rest between starts, and Gossage, the big, strong relief pitcher, suspected that Guidry wouldn't have his best stuff.

Gator for as long as he can go, and then it's going to be me. Against Yaz.

That night, Carl Yastrzemski, successor to the great Ted Williams and Red Sox star since 1961, lay in bed and thought about the game the next day. He tried to picture in his head the pitchers he would be facing -- Guidry and Gossage. He'd faced them plenty of times before. What did they like to throw? What did they like to throw against him? What did they like to throw against him at Fenway? That was what Yastrzemski did before games. He was always thinking, always preparing, so deep inside his head that some of his teammates felt like they barely knew him.

Carl Yastrzemski had turned thirty-nine years old that season. He was well past his prime, eleven years older than he had been in the miracle season of 1967, when an unheralded Red Sox team came from nowhere to win the pennant. Yaz won the Triple Crown that year, leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs driven in. No player in either league has done so since. But now, after seventeen seasons in the majors, Yaz's body was starting to break down. His back hurt him constantly; one of his vertebrae was digging into the surrounding tissue. Since August he had worn a steel back brace whenever he played. His wrists ached from an awkward check swing early in the season. Before each game, Yaz had them wrapped so heavily he looked like a burn victim. He couldn't run with his former daring, and more and more he played first base instead of his usual position in left field in the shadow of the thirty-seven-feet-high left-field wall, Fenway's famed Green Monster. First base was easier on the body -- less running.

None of that, though, would matter in this game. As Gossage knew, Yastrzemski was the last man you'd want coming to the plate with the game on the line. He was unflappable, and he performed brilliantly under pressure. On that last day of the '67 season, when the Sox had to beat the Minnesota Twins to win the division, he went 3-4 with three runs batted in. Yaz was just tough. Midway through the season, the doctors wanted to hospitalize him so his back would heal. Yaz walked out on them. Blocks away from the hospital, he came across a construction site and picked up a shovel, the closest thing to a bat he'd seen in days. He picked it up and started to swing. If his back could handle the shovel...

When he was a kid, the son of a Long Island potato farmer, Yastrzemski had done much the same. In the summers, he'd toss hundred-pound bags of potatoes onto a tractor. On winter nights, bundled up against the cold, he'd trudge up a long hill to the family garage and swing a lead bat for hours, hundreds of times, peeling off the layers of coats and sweaters as he warmed up. Night after night, Yastrzemski went to that garage to practice his swing and build his strength. Twenty years later his swing was still powerful, just less frequent. Yaz had always been mainly a fastball hitter. Now, in the twilight years of his career, fastballs were about the only pitch he'd swing at. Breaking balls, curves, changeups -- unless he guessed fastball, and guessed wrong, Yaz would stand and watch them go. And if Gossage and Yastrzemski did face each other, the two men's individual strengths would make the confrontation particularly compelling: a fastball hitter against a fastball pitcher. For Gossage was even faster than Guidry -- over short stretches, anyway -- and maybe the fastest in the game. So against Gossage, Yaz would get his chances, and that was as it should be. You didn't want to come at a legend throwing junk. Gossage would match his strength against Yastrzemski's.

The two men tried to sleep, but couldn't, and lay in their beds wondering. What would the next day be like? Surely there would be two on, two out. Bottom of the ninth, the season on the line. Maybe the greatest chapter in the greatest rivalry in baseball and beyond. Was there a more intense, more passionate, more historic rivalry in all of sports? Going back to the turn of the twentieth century, the competition between the Red Sox and the Yankees wasn't just about two teams, but also about two cities, two regions, two cultures, two different ways of looking at the world. Whether you rooted for the Yankees or the Red Sox had something to do with your outlook on life, your reverence for tradition versus your tolerance for change -- even, perhaps, how you saw the United States itself. There weren't many rivalries in sports you could say that about.

Fate, destiny, logic, whatever you wanted to call it -- that was how the two teams had wound up here. The Sox and the Yankees had battled for six months now. Back in April, they'd started from two very different places. The Yankees had won the World Series in 1977, but even in spring training they seemed weary of the infighting that had plagued them the prior season, when manager Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson feuded and fought for months, and owner George Steinbrenner played the team like a puppeteer. Steinbrenner was "the kind of owner," right fielder Lou Piniella said in April 1978, "that likes a 163-game lead with 162 games left." Now, even the off-season was exhausting. "This club can't take it for another year," Piniella said.

The Red Sox, on the other hand, were optimistic, and with good reason. Defense? Player for player, theirs was better than the Yankees', and the Yankees themselves would probably have admitted that. Offense? In 1977, their third baseman, Butch Hobson, had 30 home runs and 112 runs batted in, and he was the last batter in the Red Sox lineup. Ahead of him came Yaz, of course, and catcher Carlton Fisk, former MVP Fred Lynn, the powerful George "Boomer" Scott, and the slugger Jim Rice, who would go on to have the finest offensive season in baseball in decades. The 1978 Red Sox might have had the strongest-hitting lineup in the team's storied history. They even had some speed, a Red Sox rarity, to go with the power. In the off-season, they had acquired second baseman Jerry Remy from the California Angels; Remy had stolen 41 bases for the Angels.

Pitching had been the club's weakness in 1977, when not a single Red Sox pitcher had won more than twelve games. But in the off-season the team had traded for the young and promising Dennis Eckersley and signed Mike Torrez, a right-hander who'd won 17 games for the Yankees the year before, with two more victories in the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Torrez had been with four teams before joining the Yankees, but from 1974 to 1977, even as he was traded from coast to coast, he'd won 68 games. After the advent of free agency in 1975, Torrez had taken charge of his own future. His father had been a Mexican immigrant who worked on the railroad for a living; Torrez wanted a better life. He played out his contract with the Yankees and signed a seven-year deal with their enemies in Boston for a million dollars more than the Yanks were willing to pay. New York fans called him a traitor. He told them to talk to George Steinbrenner.

Baseball was changing in the 1970s. With the recently obtained right to sell their services on the open market, players were acquiring new wealth and power; the days when even the greatest players were simply handed a contract every spring and told to sign it were gone forever. But this good fortune was also costing the game some of its former pleasures. The lure of seven-figure contracts separated players not just from their old teams, but from the writers who wrote about them, the fans who rooted for them, and even the teammates they played alongside. As wealth began to isolate the players, press coverage grew tougher and more invasive, while the fans, stunned and angry at the amounts of money these baseball players -- baseball players! -- were making, not to mention their sudden ability to pick up stakes and move to another city, were starting to look upon the athletes like racehorses -- worse than that, even. Fans in the 1970s would hurl curses and objects at the players with whom they once felt kinship -- beer, hot dogs, cherry bombs, bolts. Such vitriol reflected the fans' frustration over the uncomfortable ways in which baseball, the most traditionconscious of American sports, was undergoing rapid and disconcerting change. It also showed how the violence and anger of the late 1960s and early 1970s was seeping into baseball stadiums, no matter how much those fortresses of constancy and tradition tried to filter out the cultural transformations, both good and bad, coursing through the country.

The game was changing, and even as the players tried to capitalize on that, they struggled to preserve the sense of joy so vital to the sport, that element of eternal boyhood so hard for most of them to articulate but so crucial to their love of the game. They welcomed the money that free agency brought. Who wouldn't? But money wasn't why this generation of athletes started playing baseball. When they were boys, no one went into baseball to get rich, because the vast majority of players never would. In backyards and on dusty playgrounds, in inner-city parks and on high school diamonds, they played baseball because when they were young they listened to the game on the radio and watched it on television, sometimes in color, but more often in grainy black and white. They saw Jackie Robinson steal home or Mickey Mantle race to make a catch in center field, or heard the crack of Ted Williams's bat sending another line drive into right field at Fenway Park, and that's what they wanted to do when they grew up: play baseball like their heroes. They never dreamed of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, much less millions, just for playing a game. They played baseball because they loved the sport, and for many of them it was the only thing they knew how to do.

Rich Gossage had been a free agent when he was signed by the Yankees after five years with the White Sox and one with the Pirates. When he came to the Bronx that spring of 1978, he learned how brutal the fans could be when you were being paid enormous sums of money but didn't perform brilliantly from day one. Gossage blew a few games early, on the road. Then, on opening day at the Stadium, when Gossage was announced with the rest of the Yankees, the fans had booed and booed, like nothing the twenty-six-year-old Gossage had ever heard. Playing for the White Sox, the fans had never been anywhere near as vocal -- or hostile. He stood disbelieving in a line of Yankees, the jeers and catcalls cascading down upon him. Gossage was one of the game's most intimidating players. He stood six feet three inches tall and weighed 210 pounds, and pitched with his cap yanked down low so that opposing batters couldn't see his eyes. On his first day in his new stadium, Gossage stood on the field, alone in front of 50,000 people, and pulled his hat down to hide the fact that he was crying.

The 1978 season was like that for the Yankees and the Red Sox -- gritty, emotional, fiercely competitive. It was also, as the writer Roger Angell said at the time, a painful season. All of those qualities contributed to the drama of the 1978 American League East pennant race. In the first months of the season, the Sox raced to a fourteen-game lead over the Yankees, who bickered and fought with one another as they had the year before. Then, in mid-July, Yankee manager Billy Martin simply imploded, the result of too much pressure and too many scotch-and-waters. One night he told two reporters that his most famous player was a liar and the team's owner was a crook, and the next day, as he unsuccessfully fought back tears, he announced his resignation in the lobby of a Minnesota hotel.

The Yankees hired a new manager, the quiet, self-assured Bob Lemon, who didn't say much, just wrote out the lineup card and let the players play. And even as the Red Sox started to lose, the Yankees started to win. A fourteen-game deficit became eight...then four...then none...and suddenly, in early September the Yankees had a three-game lead. No team in American League history had ever come back from fourteen games down. Red Sox fans, always the first to put the worst on the table -- it hurt less that way -- were calling their team's slide the greatest choke in baseball history.

And then the Red Sox surprised those fans by picking themselves up and fighting back.

The playoff started at two-thirty in the afternoon on October 2. Inside Fenway Park, 32,925 fans would watch as if the weight of a combined 324 games was riding on every pitch, because it was. For Red Sox fans, whose team had come tantalizingly close but fallen short for some sixty years, the weight of decades was riding on the outcome. This game was not just about who would go on to play the Kansas City Royals; both the Yankees and the Red Sox were sure they could beat the Royals. It was about everything that had come before it. You could trace a line from the men involved in this game back to the origins of the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry at the beginning of the century, and from there back to the very beginning of baseball in the United States, before the Civil War. Yet you could also look forward and see that, whoever won on this October day, when it was done everything was going to change -- faster, probably, than baseball had ever changed before. That was one reason why players on both teams agreed it was the most important game of their careers. It felt not just like a singular moment, but also like a fragile one, a rare convergence of tradition and rivalry and timelessness that would not be easily, if ever, re-created.

Outside Fenway Park that afternoon, Red Sox fans lamenting their failure to acquire tickets would mill around Kenmore Square, carrying signs with obscene sentiments and harassing any Yankee fan reckless enough to flash his pinstripes. And beyond Fenway, north to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, south to Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey, and west across the entire country, fans would play hooky from work or school to park themselves in front of their televisions and watch a game that would burn itself into their memories, a game that reminded them of why they loved baseball, of how beautiful it felt to win and how much it hurt to lose, of the reassuring constancy of the expected and the inevitability of the unpredictable, of struggle and hope and redemption and disappointment and all the ways in which baseball was like life itself. Much of that feeling would be inspired by a light-hitting shortstop named Bucky Dent, whose uncharacteristic moment of greatness changed his life forever and would become one of the sport's iconic events. And much of the emotion would result from a showdown between a fiery but anxious relief pitcher and an intense, driven veteran near the end of his career, desperate to win it all for the very first time.

After 162 games, the New York Yankees would fly from New York to Boston and Goose Gossage would sit in his hotel room, thinking that the game between his team and the Red Sox would probably come down to a single confrontation between him and Carl Yastrzemski. Meanwhile, Yastrzemski lay in bed and wondered if he would get a chance to win the game for his team, bringing the Red Sox and himself one huge step closer to the goal that had so long escaped him: winning a World Series.

From THE GREATEST GAME by Richard Bradley
Copyright © 2008 by Richard Bradley
Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Dear Alex

Dear Alex,

Are you serious? Is all this really happening? Can you really be this misguided? Ever since I heard the news during the eighth inning of the fourth game of the World Series on Sunday night (more on that later), I've been having a hard time functioning because my brain is having such difficulty understanding the sheer magnitude of what you've done.

Let's start with the bottom line. Can this really be about money? Since we're talking about professional sports, I guess it's always about money, but I'm not the type who blames guys for signing with the highest bidder. If there's someone willing to pay you a truckload of money because you're the best at what you do, you should take that truck and drive off into the sunset. But here's what I don't get, Alex. The contract you just walked away from would've paid you $91 million over the next three years, and reports indicated the Yankees were getting ready to offer you an extension of five or six years beyond that for an additional $150 million or so. I suppose it's possible, as Scott Boras keeps telling us, that since the game's overall wealth has more than doubled in the past seven years, you might actually be worth more now than you were when you signed that ridiculous quarter-billion-dollar contract in Texas, but wouldn't that Yankee money have been enough?

See, I'm guessing that it's not about the money. I think that when you came to New York five years ago you honestly thought you were gonna be the man. Sure, Jeter was the Captain, but he couldn't carry a team. It would take him almost three years to hit the dingers you could hit in one, and he was only half the shortstop you were. You probably assumed that you'd be the fan favorite as soon as you hit your first bomb into Monument Park.

And then reality set in. Your first clue came during trade negotiations when you were told that you'd have to move to a new position. There must've been a voice in your head questioning the whole thing, reminding you that you were probably the best shortstop in the history of the game, but you ignored it, thinking that you were talented enough to play any position on the field. (And you were probably right.)

Your next clue came during the press conference when you were first introduced as a Yankee. (Not a true Yankee; forgive me.) The reporters and camera crews packed the media room, eagerly snapping photos and taking video of the greatest player in the game pulling on the jersey of the greatest franchise in sports. But wait -- who was that sitting right next to you? It was Derek Jeter, at your press conference. It was as if the Yankees had flown him in to remind the world -- and you -- that sure, this A-Rod character's a great player, but this will always be Jeter's team.

But you did well. You might not have gotten the biggest cheers, but you certainly put up the biggest numbers. If you were tentative in your first year, it was easily explained away. The Bronx, afterall, is a bit different than Seattle or Arlington. No problem, though. You made up for that average '04 by winning the MVP in '05.

Was it in 2006 that you made up your mind about this experiment? Never before had a future Hall of Famer been questioned as you were, and you were in your prime, smack in the middle of two MVP seasons. First your manager and teammates turned on you in that Sports Illustrated piece, and then came the ultimate indignity. In the fourth game of the American League Divisional Series, with his team facing elimination, manager Joe Torre decided to put you in the eighth slot in the order, something which surely must have embarrassed you. What was the voice saying then?

As all the world demanded your trade during the off-season, you worked. While other sluggers responded to adversity by getting bigger, you dropped weight instead. Your defense improved drastically, and your offensive exploits were so spectacular that they can't really be defined by numbers alone. On a team full of all-stars and future Hall of Famers, you stood out as if you were playing with Little Leaguers. Your teammates were at a loss in the interview room, in awe in the dugout. I'm sure you remember the bomb you hit into the rarely visited upper deck in left field of the Stadium; what I remember is the look of disbelief that Jeter gave you when you got back to the bench. As he said many times throughout the year, he simply couldn't relate to what you were doing on the field.

There was another moment with Jeter, though, that spoke even more about your new place on the team. It was in a meaningless game as spring turned to summer, and someone drilled you in the ribs with a tight fastball. Remember? It must've gotten you pretty good, because you immediately howled with pain and went into a full body spasm while dancing around the plate for a while before staggering to first base. Now here's the beautiful part. A while later the cameras caught Jeter in the dugout doing a dead-on impression of your contortions. Everyone on the bench, especially Robinson Canó and Melky Cabrera -- laughed hysterically. You were a team.

But it wasn't only your teammates that had come around. The fans were suddenly in your corner as well. Sure, it helped that you came out like a house afire in April, stopping the boos dead in the throats of even your most jaded critics. But once you had them, you kept them. Each clutch hit and walk-off homer seemed to bring new fans and louder cheers until finally you were slipping your 500th home run past the foul pole in left and the Stadium suddenly belonged to you. Did you feel the love that afternoon? It was as if fifty thousand people were trying to make up for all the boos from the past three years -- but it was more than just that. They weren't just screaming about your 500th home run; they were dreaming of your 660th, 714th, 755th, and 800th. I know I was. The best player in the game -- maybe the best player ever -- was wearing pinstripes, just the way we all knew it was supposed to be.

All the while, though, there was a cloud hanging over the stadium. While you told half-truths about being happy in New York and downright lies about not thinking about next year, your agent spoke about the huge opportunity of free agency. As I've said, I can never fault someone for wanting to get paid, but did you once think about how all this might play out in the bleachers or playgrounds or construction sites in New York? Few people have ever had the opportunity to work for a $91 million pay day; fewer still have had the cajónes to walk away from one.

And so when it finally happened, when you left your legacy along with all that cash on the table, I wasn't surprized, only disappointed. I thought you'd at least have the sense to sit across the table from Brian Cashman or George Steinbrenner. Even if you didn't want to negotiate with them, I thought you'd at least feel the need to explain your decision.

But then it got crazier. Just as the attendants in the Red Sox clubhouse were starting to make plans for rolling out the champagne, America got the news that you were opting out of your contract. From a larger perspective, it showed a lack of respect for the game and a need to be the center of attention, even if that meant pulling the focus away from the World Series. From a Yankee persepctive, though, it was even worse. That last series game was depressing for me. Here were the Red Sox winning a second championship in four years while the Yankees were seven years removed from their last ring. Joe Torre was gone, and the organization seemed as unstable as it had been since before he arrived. And then came your news, like a knife twisting in my back.

Your agent claimed that the Yankees could still negotiate with you, but if you believe that... Well, let's imagine for a moment that Brian Cashman decides to go back on his word. Let's imagine that Hank Steinbrenner changes his mind and decided he really does want you back in pinstripes even though you don't appear to want to be a Yankee. They get together with your agent and hammer out a deal worth $300 million over ten years. Sounds good, right? Now let's jump ahead to April and the last season opener in Yankee Stadium history. Bob Sheppard announces the starters one by one, and they trot out to the first base line accompanied by the usual cheers. First Johnny Damon doffs his cap to the crowd, then Jeter lightly touches the bill of his cap to the biggest roar of the day. Bobby Abreu follows and waves to the crowd as he takes his place next to Jeter.

And then the three of them turn to the dugout where you stand poised on the first step. As your name is announced and you trot out into the light, what do you think it sounds like? The fans will remember the fifty-four home runs, but suddenly they won't matter much. The boos will come down like insects in Cleveland, clinging mercilessly to your skin. But it won't be about the money. It will be about the lack of loyalty to the team and the lack of respect for the game. It will be about you.

But of course, none of that will happen. Next April you'll find yourself wearing another jersey in someplace like Los Angeles or Detroit or Anaheim or Boston, and as your name is announced on Opening Day, the sun will be shining, the cheers will be loud, and the outlook will be bright. There's just one thing you'll have to watch out for, Alex. As your numbers continue to mount -- and I'm sure that they will -- there will always be whispers about your failures in New York as a player and as a person, and I'm not sure there's anything you'll ever be able to do to quiet them.

Lucky

Were the Indians a better team than the Yankees this year? Quite simply, no. The Indians won 96 games to the Yankees' 94, and they only allowed 704 runs to New York's 777, but that's about it. The Yankees thrashed them in six regular season meetings, outscoring them 49-11 in sweeping series in April and August. Against the rest of the league, it was much the same. New York's run differential was +191 (meaning they scored 191 more runs than they allowed, 2nd best in the league to Boston), while Cleveland's was only 107. But this is really quibbling. Both teams were definitely two of the four best teams in the league.

So did this series prove that the Indians are actually better than the Yankees? Hardly. In fact, no five-game series will ever prove such a thing. Would it be possible, for instance, for the Florida Marlins (or any other bottom dweller) to win a five game series against one of the top teams in the league? Certainly. The Marlins swept all six games against the NL Central champion Chicago Cubs. But what about this particular four-game series between the Yanks and Tribe? If you only watched the highlights on SportsCenter or read the blurb in your morning paper, you can be forgiven for thinking that the better team won, but if you watched every pitch of every game (like I did), you know that the answer isn't quite that simple.

Here's the one stat that you need to know. Until late in game four, the Indians as a team were actually hitting .500 with two outs and runners in scoring position. This is insane, a number which points to a fair degree of luck. By calling this lucky, I am in no way saying the Indians didn't deserve to win, I'm just acknowledging the place that luck has in baseball, perhaps more than any other sport. More on this later...

Now let's look at the individual games.

Game 1:
Indians 12, Yankees 3. This was the game where the Yankees had no shot, right? Trailing 4-2 in the top of the fifth, New York mounted a rally. Bobby Abreu sliced a double down the left field line to score Shelly Duncan and push Johnny Damon to third. Suddenly up by only a run with the meat of the Yankee order coming up and only one out, Cleveland manager Eric Wedge wisely chose to walk Alex Rodríguez, looking for a double play from Jorge Posada. Were it not for A-Rod's historic season, Posada would have been the Yankees' clear MVP. C.C. Sabathia, meanwhile, was struggling, having already thrown close to a hundred pitches. C.C. dialed it up, though, and struck out Posada before getting Hideki Matsui to pop-up to end the threat. Cleveland then came up in the bottom half of the inning and plated five runs, essentially ending the game. What might've happened if either Posada or Matsui had come through? Or what if Posada had even managed a sac fly? A baseball game, even one that ends with a nine-run margin, can sometimes turn on a single at bat, and this was one of them.

Game 2:
Indians 2, Yankees 1. Depending on how you look at it, this was either the game when Cleveland's luck abandoned them or the game when Andy Pettitte pitched like a magician. Pettitte pitched into the seventh inning, allowing base runners in every frame. Most of these runners led off the innings (a Grady Sizemore single in the first, a Jason Michaels double in the third, a Travis Hafner single in the fourth, a Kenny Lofton single in the fifth, and a Sizemore triple in the sixth), but none of them scored. With one out in the seventh, lucky enough to be clinging to a 1-0 lead because Melky Cabrera had deposited Cleveland pitcher Fausto Carmona's only mistake of the night into the right field stands in the third inning, Pettitte got even luckier when Jhonny Peralta launched a missile to straight away center field. It bounced high off the wall for a double, but had it been eighteen inches higher or eighteen inches to the right, the game would've been tied.

Joe Torre smartly went to his favorite new toy, Joba Chamberlain, and order was quickly restored. Through seven innings, the Yankees were right where they wanted to be, up by a run with the most dominant pitcher in baseball (at least in August and September) on the mound, to be followed quickly by Mariano Rivera (arguably the most dominant pitcher of the last ten years) waiting to pitch the ninth. No problems, right? Perhaps in response to the run of luck the Yankees had been enjoying for seven innings, things changed dramatically in the bottom of the eighth. I'm not sure if Lake Erie was running red, but there was a plague of biblical insects inside Jacobs Field, and they descended upon Chamberlain. Covered by bugs and clearly flustered, the man who had struck out 34 while walking only six in 24 regular season innings suddenly lost the strike zone. He threw sixteen pitches to the first five hitters in the eighth with these results: 11 balls, 5 strikes, one hit batter, and two wild pitches (one of which allowed the winning run to score). Carmona dealt with the same insects in the top halves of the seventh and eighth, but he seemed to get them as they were coming and going; Joba had them at their thickest. What if the umpires had halted the game as they probably should have? What if the swarm had never arrived in the first place? Luck allowed the Yankees to hold the lead for seven innings; luck allowed the Indians to tie it up in the eighth.

Game 3:
Yankees 8, Indians 4. Who'd have thought that the only game the Yankees would win in the series would be the one in which Roger Clemens limped his way out of the game and finally into retirement? I can't really say that luck had much to do with this one. Jake Westbrook pitched like Jake Westbrook, and Phil Hughes pitched well in relief of Clemens.

Game 4:
Indians 6, Yankees 4. In many ways, this was the strangest game of the series. The pedestrian Paul Byrd kept the Yankees off balance all night long, Yankee ace Chien-Ming Wang turned in his second consecutive disastrous start, and the Yankee pitchers who weren't named Joba or Mo actually did their jobs, shutting down the Indians over the last five innings and giving their team a chance to get back in the game. But how did the runs score? The Indians had their share of blasts (Sizemore's no-doubt homer to lead off the game and a couple of Kelly Shoppach doubles come to mind, but the back-breakers were a bloop single by Asdrubal Cabrera with two outs and two strikes in the second and a ground ball by Victor Martínez with the bases loaded in the fourth. The Yankees, meanwhile, made their money the hard way, tallying their four runs with three solo home runs and a bases loaded single.

So we can look at all this in two different ways. Maybe the Indians came through when they had to, buckling down with two outs and getting the hits that good teams and clutch players get. Maybe the Yankees wilted under the pressure of their owner's yearly mandate to win the World Series. Maybe the best team won.

Or maybe the Indians just got lucky.

I don't think we can discount either answer, but a seven-game series would be much more equitable than a five-gamer. Would the Yankees have been able to beat C.C. Sabathia, Fausto Carmona, and Jake Westbrook in games five, six, and seven to win a longer series? It would've been difficult, but it would've been possible. Sabathia was shaky in game one, Carmona might never again pitch as well as he did in game two, and Jake Westbrook is Jake Westbrook.

If the NBA can convince people to pay attention to seven-game series in a sport in which luck plays a minimal role, why can't major league baseball? If they had started the first round on Tuesday as they always have, then given off days for travel on Thursday and Monday, a seven-game series would end Wednesday at the latest. The league championship series would then start on Friday -- exactly as it's scheduled now.

All that being said, it's impossible to completely eliminate luck in any playoff series. The best example of this is probably the 2001 World Series. The Arizona Diamondbacks thoroughly outplayed the three-time defending champion Yankees, outscoring them 28-3 in games one, two, and six while losing three one-run games (two in miraculous fashion) before heading to the deciding seventh game. To say that the Yankees were lucky even to have made it to the seventh game would be an understatement; that they actually made it to the ninth inning of that game and were able to put the ball in Rivera's hand was ridiculous. But just when things seemed most certain, when the role of luck seemed to have been extinguished, everything exploded. A broken bat single, an error by the best fielding pitcher I've ever seen, a failure by a Gold Glove third baseman to complete a double play, a line drive down the right field line, a hit batter by a pitcher who had hit one batter all year long, another broken bat single, and the Diamondbacks were champions.

Now that's lucky.

An Interview with Jayson Stark

You probably know Jayson Stark from his writing at ESPN.com or his frequent appearances on Baseball Tonight. Recently he found time to write a book, The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players in Baseball History. Stark's book is essentially an organized listing of the conversation which occurs in bleachers and barrooms on a nightly basis: which players aren't really as good as most people think? Which players are secretly much better than advertised? Some of the names aren't too surprizing (everyone knows Juan Pierre is overrated), but others are shocking (how can Babe Ruth be underrated?). Stark hits every position on the field, always maintaining the sense of humor which will be familiar to frequent readers of his work.

Last Friday morning Jayson took the time to talk to me about the book and a few other issues. Enjoy...

BrokenCowboy:
Thanks for taking the time to do this. I know you must be pretty busy since we’re smack in the middle of baseball season.

Jayson Stark:
You know, there’s no time in baseball where you can kick back and say, “I think I’ll go to the beach for about four days,” unless you carve that time out. That’s all I do is juggle. I should join the circus.

BC:
What about during the off-season? How much does it slow down for you then?

JS:
In a typical off-season? Not a whole lot. Right after the World Series, and that week between Christmas and New Year’s, and generally right before Spring Training it’s not too crazy.

BC:
One thing I like to ask, especially of reporters, is that I assume you got into this gig because of a love of baseball?

JS:
Sure.

BC:
So I’m wondering, how has being a journalist, especially since you covered the Phillies for a while real closely, being that close to the game and the players, how does that affect your ability to relax and just be a fan?

JS:
Well, it changes it a little bit. I’m not a fan of any team. My family hates going to games with me. I love being there, but I don’t root for anybody, and that frustrates them.

BC:
Is that something that’s changed as a result of your job?

JS:
Yeah, sure. I think that’s a natural part of being a professional. You can’t root. But I’m a human being, and there are certain people, certain players, certain teams I like being around more than others. But I basically root for the best stories, I don’t root for any team. One thing you learn when you cover baseball is that every game you attend, there’s a winner, there’s a loser, there’s a hero, and there’s probably a goat. So they’re all a big part of the story, so you root for the story. You don’t root for any team. So that part has certainly changed the way I’m a fan, but I also think baseball is one of those games where the more you invest in it, the better it gets. The more you understand, the more you see. The more you put in, the more you get back. There are just so many levels to the game. I think I love the game as much as I ever have, if not more. I’m probably a different kind of fan of baseball than your average fan, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of it. One of the things that I consider to be the greatest compliment that people in the sport give me is when they tell me they can see by the things I write or say on the air how much I care about the sport. And that means a lot to me, because that’s true. I really do come at it with a lot of passion for the sport.

BC:
One reason I ask that is because I would agree that from seeing you on ESPN and reading your work, that love definitely comes across. But there are reporters or on-air personalities where there’s a cynicism that you can taste, and I wonder sometimes if that comes from being too close. It’s easy for me to be a fan of the Yankees, for instance, because I’ve never been in their clubhouse and I may not know everything that goes on. And so I wonder sometimes -- if you’re up close and personal do you lose something?

JS:
That can happen. Everybody’s different. You start with that -- people are different, and everybody’s got a different way of coming at it and a different perspective, which is what makes it great. And I think that depending on where you work, what the reportorial culture is where you work, that can color the way you look at things, too. There’s a much different mentality covering baseball in New York than there is covering baseball in, say, St. Louis, Milwaukee, San Diego, right? And so I think that can have a lot to do with it, too. I know that Philadelphia is one of those cynical kinds of places, too, but what you see and what you read from me, it’s just a reflection of me. Sometimes people ask me if I really do come from Philadelphia. I’m a much more positive personality, I think, than you’ll find walking the streets of this town.

BC:
Now on to this book. When I first heard what you were doing with this book, it intrigued me because I think every fan has had this conversation at some point. When did it start for you? When did you get the idea to turn it into a book, and what was the process? Did this all come off the top of your head, did you speak to other people about it? How did that go?

JS:
I’ve been aspiring to write a book for a long time, but I could never find the right match of idea and publisher. I talked to different agents and different publishers with different ideas, but it never happened. The people at Triumph Books are fans of mine, and they actually approached me with this. I got a call last summer from a guy at Triumph Books who said, “We came up with this idea and think you’d be the perfect person in America to write it.” I didn’t think about it very long before I said, you know, you might be right. I think this is really right up my alley. I would love to do this book. The more we talked it over, the more excited we all got. It came together really quickly, for the most part. I would say I didn’t agree to write the book until some time late last July, and the fact that it’s out this spring is a miracle. I got three chapters done during the season last year, and then when the World Series ended I worked seven days a week until spring training to get it done, because that was the only way to do it. But it was such a fun project that it kept me going. Plus, there wasn’t time for writer’s block... The idea itself, overrated/underrated, is really fun. As you said, it’s one of those classic sports arguments, and we’ve all found ourselves in the middle of it on a talk radio dial or sitting on a barstool. It’s amazing that nobody ever wrote a book on it. Actually after I finished mine, Triumph approached me and said, “How’d you like to write a football version of it?” There’s no way I could possibly do that. So there’s actually a football version of it coming out in a week or two written mostly by Sal Paolantonio of ESPN. We all stumbled onto something here. It’s incredible that nobody ever did it before.

BC:
So were there people that you spoke to about this, or did you have a lot of these rankings already in your head?

JS:
Well, some of ‘em. I always say these selections were nominated by a distinguished committee consisting of me. Because it really did come down to me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t talk to a million people about all different aspects of this book. Certain chapters, certain passages, certain names came much easier than other names. I really struggled with some of these choices. I spent a lot of time talking to people about some of them. I describe in the book how difficult center field was for me. Center field, I kicked around for weeks. Weeks! I couldn’t find any great center fielder from the past who I considered to be drastically overrated to the point where I could put him number one in the chapter. If we’re calling somebody the most overrated player in history at his position, I didn’t think it was right to put Juan Pierre or Mickey Rivers at a position like center field, so I really spent a lot of time on that chapter. I remember going around the winter meetings asking everybody I ran into about center field. I spent a lot of time actually listening to people talking about Joe DiMaggio. This is a different kind of argument than he’s great, no he stinks. This is really a relative term, overrated/underrated. It’s about perception vs. reality. Myth vs. reality. There were people arguing that there were a lot of myths that evolved around Joe DiMaggio that we know about now that we didn’t know about then. If it was a myth vs. reality book, why not him? But I just couldn’t bring myself to go there. I couldn’t bring myself to call Kirby Puckett the most overrated in history. So it really took me a long time before I settled on Andruw Jones. I tell people all the time that if I were doing this book differently and it was the fifty most overrated players in history, I don’t think Andruw would be in there. But because it was position by position, it’s a little different concept. So those are the kinds of debates, those are the kinds of challenges that I ran across as I went about writing the book. Every position and every name had its own set of complications, criteria, and differing needs to interview a lot of people or do the research than others.

BC:
I think for me the underrated side of the chapters tended to be more interesting. Sometimes confirming things that I believed, but other times there were some names that really surprized me. There were a few guys that I wanted to talk to you about. First of all, how can Babe Ruth -- the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat -- how can he possibly be underrated?

JS:
(Laughing) Well, obviously he wasn’t underrated as a hitter, but do you really think that many people are walking around with a working knowledge of just how dominating a pitcher Babe Ruth was?

BC:
I’d have to say no. I consider myself a big fan, a Babe Ruth fan, but there were some things that you pointed out in that section that -- you really have to say, wow! Thinking about Babe Ruth, it’s interesting to think about, what if he had never picked up a bat? How would history view him today?

JS:
Right. Exactly! It’s very possible we’d be looking at him as the greatest left-handed pitcher ever. Very possible! This was so much fun to do this chapter. This was one of the really fun chapters in the book, because I learned a lot myself. I didn’t know that those six seasons that Babe Ruth pitched he had the highest winning percentage of every left-handed pitcher. I didn’t know that! And when I started stacking him up against Walter Johnson...

BC:
That was amazing to me.

JS:
I realized that in his two full seasons as a pitcher, Babe Ruth was better than Walter Johnson! That blew my mind! Walter Johnson’s the greatest pitcher that ever lived, probably, right? And then the fact that they faced each other seven times and Babe won six and would’ve won the seventh, right, if he hadn’t blown that lead in the ninth inning? Unbelievable. The World Series dominance? Incredible. Again, this is about perception vs. reality. If all this was going on, and people haven’t noticed it, then that’s the definition of underrated or overrated for me, and that’s the way I went about the book. The other thing that was really important to me is that every name who was number one in a chapter, underrated or overrated, my criteria was it can’t be somebody that the reader will say, “who the heck is that?” Nobody cares if Hippo Vaughn was underrated or overrated, but Babe Ruth? That can get your attention. It’s a book written with the idea that people are supposed to react to it. That doesn’t mean I threw names out there for effect, it means I wanted this to stimulate debate. I wanted people to read this book and think. I want them to bring it to their next session with their buddies sittin’ around watching a game and say what about this guy? Can this guy really be underrated, or can this guy really be overrated? I wanted to make them think and debate and laugh. A lot of people think I wrote it to make people mad. That really was never the intent. It was really to make you think.

BC:
And what about Bert Blyleven? Recently, in the last -- I don’t know, it feels like the last three or four years -- it’s become kind of popular to champion his cause for the Hall of Fame.

JS:
Right.

BC:
Do you think he’s ever gonna get into the Hall of Fame?

JS:
I think he’s heading in that direction now, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, yet. There was a time I thought he’d never make it. I admit, he’s one of the hardest candidates ever to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot for me. I have spent more time agonizing over Bert Blyleven than any pitcher who’s ever been on the ballot. But deciding whether he’s a Hall of Famer is a different process than deciding whether he’s underrated or overrated. He shares a lot of the same characteristics as Nolan Ryan, the stuff that caused me to say that Nolan Ryan was overrated, a lot of that applies to Bert Blyleven. I understand that. Two all-star teams in 23 years, right? Never won a Cy Young, finished in the top three only two times. Didn’t have a real good winning percentage compared to his teams. Those are the things that stopped me from voting for Bert Blyleven for a long time. I finally did come around to the point where I got nudged over the edge by people that I respect. But here’s the difference between Bert Blyleven and Nolan Ryan for the purposes of this book. You have a lot of people walking around who think Nolan Ryan’s the greatest pitcher who ever lived. If he were the greatest pitcher who ever lived, you have to think he’d have won one Cy Young Award, right? Or he would’ve finished in the top three more times than Dan Quisenberry, or his winning percentage would’ve been more than twenty-seven points higher than his team. And so I recognize how great Nolan Ryan was, I only jump off the train when people start calling him the greatest pitcher of modern times. But in Bert Blyleven’s case, you know, those 287 wins, if you look closely at them, could very easily have translated into well over three hundred. And the fact that he was thirty-seven games over .500, it very easily could’ve been a better record with better run support. Bill James has documented this exhaustively. So because of just a slight difference in the numbers, Bert Blyleven is not in the Hall of Fame. Even though if you look at that division play era, look at shutouts and strikeouts, it’s basically Nolan Ryan and Bert Blyleven. Their numbers are so similar, and yet one guy is regarded as the greatest pitcher of his time and the other guy’s not even in the Hall of Fame? That’s where the overrated/underrated disparity comes from.

BC:
This is hardly scientific, this whole process. One of the guys who violates all the rules of the overrated/underrated paradigm, I guess we can call it, is Derek Jeter.

JS:
Absolutely.

BC:
He’s the ultimate glamour boy, playing shortstop in New York for teams that have been winning, and yet you’ve got him on the underrated side of the coin. At the same time you could find dozens of guys who could talk for hours about how overrated he is. How is it possible that he could be seen in both lights?

JS:
(Laughing) Yeah, good question. Derek Jeter was the reason to write a book like this. When I first started researching the book, trying to come up with definitions and examples, I Googled “overrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And then I Googled “underrated” and “baseball”, and Derek Jeter came up right away. And the more I thought about it, the more I talked to people, it really became clear he was the classic case because you’ve got people out there saying he’s so overrated he’s underrated, so underrated he’s overrated. It’s hilarious, because he’s that kind of figure. In some ways his numbers are spectacular. In other ways, there are people who just look at numbers who think he’s not that good. But the reason that I called him underrated was I just feel like there are certain players, in this sport and every sport, whose numbers can’t tell you what they are, and Derek Jeter is one of those players. The argument that drives me crazy is when people say if Derek Jeter was a Royal, you wouldn’t even know his name. That, to me, is the most irrelevant argument in the history of mankind. Because he’s not just a guy who happened to pass through the Yankees while they were winning rings. He wasn’t mopping up the clubhouse until they gave him a World Series ring just because he was hanging around. He was a major difference maker. He was the heart of the Yankees. You know, I’ve done a lot of appearances for this book in the New York area, and when I ask people how many rings they think those Yankees would have if Derek Jeter had never been a member of that team, they say, I don’t really know -- one? Nobody says all of them. This little section of the book was a response, basically, to all those people who think he’s overrated, who think he’s just a great player because he was a Yankee. For me, guys who love the moment, and have that feel for how to rise to the moment... You have to be a Yankee to get to that moment, I acknowledge that, but I don’t know how you can deny the fact that this guy loves the moment.

BC:
I agree. He’s been my favorite player, probably since the day he was drafted. I’ve followed him that long, so when I picked up the book, the first thing I did was turn to the shortstop section, and I expected to find him on the other side. I was already getting angry before I even found him...

JS:
Yeah, he was one of those people that a lot of people have asked me about. Originally he was gonna be the most underrated, but then last year it looked like he was gonna win the MVP award as I was working on that chapter, and thought I better not put him number one if he wins the MVP, so I couldn’t take that chance.

BC:
Well, you could’ve bumped him up as it turned out.

JS:
Easily.

BC:
I have some numbers for you. You have sixty overrated players, and twenty of them were Yankees. And then of your number ones, twelve number one overrated, and half of them -- six -- were Yankees. Can you explain yourself to me please?

JS:
(Laughter)

BC:
Is there an axe you have to grind?

JS:
No. I can’t remember which chapter it was that I went into this. It might’ve been the Graig Nettles chapter?

BC:
Yeah, it was.

JS:
When you’re looking for overrated, the Yankees just have more opportunities for overratedness than any other team! Think about all the different ways you can get to be overrated. One of the classic ways is one swing, one game, one week, one stretch in October can vastly inflate the national perception of what a guy is, right? That goes for any team, but the Yankees show up in October every year. And because of that, I think quite a lot of their players are just lucky. They get this opportunity to seize that moment and become far greater figures than they probably otherwise would be. Now I know I just used a similar argument to explain why Derek Jeter’s underrated, but being in the spotlight the way they are, it’s almost like the Yankees are in color and everybody else is in black and white. It just creates those unparalleled opportunities for overratedness. When everything was equal, it was often hard not to pick a Yankee.

BC:
I think I agree with you, I just thought I’d give you a chance to say it out loud.

JS:
I’m glad you did. But you know, the fact that Yogi Berra is probably the most well-known living ex-Yankee could be considered underrated. That tells you I don’t have any axe to grind. The fact that Derek Jeter is in there tells you that I don’t have any axe to grind. Certain players, just because they were Yankees, are regarded by the world as superstars, when that’s probably not what they were.

BC:
One guy I wanted to talk to you about also is Steve Garvey. I grew up out here in LA, and watched him as a player, you hear a lot out here about how great he was, and isn’t it a crime that he’s not in the Hall of Fame. What’s your response to that?

JS:
Well, the fact that he’s gone through fifteen years on the ballot, and the voters never saw it, he never got close, would tell me that the general public agrees with me. Look, Steve Garvey was a real good player, and just because he’s in this book as overrated doesn’t mean I don’t think he was a real good player. But the reason that he obtained this lofty status as most overrated first baseman is that somehow, and in great part because he was a Dodger, he really became the face of the sport. He was a guy who started the all-star game every year, he was the guy who was yucking it up on the Tonight Show every time you turned it on. He was the first player in history to attract four million all-star votes. Was he a good player? Yeah, he was. He was a real good player. Steve Garvey, in a lot of ways, was a reflection of his times. Back in the seventies, the early eighties, the stuff people looked at was batting average, home runs, RBIs, fielding percentage. Very basic kinds of stats. Nowadays we live in a much more sophisticated age where you look beyond those stats. And when you look beyond those stats, it’s clear that Steve Garvey wasn’t the player that people perceived him to be. If he was a feared slugger, he probably would’ve slugged .500 in a season once, right? Once. If he was really a complete offensive player, he would’ve averaged more than twenty-nine walks a year, right? Out of six 200-hit seasons, he would’ve scored a hundred runs once, right? He’s the only player in history to have more than two 200-hit seasons and not score a hundred runs in any of them. And the fielding percentage? Hey, it’s great that he won those Gold Gloves. It’s great that he owns that record for the longest errorless streak by a first baseman, but anybody from that era will tell you that the reason he never made an error is that he would not throw the ball. And so this is stuff that didn’t always show up on the stat sheet at the time. Now we can look back at it with more perspective and understand what the limitations of the player were. In this book, at times, I guess I play reality police. And again, it doesn’t mean I think Steve Garvey was some kind of bum who never should’ve played a day in the big leagues. He was a really good player, but the fact that he became the face of the sport, that’s where perception and reality, to me, diverge.

BC:
Who do you think needs to be in the Hall of Fame? I know this isn’t necessarily an overrated/underrated thing, but you mentioned in a few chapters some of the guys -- Blyleven and Gossage -- are there other guys on your radar?

JS:
I think Gossage is gonna get in. The guy I worry about is Ron Santo. I think of all the players who are not in the Hall of Fame, and who may never get in the Hall of Fame, he is the most deserving. I think that Ron Santo is not in the Hall of Fame basically for one reason. Because people say, well how can you have four Hall of Famers from a team like the Cubs that never won anything? I don’t know. There’s no quota, there’s no government quota on Hall of Famers from one team. I guess there’s quotas on pimento imports or something, but not on Hall of Famers from one team! And it’s not Ron Santo's fault that he happened to play with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins. And the thing that’s revealing to me is, who was the guy who hit cleanup on those teams that had Banks and Williams on them? It wasn’t Banks, it wasn’t Williams, it was Ron Santo, year after year after year. That should tell us all something. And then if you really look at Ron Santo and compare him to his peers -- I don’t want to compare him to A-Rod or Mike Schmidt or Brooks Robinson -- compare him to his peers in that league. It’s obvious he was the greatest offensive and defensive third baseman in the National League in his time, without anybody really being close. So I guess I just don’t understand this. And Ron Santo has been through so much, personally. He went through so much as a baseball player. It just really pains me that this is a guy who should be in the Hall of Fame, and I would really love to see him get elected while he’s alive. All that he’s been through, if he ever gets to that podium, that’ll be a special moment. I’m not talking about a baseball moment, I’m talking about a human moment. That turned out to be a really emotional chapter. I didn’t think of myself as a guy who had a big emotional investment in Ron Santo, but I just think that’s a huge injustice that I don’t understand.

BC:
I did appreciate that chapter because he was not a guy that I really knew a lot about, except you would hear his name mentioned as a guy who should be in the Hall, so I appreciated that chapter. I guess the last thing I’ve got for you then is that as we sit here on August 17th, how do you see the rest of the year shaking out? Who are your playoff teams and who do you see winning the World Series?

JS:
Well, a lot has changed over the last couple of weeks, don’t you think?

BC:
Yeah, in both leagues.

JS:
Tim Kurkjian said the other night that it’s the first year in history where we got to the 15th of August and all six divisions and the wild card races were within five games. So it really is a free-for-all. I was among the group who thought the Yankees were done, and the Cardinals were done, and the Rockies were done, but they’re not so done. Right now, I think the Yankees are gonna make the playoffs. I don’t think they’re gonna unseat the Red Sox, but I think they are gonna be the wild card. I think the Cubs are gonna wind up winning the Central, but who the heck knows anymore? I think the Red Sox are gonna get to the World Series, but in the National League I’ve never been more confused. If you can tell me what Pedro’s gonna be like when he comes back... I’m very tempted to pick the Mets still, even though I don’t think they’ve had a great year compared to their talent level. I think that’s probably the most talented team in the league. I think they’re a team that was constructed unlike any other, to win the World Series. I don’t think they can do that unless Pedro can make an impact, but if I were gonna pick right now, I’d say Mets-Red Sox, and I guess I’d say Red Sox win.

BC:
Alright. That’d be something to see.

JS:
Bill Buckner better not watch his TV that week. He’s liable to show up in a film clip or two.

BC:
Yeah, talk about emotional investment right there...

Bonds Passes Aaron; World Survives

And so it has come to pass. Barry Bonds has finally hit his 756th home run and taken his place (like it or not) at the head of a long and illustrious line of home run hitters. We've seen this coming for the past two or three years, but the soundtrack of Barry's march towards destiny has been driven by a steady drumbeat of hand-wringing and head-scratching.

Without question, the major league home run mark is the most hallowed record in all of sports. And so, the cynics say, how can we stomach the idea of a man like Barry Bonds standing atop that mountain? Can we applaud a man who is by all accounts a jerk and by most accounts a cheater?

Additionally, there are those who mourn for the man Bonds is surpassing. Hank Aaron, they say, is a more deserving record holder. The president of this club is baseball's commissioner, Bud Selig. Selig showed up in San Diego for the tying home run, but did so with a teenager's attitude: "you can make me go, but you can't make me like it." He couldn't even bring himself to applaud, nor could he make the trip up the coast to San Francisco for #756. (For the record, Aaron has always been one of my favorite players; some might remember a debate I had with noted Bonds defender John Perricone of Only Baseball Matters. We argued about who was the greatest hitter of all time, and I chose Aaron.)

In many ways this story comes down to Bonds vs Aaron, as if a choice must be made. What happened on Tuesday night did nothing to diminish Aaron, though some would have us believe otherwise. If only there weren't any of those external factors getting in the way. If only things were simple the way they were back in 1974. Here's what SI's Tom Verducci wrote recently in anticipation of 756:

The home run record isn't supposed to be this complicated. Even when Barry Bonds holds the record, Hank Aaron can still be the people's home run king -- and 755 can still be the number in which we believe.

That sounds nice, but things were still pretty complicated for Aaron. In addition to the death threats and hate mail, Aaron had to listen as detractors claimed he simply wasn't as good as Babe Ruth, regardless of what color he was or how many home runs he had hit.

But this is what we do. We romanticize the past to the point that the present can't possibly compete. The sun used to shine brighter, music used to mean something, and our baseball players used to be as pure as the driven snow.

It's probably too much to ask for people just to appreciate the record for what it is, so instead I'll just look forward to 2014 when Alex Rodriguez hits #779 and fans look back at the good old days of 2007.

Return of the Rocket

Inspired by Matt's brilliant work over at Bronx Comix. Be sure to check out his full body of work. Great stuff.

Man On Fire

The game isn't supposed to be this easy. You aren't supposed to have streaks like this, even if you are Alex Rodríguez, the best player in baseball.

A-Rod's struggles in New York have been well documented, and it was only six months ago that every baseball expert in America -- and I mean every single one -- was dead certain that his time in New York had come to an end. (You probably could've gotten pretty good odds at an online sportsbook.) After another abysmal October capped off by the humiliation of being dropped to the eighth spot in the order for the Yankees' final game, it looked like Rodríguez would be traded. Even though he had won the MVP in 2005, he had failed when it counted. GM Brian Cashman didn't seem to have any choice. Like Jack Clark, Rickey Henderson, and Dave Winfield before him, Rodríguez seemed destined for the trading block, sure to bring nothing but flotsam and jetsam in return.

Thankfully, Cashman knew better.

What we're seeing now, quite simply, is the best player of our generation performing at the absolute peak of his abilities, so pay attention. In case you've been distracted by the close of the NBA season or the latest round of American Idol elimations, here's a quick synopsis of what A-Rod's done so far:

• 10 HRs and 26 RBI in 14 games
• More home runs than eight other teams
• Basehits in all 14 games
• Extra base hits in 13 of 14 games
• Two walk-off home runs

Those numbers, though, don't tell you the most important part of the story. Alex Rodríguez is having fun again. His home run have all been no-doubters, allowing him to break into this home run trot before leaving the batter's box. It's the same each time: as the ball rockets into the stands, he flips his bat in the air and looks into the dugout, smiling with joy. Following his one-handed blast on Wednesday night, he was seen doubled over in laughter at the ribbing he was getting from the rest of the guys, the batboy included. As unlikely as it seemed six months ago -- or even six weeks ago -- A-Rod is one of the boys.

The interesting thing about his streak, though, is that as flaming hot as Rodríguez has been, he's still seeing pitches to hit. Take Thursday, for instance. Even though his advance scouts must've told him A-Rod's been pounding everything, and even though he had seen it with his own eyes during the first two games of the series, Cleveland manager Eric Wedge still chose to pitch to him in the ninth inning with the winning runs on base and first base open. The results were predictable. Another A-Rod walk-off blast.

Rest assured, though, that there are whispers. What happens when things get serious? Rodríguez might be able to carry a team in April, but what about September and October when (excuse me for this...) Yankees earn their stripes? We'll start getting some answers this weekend when the team makes its first trip to Fenway Park and A-Rod digs in against Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett, and Daisuke Matsuzaka. (Needless to say, my TiVo is already set.)

Expect big things.

An Interview with Jonathan Eig

Just in time for the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jonathan Eig has recently released Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season, a book which features a new look at Robinson's historic rookie campaign. (Click here to read an excerpt, and here for my review.) Last week he was nice enough to meet me at Starbucks in between an appearance on the Tavis Smiley show and a book signing at a local L.A. bookstore. (The lineup makes perfect sabermetric sense, by the way. Smiley's on-base percentage is much higher than mine, but my slugging can't be denied.) Anyway, here's the interview. Enjoy.

BrokenCowboy
I wanted to start out with this. When I was growing up I was a huge baseball fan, and I learned about baseball history -- and just American history, I think -- by reading biographies. And so as a young black boy growing up, Jackie Robinson’s story obviously had some special appeal to me. So I was curious -- what drew you to the story? What about Jackie Robinson’s story really touched you or made you want to pursue this?

Jonathan Eig
It wasn’t the baseball at all, it was the history. Like you, I learned about prohibition by learning about Babe Ruth, right? All I read was baseball stuff, so what little history I absorbed was through the baseball books. I think I can relate to that. And with Jackie Robinson’s story, I just became really curious about what it was like in ‘47, what that particular year was like. Because I knew all the stories about him, I knew all the myths. I knew all about his career with the Dodgers and the World Series, but as I got older what really got me going was thinking about this friendship with Pee Wee Reese. It’s probably what sparked the idea for me. When I realized that they weren’t such good friends in ‘47, that Jackie was really alone for that first year -- later on it got easier -- for that first year he was all alone. I wondered what it was like -- where did he live that year? I didn’t know any of that stuff, so I just became really fascinated by that.

BC
Obviously there have been a lot of books written about Jackie Robinson. What inspired you to do another one? I know that your angle here is a little bit different, but what made you think you could bring something new to the picture that we have of Jackie Robinson?

Eig
It was a challenge, there has been so much written. But I felt like lately over the years we’ve tended to mythologize him, and I felt like it was time for somebody to sort of scrape the barnacles off the story and look for the truth, just get at the bones of it. I felt like if you just focused on a really tight time period, on one year, you could really get beyond the baloney and find out just what happened. Just stick to the facts. And I was also intrigued by the fact that, you know, Rachel Robinson was still around, and she wasn’t going to be forever. She cooperated on a biography ten years ago, and it was a good biography, very good, but nobody had ever tried to force their way into that apartment with her and ask what their life was like as newlyweds, and I thought if I could get her to open up I might have a shot at doing something different.

Excerpt from Opening Day by Jonathan Eig

There have been countless articles and books written about Jackie Robinson over the past sixty years, but none with the focus of Jonathan Eig's new release, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. Eig's thoroughly researched book chronicles Robinson's rookie year, covering the drama both on and off the field. I hope you enjoy this excerpt from the book's Prologue.

April 10, 1947

The telephone rang like an alarm, waking Jackie Robinson from deep sleep.

"Hello," he mumbled.

It was early morning in Manhattan. Robinson was alone in room 1169 of the McAlpin Hotel, across the street from Macy's. He had been on edge all week, his stomach in knots. As he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, he was poised to embark on a journey -- one that would test his courage, shake the game of baseball to its roots, and forever change the face of the nation. Throughout history, heroic quests have often been launched on grand orders. "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River . . . ," wrote Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis. "The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!" General Dwight David Eisenhower exhorted his troops before the D-Day invasion. But the commanding words that sent Robinson on his way this cool, gray morning were uttered by a humble secretary.

Come to Brooklyn, she said.

Crossing the Line

There are few Americans who cannot tell you at least something about Jackie Robinson. His story has become ingrained into our cultural awareness through countless books, magazine articles, and songs detailing his heroic integration of the National League and his subsequent brilliant career. There are statues of his likeness, schools and streets bearing his name, and a plaque in baseball's Hall of Fame. He has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and there are plans for a Jackie Robinson Museum in New York City. He slides home triumphantly on a 33¢ stamp, and he even starred in a movie about his life. Thirty-five years after his death, Jackie Robinson is everywhere.

As we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, it wouldn't seem that there would be a need for another book. Thankfully for baseball fans everywhere, Jonathan Eig thought otherwise. Only two years after producing his award-winning Lou Gehrig biography, Luckiest Man, Eig returns with another outstanding effort in Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. It should be added to your reading list right now.

As suggested by the title, Eig's angle here is to focus on that historic season stretching across the spring, summer, and fall of 1947. By narrowing the view to this pivotal campaign, Eig reminds us of what we already know about Robinson while shedding light on aspects of the story that haven't been told, skillfully integrating the narrative of the baseball season with stories reflecting the social importance of Branch Rickey's "Great Experiment."

The author's stated ambition is to demythologize the story of Robinson's struggle, and he clearly achieves this goal. More importantly, however, he gives us a more detailed picture of the man before he became a legend. Leaning heavily on newspaper reports of the day and interviews with Robinson's wife Rachel and others who experienced the events of 1947 firsthand, Eig tells the story from a fresh perspective, free of the weight of the past sixty years.

Certain stories which we have come to take for granted might have been exaggerated -- or even concocted. Most notably, teammate Pee Wee Reese's famous embrace, meant to show support for Jackie in the face of abusive fans in Cincinnati, doesn't seem to have happened, at least not in 1947. Also, the threatened league-wide boycott which was rumored in the early days of the season appears to have been all smoke and no fire.

In debunking these myths, however, Eig does nothing to diminish the enduring power of Robinson's legacy. Instead, he actually strengthens it by detailing the enormous breadth of Robinson's influence, even in the early days of his career, and this is where the book shines. We have always known that as great a ballplayer as Robinson was (1949 NL MVP, 1955 World Series Champion, baseball Hall of Famer), his social and historical significance is much greater. Eig emphasizes this by telling the stories of individuals whose view of the world changed by watching Jackie's struggle. There was the white high school student who would eventually question the absence of black students at Stanford University, the black prisoner who would become one of the nation's most contraversial civil rights leaders, and the factory owner who saw Robinson's arrival in Brooklyn as a signal that he should integrate his business as well.

As triumphant as Jackie's rookie season was, Eig reminds us that he was far from the only hero. Branch Rickey took a considerable financial and social risk in pushing for integration, and Rachel Robinson was the rock that Jackie needed during his difficult year. The black press, especially Wendell Smith, served as shepherds for the entire integration process.

Jackie Robinson touched people then, and continues to be an icon today, almost fifty years after he hung up his cleats for the last time. So when you're finished reading stories this week about Major League Baseball's various tributes to Jackie Robinson, do yourself a favor and check out this book. You owe it to yourself -- and to Jackie -- to see where it all began, back when 42 was just another number.