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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
'Joe Posnanski is baseball's greatest modern-day storyteller, and his passion and expertise leap through every page of this book' New York TimesWhy We Love Baseball is the classic countdown of baseball's most memorable episodes, updated with a new introduction for the UK edition. Here are moments that forged legends -- Babe Ruth's called shot, Kirk Gibson's limping home run –- side by side with unsung heroes, gale-force tantrums and eye-watering mishaps. With baseball poised for British take-off, this is the perfect celebration of the sport's unrivalled storytelling lore.
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for patience, sunshine, and new one …
and buck, who gave them those names
CONTENTS
ix
WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL
xii
Ithink now of a baseball story.
Gaylord Perry was a Hall of Fame pitcher best known for the expansive and marvelous array of illegal pitches he threw. He threw spitballs and greaseballs, emery balls and shine balls, Vaseline balls and puffballs, hair-tonic balls and fishing-line-oil balls. Perry threw all these pitches and also pretended to throw all of them, and he fooled batters and umpires in equal measure for more than 20 years.
This, though, is a story about Gaylord Perry’s hitting.
In 1962, Perry took batting practice before his second career bigleague start. This was in Pittsburgh. Standing behind Perry in the cage was his San Francisco Giants’ manager Alvin Dark, along with a colorful sportswriter and saloonkeeper named Harry Jupiter. Dark was looking at something else when Perry hit a long fly ball. Jupiter was impressed.
“Hey, Al,” Jupiter said, “looks like this one might be a hitter!”
Dark looked up and shook his head. “Perry?” he asked loudly. “Nah. This one’s got no power. We’ll have a man on the moon before he hits a home run.”
Sure enough, for the first seven years of his career—the first 547 times he came to the plate—Perry did not hit a single home run. Then on a warm Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, Perry started against the Dodgers. The date was July 20, 1969. At 1:17 p.m. Pacific time—17 minutes after the Giants–Dodgers game started and while Perry was giving up three runs to the Dodgers in the first inning—Apollo 11’s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.
In the third inning, Gaylord Perry stepped to the plate against the Dodgers’ Claude Osteen. On the first pitch, Perry hit a long fly ball to center field, and it sailed over the fence, his first home run. He hit it exactly 34 minutes after mankind had put a man on the moon.xiii
INTRODUCTION TO THE UK EDITION
MARCH, 2024
The best book I’ve ever read about what it is to be a baseball fan is called Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby.
Now, I assume you know that FeverPitchis not at all about baseball but is instead, in a limited sense, about Hornby’s obsession with Arsenal and, in a grander sense, about the British obsession with football as a whole. The word “baseball” appears only once in the entire book, and there only as a reference to the famed Baseball Ground in Derby.
When I first read the book some twenty years ago, I had never heard of the Baseball Ground and also had no idea how to pronounce Derby. More than that, I would say that I picked up only about 32 percent of the references made in FeverPitch. I didn’t know any of the players he wrote about, didn’t know many of the clubs, missed some of the particularly British reference points and and could not directly relate to any of his experiences growing up in Maidenhead.
And yet, that book so fully and completely evoked my own feelings of growing up a baseball fan in Cleveland, a blue-collar city in Ohio known for its river which caught on fire many times and for being the punchline in any number of American movies you may have seen. Hornby’s love of the Gunners, in ways so much larger than the obvious, was precisely my own love for the Cleveland Indians.
It occurred to me then, perhaps for the first time, that our sporting hearts share a common language. You may already be a baseball fan. You may be baseball curious. You may not know or care one whit for xvthis American game and only picked up this book to squash a bug. But I desperately hope that, if you love sport, you will find yourself in here in the same way that I found myself in a British football book that referenced Ian Ure and Jimmy Husband and Ian St. John and Charlie George and The Double and the Clock End and Super Mac and so many other seemingly exotic British things that registered no recognition whatsoever in my brain.
For many years, I admit, it did baffle me a bit why FeverPitchhad such a large impact on me. I would try to explain to American friends why they should read the book, but when they said, “Nah, I don’t like soccer, it’s boring,” I couldn’t articulate to them that this didn’t just miss the point, it wasthe point. Football can be boring. Baseball can be boring. This is not something to hide from. This is something to celebrate.
Here in the States, we had a legendary sportswriter more than a half century ago named Red Smith, and he wrote, somewhat haughtily, “Baseball is a dull game only for those with dull minds.”
I’m not in love with that quote because I feel pretty strongly that baseball often IS a dull game.
But then it isn’t. And that’s the magic of it.
Hornby got this precisely. He didn’t claim that football is always brilliant and thrilling. He wrote about “all those terrible nil-nil draws against Newcastle” and I thought about all those bleak Cleveland baseball games against the Chicago White Sox, and I fully realized that without them football wouldn’t be football and baseball wouldn’t be baseball. How can you appreciate the dazzling days without the dreary ones? This book contains more than 100 of the most wonderful moments in the history of baseball, but without millions of anticlimaxes—long fly balls that died just before the fence, comebacks that ended too soon, dreadful games decided by a fielding error or a four-pitch walk—they wouldn’t mean much at all.
My hope is that, no matter your relation to baseball, you will find that familiar. xvi
And then a few years ago, I was sent to Lancashire to write a story about the newest club in the Premier League, Burnley. By this point, I did know some more about football than I had when I first read Fever Pitch, but only some. I knew nothing of Burnley, nothing of its ancient history, nothing of the Orient Game or Bob Lord or Harry Potts or even that they were called the Clarets. Everything about Burnley should have felt entirely foreign to me.
Yet: all of it felt utterly and completely familiar. To be a fan of Burnley was, I saw, so much like being a fan of the Chicago Cubs or a fan of the Kansas City Royals or a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers. The triumph felt the same. The suffering felt the same. The reverence for history was the same as was the hope for the future.
I’ve heard from friends in the UK that the way to introduce this book and baseball to a British audience is to make various comparisons to cricket, what with them both being bat and ball sports and with their shared history. And I’ve heard from many other friends in the UK that there would literally be no worse way to introduce this book to an English audience than to list off vacuous and superficial resemblances such as “baseball has a pitcher while cricket has a bowler.” And I fear that’s about the extent of what I could manage since I know even less about cricket than I do football.
Instead, I’ll leave this here. Baseball can be complicated, yes, but one of its many wonders, I believe, is that you don’t have to understand its complexities to fall in love. A pitcher throws the baseball. A batter tries to hit it. Fielders try to catch the ball. A ball that goes over the fence is a home run. And all the rest is history and storytelling and connection and strategy and tension and family and hilarity and joy and heartache. Here, then, are the most magical moments in baseball history … and why we love this game so much.xvii
INTRODUCTION TO THE US EDITION
OCTOBER 23, 2022
I write these words in the afterglow. The Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres just finished a wild and wonderful playoff game. You can still see the goose bumps on my arms. The Padres led the game by a run in the eighth inning; they were trying to extend the National League Championship Series. The Phillies, meanwhile, were trying to end it. Philadelphia fans were soaked—it had been raining pretty much the whole game—and they were hoarse and manic and utterly desperate for a hero.
Up stepped Bryce Harper.
TherewaseaseinCasey’smannerashesteppedintohisplace;
TherewasprideinCasey’sbearingandasmilelitCasey’sface.
A man named Ernest Lawrence Thayer wrote those words—and the entire poem, “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic”—in 1888. Do you know how long ago 1888 was? It was long before iPhones and television, long before movies, long before radio, yes. But it was also before air conditioning, vacuum cleaners, cardboard boxes, and ice cream cones. It was before “America the Beautiful” or “God Bless America” was written and some four decades before “The Star-Spangled Banner” became America’s national anthem.xx
How long ago? Sherlock Holmes debuted only a year earlier. Dracula didn’t exist. Harry Houdini was a factory worker named Erich Weisz. Walt Disney wasn’t born. Henry Ford had not yet built his first automobile. The Wright Brothers were trying to start a newspaper. That year, 1888, was before Hershey’s bars and Wrigley’s gum, before Coca-Cola and credit cards and the paper clip. The zipper had not been invented.
And in sports? There was no modern Olympics. Basketball had not been conceived. There wasn’t a single 18-hole golf course on American soil. Football was being played by only a handful of universities, and the forward pass did not yet exist.
But in 1888, already, there was baseball—joyful and recognizable major league baseball. A pitcher named Tim Keefe won 19 consecutive games. Cap Anson led the league by hitting .344. A slick-fielding second baseman called Sure Shot Dunlap signed for the unheard-of price of $5,000,* the biggest contract in baseball history.
In “Casey,” Thayer was writing about his own time. But his words still rang true as Harper stepped to the plate 134 years later.
San Diego’s pitcher was named Robert Suarez, and he was very much a modern creation, a type of pitcher Thayer could not have imagined. He stood 6-foot-2, 210 pounds, and he threw so hard that there was nothing to compare it to in 1888.
Suarez’s first pitch was 100 mph, and it raced by Harper for a strike.
Fromthebenches,blackwithpeople,therewentupamuffledroar,
Likethebeatingofthestorm-wavesonasternanddistantshore;
The two men battled for a time after that. Suarez threw two kinds of pitches—a 100-mph fastball and a changeup that, coming out of his hand, looked to be going 100 mph but was actually moving 10 mph slower. This second pitch made hitters look ridiculous.
xxiBryce Harper, meanwhile, was destined for this moment. He had been a baseball prodigy. He was on the cover of SportsIllustrated at 15. He was the first pick in the baseball draft at 17. He was Rookie of the Year at 19. He was the National League’s most valuable player at 22.
He signed with Philadelphia for the largest contract ever handed out, $330 million in all, quite a journey from Sure Shot Dunlap.
“At the end of the day,” Harper said on the day he signed, “I want to be able to go to sleep and know that I gave it my all and was able to bring back a title to Philadelphia.”
This was Harper’s moment to make good.
Andnowthepitcherholdstheball,andnowheletsitgo,
AndnowtheairisshatteredbytheforceofCasey’sblow.
Suarez threw a 99-mph fastball. It was close to the outside corner of the plate … it does not seem possible to hit such a pitch. But Harper connected, and he knew that he’d hit it well. He stopped and watched it with his mouth open. That’s a wonderful time for hitters, that instant when only they know just how well they’d hit the baseball.
It took everyone else in the ballpark only a second to catch up. The ball soared to left field and Harper watched the ball fly into the stands, and all together the city of Philadelphia made a sound of incomprehensible joy.
I thought to myself—and surely I was not alone—God,Ilove baseball.
weknowthereasonssomedonotlovebaseball. it’sa slow game with lots of meetings, lots of standing around, lots of aimless jogging on and off the field. Over the past 25 or so years, the game slowed to the point that Major League Baseball changed a series of rules just to get the players to pick things up. Baseball can feel repetitive, xxiione ground ball to second looking just like the rest. There is no clock—other than the new pitch timer—and games sometimes drone on interminably, and there always seems to be some scandal going on.
Baseball has no slam dunks, no breakaways, and little violence. There is no goal and no goal line, no basket, and no finish line. There are no blocked shots, no blindside hits, no blocked punts, no electrifying runs, no alley-oop passes, no kick saves, and no bicycle kicks.
Baseball does have math, though. Lots of math.
“You made me love baseball,” Lisa tells Bart on The Simpsons. “Not as a collection of numbers but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport.”
With all that, why do we love baseball?
I asked around.
“I love baseball,” Willie Mays said, “because it’s a game you can play every day.”
“For me,” Bryce Harper said, “I think it just began by being able to go out with my family, enjoy a game of catch. There was nothing better than going out on a Saturday and hanging out and smelling the weather and the fresh-cut grass, crack of the bat, and you’re dreaming …”
“You have to understand,” Henry Aaron said, “in Mobile, Alabama, where I grew up, we didn’t have many things to do. In fact, we didn’t have anything to do. You either had to play baseball or you probably taught school or did something else. So I loved baseball. I just felt like it was made for me.”
“Why?” Theo Epstein asked. “I honestly don’t know. My parents tell me that from the age of two on, I was just obsessed with baseball … They say I’d be down in Central Park, swinging the Wiffle Ball bat, and the crowds would gather because I’d be hitting homers, which I doubt is true. But if it is, that was the peak of my athletic career.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Justin Verlander said. “I don’t ever remember not loving baseball.”
Those are not exactlyanswers. If someone asked why you like a TV xxiiishow, you probably would talk about the plot or the characters or the acting or the writing or the setting or the costuming. Something specific. If someone asked you why you like a band, you might talk about the lyrics or the drummer’s awesomeness or the singer’s voice …
With baseball, it’s not so straightforward. I’ve asked the question to hundreds of people while writing this book. Some came back with simple things. Crack of the bat. Triple in the gap. Smell of the freshly mown grass. A dancing knuckleball.
One fan told me about his first baseball game—not the action on the field but the feeling of climbing up the stairs from the concourse and seeing the stadium open up to him. The colors of the sky and grass and dirt and seats overwhelmed him and stayed with him. He said it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Another told me about a Little League moment he remembered. He grabbed a bat and nervously walked toward the plate to face a pitcher roughly the size of LeBron James. He heard the other team’s chatter (“Ayyy, batter, batter, batter, batter, swing!”), and heard his own team’s chatter (“He’s got nothing! … We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher!”) and he looked down to the third-base coach for some advice (“Pick out a good one!”) and he stepped into the batter’s box and saw his pitch and closed his eyes and swung … and felt that incomparable sensation of making good contact.
Is that a direct answer? No.
Does it explain why we love baseball? Absolutely it does.
A woman told me about the combination of terror and elation she felt as a foul ball soared her way in the stands. A man talked about the giddy anticipation he felt holding an unopened pack of baseball cards. Several told me that the best night’s sleep they ever had was when they slept on a mattress that pressed down on a freshly oiled baseball glove, breaking it in.
Why do you love baseball? People talked about the thrill of watching Roberto Clemente throw, watching Tony Gwynn hit, watching Rickey xxivHenderson run, watching Greg Maddux paint the outside corner with a pitch. People told me about baseball conversations with their grandfathers about players with fabulous names like Pee Wee Reese or Cool Papa Bell. People told me about the familiar joy of listening to a hometown announcer call a baseball game over the radio.
“I saw Carlton Fisk hit that home run on television in Game 6 of the World Series,” one fan said, “and I was forever hooked on baseball.”
“One moment hooked you forever?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “That moment is forever.”
when i was a kid in cleveland, 9 or 10 or 11 years old, there was a library around the corner from our house. I loved the place. Two or three times a week, minimum, I would walk over to see if they had any new sports books. They rarely did. But every now and again, a new one would magically appear on the shelf, and when that happened, whatever the sport—sometimes it was a hockey book, and I didn’t know anything about hockey—I would feel this boundless joy and excitement.
This is the book I always hoped would be on the shelf.
This is a book of forever moments. We are counting down the 50 most magical baseball moments, and it’s no coincidence that I have used the word magical a couple of times already. There have been baseball moment countdowns before, countdowns of the most important moments in baseball history, the most consequential moments, the most dramatic moments, the moments that changed the game and so on.
This ranking is a bit less tidy. There are important moments in here, naturally, and also consequential and dramatic and game-changing moments. But there are also moments that are none of those things. Some are silly. Some are virtually unknown.xxv
All are magical or, to use my favorite definition of magical, “beautiful or delightful in such a way as to seem removed from everyday life.”
That’s what we’re going for here. These are moments that have exhilarated us, enchanted us, lifted us, and, yes, broken our hearts. These are moments that have for more than a century made people fall in love with baseball.
I said there are 50 moments, but now that you have the book, I can let you in on a little secret. There are more than 50 in here. A lot more. Yes, the countdown goes from No. 50 all the way down to No. 1, and you will undoubtedly have disagreements with the order and with what’s missing. That’s part of the fun.†
But every so often we’re going to interrupt the countdown with five bonus baseball memories. We’ll talk about five unlikely homers, five baseball trick plays, five baseball moments that melt the heart, five blunders that will never be forgotten, and so on.
In all, there are 108 moments and memories. Even that number is magical. There are 108 stitches on one side of a baseball. The Cubs’ World Series drought lasted 108 years. Some physicists did a study and determined that Nolan Ryan threw the fastest pitch ever recorded at 108 mph. The Big Red Machine—the 1975 Reds—is, I believe, the greatest team of them all. They won 108 games.
Hey, you paid for 50 moments, and you get 108! What a bargain!
onefinalthought:in1992,iplayedastrat-o-matic World Series with my friend Jim Banks. Strat-O-Matic is a tabletop baseball game that uses dice and specially designed player cards to xxvicreate a lifelike baseball simulation. We were obsessed with it. Jim managed the 1988 Cincinnati Reds. I managed the 1988 Boston Red Sox.
We had played and would play many other Strat-O-Matic series, but this was the big one, the series that would, once and for all, determine which one of us was the better manager. Nothing mattered more to us. Jim won three of the first four games, and he was about to win the clinching game and bragging rights for the rest of our lives. His Reds led 2–0 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. My Red Sox put two runners on.
And up came Dwight Evans, a good hitter and excellent outfielder who I believe belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jim had a critical decision to make. His starter, Tom Browning, had been incredible. But Jim also had John Franco and Rob Dibble throwing in the bullpen, and both of those guys were close to unhittable in 1988.
Jim hesitated and wavered and vacillated like he was Hamlet. It must have taken him 20 minutes to decide what to do. Then he made his choice. He stayed with Tom Browning.
And Dwight Evans hit a walk-off three-run homer, and my Red Sox came all the way back and won the Series, and I have never let Jim live it down, and nothing makes me happier than the fact that it’s now in a book for people to read forever.
See, our most magical baseball moments are sometimes our most personal ones. A Little League home run. An unforgettable play at the ballpark. A visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A conversation with a baseball hero. I wish I could have written about every one of your most magical baseball moments. I hope some are in here.
And Dwight Evans, if you are reading this, thank you forever.
* Equivalent to $156,847.37 in 2023 dollars.
† Ever since I wrote TheBaseball100, I’d say 94 percent of all my conversations have begun with “How could you leave out Jim Palmer?” and “How could you have Ichiro so low?” and so on. It will be nice to have people screaming, “Why is the Bobby Thomson homer so low?” and “How could you leave out Enos Slaughter’s Mad Dash?” for a change of pace.
FIVE UNLIKELY HOMERS
The Gaylord Perry Moon Shot moment that leads off this book may be my favorite unlikely homer. It’s my go-to whenever someone asks for a baseball story. There are few things more thrilling in the game than the unlikely home run.
You know about Gaylord. Here are four more:
RICKCAMP(JULY4,1985)
“People thought Rick couldn’t hit,” Dale Murphy is saying. “But they didn’t see Rick the way we teammates did. They didn’t see him take batting practice. They didn’t see him swing in the cage.”
Dale, a two-time most valuable player, smiled.
“They thought he couldn’t hit,” he continued. “But we knewhe couldn’t hit.”
Rick Camp was a multi-use pitcher for the Braves between 1976 and 1985. Sometimes he started. Sometimes he relieved. He threw a heavy sinker that could be quite effective.
But as a hitter—no.
Flash to one of the wildest games in baseball history, an Independence Day extravaganza between the Braves and the New York Mets in Atlanta. Forty-four thousand fans showed up, mostly to catch 2fireworks after the game. None of them knew that the fireworks would not go off until four or so the next morning.
The game was delayed by rain, and then the game jumped around like microwave popcorn. The Mets led, the Braves led, the Mets led, the Braves led; then in the top of the ninth the Mets tied the game off future Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter. Extra innings. The Mets scored two in the 13th. The Braves also scored two in the 13th. On it went.
Finally in the 18th inning—at about three the morning of July 5—the Mets scored off Rick Camp and it finally looked like the game would end. The first two Atlanta batters in the 18th inning made outs and that brought up Camp. Under any other circumstances, the Braves would have pinch-hit for him. Camp was a lifetime .059 hitter. He’d not had a hit all year.
The Mets’ Tom Gorman was pitching. Catcher Gary Carter waved the outfielders in … and he just kept on waving even as they got closer and closer. Mets pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre jogged to the mound and Gorman expected some scouting advice or a pep talk. Instead Stottlemyre said, “You better get him out.” Then he jogged back to the dugout.
Up in the Atlanta Braves’ broadcasting booth, John Sterling said to his partner Ernie Johnson Sr.: “Ernie, if he hits a home run to tie this game, this game will be certified as absolutely the nuttiest in the history of baseball.”
Gorman got ahead in the count 0-2. He then threw a pitch up and Camp swung as hard as he could … and he connected. He hit his first big-league home run in the 18th inning of a meaningless game between Atlanta and New York … and no one in Atlanta will ever forget it.
“That,” Atlanta catcher Bruce Benedict would say, “was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.”
There’s one more fun part to this: The Braves lost anyway in the very next inning. The last batter of the game was, yes, Rick Camp. He struck out. Then the Braves shot off fireworks for the few fans who remained at the end, sparking hundreds of complaints to the Atlanta police department. 3
TOMLAWLESS(OCTOBER21,1987)
In his career as a utility infielder and pinch runner, Tom Lawless hit three big-league home runs. He was such a mediocre hitter that once, a Phillies relief pitcher named Tom Hume walked him … and Hume was released two days later.
One of Lawless’s three homers came in the 1987 World Series.
He hit it off Minnesota ace Frank Viola, who would later call his pitch a “brutal, brutal fastball.” The improbability of the home run was trumped by Lawless’s even more improbable reaction. After he hit the ball, he walked slowly up the first-base line with the bat still in his hand. He just stared at the ball as it flew, the sort of thing Barry Bonds or Reggie Jackson might have done after hitting a 500-foot blast.
Was this a 500-foot blast? No, not even close.
“I think it hit about one foot over the fence,” Cardinals’ manager Whitey Herzog would say.
But even the strut was not the best part. No, the best part was that after the ball barely cleared the fence, and only then, Lawless flung the bat high in the air, like a cap thrown on graduation day, one of the more demonstrative celebrations in baseball history. If we were ranking top bat flips, this one would be in the top five. It broke at least a half dozen unwritten rules of baseball etiquette. “That was something strange to do, seeing that he’s hit two home runs in his career,” his teammate Gary Gaetti would say. “If I was pitching, I wouldn’t forget it.”
Lawless pleaded insanity. “I didn’t mean anything, I just kind of blanked out there for a second,” he said. “This never happened to me before.”
ALWEIS(OCTOBER16,1969)
By the time Al Weis came to the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning on a Thursday afternoon in New York—Game 5 of the 1969 World Series—he was already an unlikely hometown hero. He grew up 23 miles from Shea Stadium. He had been in the big leagues for seven years, an 4impressive accomplishment considering he could not hit. What he did was play excellent defense wherever needed, bunt upon request, and never complain.
“The best gag about Weis,” Milton Gross wrote, “is that if he were hit on the elbow with a fastball, he wouldn’t even say ‘Ouch.’”
Weis’s bat played a wildly unlikely role in the 1969 Miracle Mets run to the World Series. He hit only two home runs all season, but he hit them in back-to-back games against the league-leading Chicago Cubs. The Mets went on to catch the Cubs and win the pennant.
Then, in the World Series, Weis hit like he never had before. He singled off Baltimore’s Dave McNally to drive in the winning run in Game 2. He got two more hits and drew a walk in Game 4. The Orioles couldn’t get him out. Then came Game 5, and the Orioles led by a run going into the seventh inning. McNally was pitching again, and he missed his spot. Weis turned on it and hit the ball out to tie the game. The Mets completed the comeback and won one of the most surprising and wonderful World Series titles of them all.
After the game, Weis was asked how he did it. Naturally, he didn’t say anything. But his teammate Bud Harrelson did:
“When Al hit that home run,” Harrelson said, “I knew we had ’em.”
BARTOLO COLÓN (MAY 7, 2016)
“He drives one! Deep left field! Back goes Upton. Back near the wall! It’s outta here! Bartolo has done it. The impossible has happened…. The team vacates the dugout as Bartolo takes the long trot. His first career home run…. This is one of the great moments in the history of baseball. Bartolo Colón has gone deep.”
—METS’ BROADCASTER GARY COHEN
OK, look, a big part of the joy is how four-time All-Star pitcher Bartolo Colón looked. He looked like me. He looked like you. He was 42 years 5old, and the media guide charitably listed him at 285 pounds. Ah, if only we all had a media guide to underestimate our true weight. Bartolo was shaped like a rectangle, and if you saw him walking around in the mall, you’d think, Thatguy’sprobablythehighschoolhistoryteachereverybodyatschoollikes.The notion of his being a baseball player would never enter your mind.
It goes without saying he was an atrocious hitter; goes without saying he’d never hit a home run or come close. He was hitting .088 for his career and had struck out one of every two times he came to the plate. He had not gotten a hit all season.
James Shields was pitching for San Diego. He threw a fastball. Colón swung as hard as he could. The ball left the park. The moment was so intoxicating that even Shields himself got caught up in it.
“I’m happy for him,” Shields said.
There are two things I love most about the home run. First is that his home run trot took him 30.5 seconds. That is longer than it took the injured Kirk Gibson to limp around the bases after his 1988 World Series home run.
“I want to say,” Mets’ announcer Ron Darling said, “that was one of the longest home run trots I’ve ever seen. But I think that’s how fast he runs.”
Second is the quote that Colón gave after the game when he explained his hitting approach. “Anytime I see a fastball, I swing hard,” he said, “because I’m not a curveball hitter.”6
NO. 50:
THE REAL DUANE KUIPER
august 29, 1977, cleveland
Baseball is the best it has been and the best it will ever be when you’re 10 years old.
I was 10 years old in the summer of 1977 when Duane Kuiper hit his one home run.
Kuip was my hero. He was second baseman for my hometown Cleveland ballclub at the same time that I was second baseman for Reno, my South Euclid Youth Baseball Team. Oddly, our team did not have a nickname. We were just Reno. We were either named after the Biggest Little City in the World or Reno Browne, a 1940s B-movie actress who was married to the famous cowboy Lash LaRue.
Duane Kuiper and I shared more than just a position. I loved the way he played. He dived for every ball … and I do mean, everyball. If you hit the ball straight at him, he dived for it. If you played catch in your backyard anywhere in America in 1977, Kuip probably dived for that ball too. He played the game with verve and love, and OK, maybe he didn’t hit with a lot of power and maybe he wasn’t the fastest guy out there,* but he exuded joy, and my grandest dream was to be just like him.
He hit his one home run on a Monday night. Cleveland was playing the Chicago White Sox at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, a mausoleum that smelled of stale beer and and broken dreams. Cleveland Municipal was strategically constructed to place steel beams in front of every fan in the ballpark.
8I was not at the game—there were 6,236 people there, a sizeable crowd for Cleveland baseball in those days—so I listened to the broadcast on WWWE, 1100 on your AM radio dial. I listened while sitting on the beige carpeting in our so-called living room—we were rarely even allowed in there—and leaning against the speaker of the enormous Zenith music console my parents had bought on payments. That console was a dark wood, and it was the size of a coffin, and it looked like a coffin. The muffled voices of Cleveland broadcasters Herb Score and Joe Tait sounded like they might be trapped inside.
Herb Score was one of the greatest young pitchers in baseball history until he got hit in the eye by a Gil McDougald line drive, but I didn’t know this until much later. Herb was much too modest to ever talk about his playing days. I’d describe Herb’s announcing style as cheerful and just slightly confused, sort of like your grandfather calling a game. He began every broadcast by saying, “It’s a beautiful day for baseball.” Then, he’d go on, doing the best he could.
“Hey, Herb,” a partner said, “that hit makes Cecil Cooper 19 for 42 against Tribe pitching.”
“I’m not good at math,” Herb replied. “But even I know that’s over .500.”
South Euclid’s own Steve Stone was pitching for the White Sox. Kuip was the second batter of the game. On the second pitch, Stone threw a pitch he would call “a slider that did not slide.” Duane Kuiper did something entirely out of character. He turned on it.
“That’s headed for the wall,” Herb’s broadcast partner, Joe Tait, shouted, and then with a magnificent blend of shock and awe he added: “It’s gone! Duane Kuiper has just hit his first major league home run! How about that!”
“Hey,” Herb said, “look at Duane running those bases!”
“Oh, is he one happy ballplayer!” Tait said.
I didn’t hear that last part because I, too, was running around the bases, imaginary ones in the living room, and I shouted and howled 9until my mother told me to quiet down because she was watching the ABC comedy special McNamara’s Band with John Byner.
“Did you know it was gone when you hit it?” reporters asked Kuip after the game.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think any ball I hit is gone.”
That was it. After Duane hit the homer, he came up another 2,371 more times but he never hit another one. One home run in 3,754 plate appearances. Much later, after he had become a beloved broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, the team held a special Duane Kuiper day. And they gave the fans a bobblehead of Kuip hitting the home run.
ihavetotellsomethingelseeventhoughit’snotdirectly related to the homer. As mentioned, Kuip did become an adored broadcaster in San Francisco.
Along the way, Kuip found out that I was his biggest fan. I mean, it was no secret—I wrote about him all the time. So, one day he found my wife Margo’s email—she was writing a parenting blog at the time—and explained that he wanted to send me something. Margo is a casual baseball fan; all she knew about Duane Kuiper was that he was my hero.
“I’m assuming that you’re the real Duane Kuiper,” she wrote back to him, “though in today’s internet age, it’s not always so easy to tell.”
Kuip loved that so much. He was not expecting anyone to ever think he was pretending to be Duane Kuiper.
“It’s hard for me to say, with a straight face, that I’m the real Duane Kuiper,” he wrote. “So, I’ll say it with a smile. I’m the real Duane Kuiper.”
Anyway, not long after, I got a package in the mail with an authentic game-used Duane Kuiper bat, an authentic game-used Duane Kuiper cap, and various other priceless items.
“I’ve come to realize that my family doesn’t think this stuff is as cool as I think it is,” he wrote.10
My friends, almost all of them, had childhood baseball heroes who were better players than my Duane Kuiper. They idolized Tom Seaver and George Brett and Reggie Jackson and Wade Boggs and Frank Thomas and players like that.
I wouldn’t trade my hero for all of them put together.
Why do I love baseball? I’m going to go and swing my Duane Kuiper bat and think about it.
* Kuip was caught stealing more times than he was successful, a rare feat.
NO. 49:
KERRY AND THE BLEACHER BUMS
may 6, 1998, chicago
In 1977, a struggling actor named Joe Mantegna did his favorite thing. He went to a Cubs game and sat in the bleachers of Wrigley Field. He looked around; it was all so wonderfully familiar. There was Len, who owned a clothes store. Before long, Joe knew, Len would take off his shirt and wrap it around his head in a turban.
There was a kid—Ronny, Robby; Joe wasn’t sure of the name—and he seemed to know everything. People would challenge him with trivia questions. “Hey, Robby [or Ronny],” they’d say, “name fifteen Republican senators from west of the Mississippi.” Two to one, he’d get it right.
There was the guy who would constantly spill food or beer on himself, and a woman in a bikini sunbathing, and three blind men who kept up with the action better than anybody else. One of those guys, Craig Lynch, became a Cubs radio reporter for two decades.
Mantegna looked at the Bleacher Bums, his people, and it was a gorgeous sunny day, and the Cubs were losing, like always, and he thought, This ought to be a play.
Together with his friends at the Organic Theater in Chicago, he did write a play called Bleacher Bums. It has been performed across America. It continues to be performed still.
Twenty-one years later, Mantegna—by now a Tony Award–winning actor and successful movie star—returned to Chicago along with the BleacherBumsoriginal cast. They came back to perform the play for a National Public Radio recording. The Cubs invited the whole group out to Wrigley for a game between the Cubs and Astros. 12
“It was a meaningless game,” Joe says. “A nothing game. Early May. It was cold and it felt like it would rain any minute. Wrigley was more than half empty. The kids weren’t even out of school yet. I do remember there were a few kids at the ballpark, no doubt skipping school like I did when I was their age. But beyond that, there wasn’t much energy in the place.
“And I was like, ‘Who’s pitching anyway?’
“And they said, ‘Yeah, we have this kid, Kerry Wood.’”
whowas kerrywood?right:hewasthelatestcubsphenom. This was just his fifth big-league start, but the Chicago hype machine was in motion. The Cubs always had someone like Wood, some future star everybody was kvelling about. Joe’s favorite phenom was a big first baseman in the 1970s, Pete LaCock.* He was supposed to be the next big thing. Didn’t happen.
But, hey, it never happened for Cubs prospects. Terry Hughes? Brian Rosinski? Dean Burk? Scot Thompson? Jackie Davidson? Herman Segelke? Ty Griffin? Earl Cunningham? Oh, Cunningham was a beaut. I saw him play at Lancaster High School. He would hit home runs that would sail over the fence, across a street, and into a strip mall. It was jawdropping. One scout told me Cunningham was the best hitting prospect he’d ever seen. But he, like the other Cubs hopefuls, didn’t pan out. Why not? As one scout said, Cunningham had two weaknesses: curveballs and McDonald’s.
Kerry Wood was the next in line. He threw so hard. His curveball broke hard. People were comparing him to Nolan Ryan. But, yes, he was displaying some troubling Cubs tendencies. A week earlier, he pitched 13against the Dodgers. He walked four batters in a row, then gave up a grand slam to Mike Piazza.
“Sure, I wanted to see the kid,” Joe says. “But I wasn’t holding my breath.”
The Astros’ first batter of the game was Craig Biggio, one of the toughest outs in baseball. With the count 2-2, Wood threw a … well, it’s hard to describe what exactly he threw. Satchel Paige used to say he never threw an illegal pitch in his life. “The trouble is,” he said, “once in a while, I toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
It was like that. Wood threw a never-been-seen-by-this-generation pitch, a fastball, probably 100 mph, only about halfway home it appeared to hit a sheet of ice. It jumped forward. Biggio swung after the ball was already in catcher Sandy Martínez’s glove.
“That’s one of the worst swings you will eversee Craig Biggio take,” said Cubs’ broadcaster (and the guy who gave up the homer to Duane Kuiper) Steve Stone.
Mantegna, sitting next to his Bleacher Bums co-actors, thought, What do we have here?
outinthebleachers,atruebelievernamed tom Bujnowski had brought with him an assortment of K cards† so that the crowd could help him count Kerry Wood’s strikeouts.
“How many K cards did you bring?” someone asked Bujnowski.
“Sixteen,” he said.
Sixteen. Yes, that will tell you a little something about Tom Bujnowski. He was a physical education teacher at MacArthur Middle School up in Arlington Heights, but that was only his job. His life was 14being the rarest sort of Cubs fan: Tom was an optimistic Cubs fan. Only an optimist would bring sixteenstrikeout cards to a game being pitched by a 20-year-old Cubs’ rookie making his fifth big-league start. The last Cubs’ pitcher to strike out sixteen batters in a game had been Jack “The Giant Killer” Pfiester back in 1906, before Wrigley Field was even built.
But Wood struck out all three batters he faced in the first inning, another two in the second, one more in the third, and two more in the fourth. He had eight strikeouts through four innings.
In the fifth, Wood started to feel in control. He struck out Moisés Alou on a fastball, then threw three mind-bending and time-bending curveballs to Dave Clark (who didn’t swing at any of them), and then blew the ball by Ricky Gutierrez. After getting one strikeout in the sixth, he struck out the side in the seventh—including his third strikeout of future Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell. That gave him fifteen strikeouts with six outs to go.
Bujnowski, impossibly, realized that he was about to run out of K cards.
aspartofhisvisittowrigleyfield,joe mantegnaagreed to lead the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” … just the way legendary Cubs’ announcer Harry Caray had. Caray had died three months earlier at age 83. Mantegna, like all Cubs fans, loved him.
“Well, I think Harry would approve,” Joe said as the organ began to play. “I dedicate this to all the bleacher bums, past, present and future!”
He sang his heart out. And when finished, immediately after singing “at the old ball game,” he added his own flourish: “All right! Go, Kerry!”
He then joined the announcers in the television booth.
“This Kerry Wood,” Mantegna said, “it sure looks like he’s got the real stuff.”15
Below, Wood threw a curveball that had Dave Clark swinging at shadows and ghosts. That was strikeout No. 16.
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Steve Stone said.
He threw a fastball on the outside corner that Ricky Gutierrez swung through feebly.
Next was Brad Ausmus, who was so spooked by the moment that he swung at a pitch that bounced at least two feet in front of home plate. That was strike two. He then looked at a curveball for strike three. That was strikeout No. 18.
Out in the bleachers, Tom Bujnowski had used up all 16 of his K cards, but wily Cub fan that he was, he convinced two bleacher bums to paint Ks on their chests.
joe mantegnadidnotjustbringalongtheoriginalcast of BleacherBums,he also brought out his older brother Ron, who worked in advertising for Montgomery Ward.
“Can you believe this?” Ron asked his brother. He was in tears.
The Astros’ first batter in the ninth was a pinch hitter, Bill Spiers, who fouled off a couple of pitches before swinging and missing at a curve. Nineteen strikeouts. The record for strikeouts in a game was 20, held by Roger Clemens. Kerry Wood had two chances to tie the record and one chance to break it.
Up came Craig Biggio, who this time put wood on the ball and grounded out to short. Chicago boos crashed down upon him. The rain had stopped. “Goose bumps” was all Mantegna could remember.
The last batter was Derek Bell. He looked pale. Wood threw him a curveball; Bell swung and missed it by 3 feet. Wood threw him a second curveball, and Bell tried to hold up his swing but could not.
“One more curveball,” Steve Stone said up in the booth, “and that should be about it, because Derek Bell isn’t even coming close.”
Wood threw that one more curveball. Bell swung and missed. 16
That was strikeout No. 20. Kerry Wood was 20 years old. The twentieth person in the Wrigley Field bleachers stood up with a K painted on his chest.
“What did we do?” Mantegna says all these years later. “What do you think we did? We all went nuts. I mean, you go to Wrigley Field to see a Cubs game, and you’re expecting it to be fun. But you aren’t expecting to see something you’ll never forget. You aren’t expecting to see history. That’s baseball, right? I mean, you never know. Even at a Cubs game.”
* Joe particularly loved that LaCock was the son of game show host and television personality Peter Marshall. He even wrote LaCock into Bleacher Bums: “Gee, Pete LaCock’s father’s named Peter Marshall. Who do you think changed his name? You know who changed his name!”
† You probably know this, but K is the way that you mark a strikeout in the scorebook. Nobody is entirely sure why, but it might be that S begins so many other baseball things (single, sacrifice, stolen base, etc.) and K is clearly the most unique letter in the word strikeout.
NO. 48:
A KNUCKLEBALL STORY
april 9, 2010, plant city, florida
You cannot write a book called WhyWeLoveBaseballwithout a knuckleball story in it. Here’s one you might not know.
The story begins in a backyard in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in the early 1950s. The backyard belonged to Phil Niekro Jr. When he was young, he could throw very hard; he might have been a big leaguer but he needed to work to support his family, so he took a job in the coal mines. While pitching for the company team, he hurt his arm.
He still wanted to pitch, though.
One of the other coal miners taught him how to throw a knuckleball.
Ah, the knuckleball. Nothing in the whole world like it. Willie Stargell called the knuckleball a butterfly with hiccups. Bobby Murcer said hitting one is like eating Jell-O with chopsticks. Tim McCarver said catching one is like trying to seize a moth with tweezers.
“There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball,” acclaimed batting coach Charley Lau said. “Unfortunately, neither of them works.”
As a baseball fan, you have surely put together that Phil Niekro Jr. was the father of Phil Niekro III, who would become perhaps the greatest knuckleball pitcher in the game’s history. He learned that pitch from his father in that backyard and would go on to win 300 games. His knuckleball danced so unpredictably that nobody even wanted to catch him. Bob Uecker took on the task one year and had 23 passed balls in 15 Niekro starts.
“The easiest way to catch the knuckleball,” Uecker later told Johnny 18Carson on The Tonight Show, “is to wait for it to stop rolling and then pick it up.”
But this story is not about Phil. No, it begins with Phil’s brother Joe, who was five years younger. Joe also learned how to throw the knuckleball in that backyard, and while he might not have been quite as good as Phil, he was plenty good. He won 221 games in a 22-year career.
Joe, though, sometimes needed a little extra help. In 1987, for example, he was pitching a game against the Angels, and the knuckleball was breaking every law of gravity, so much so that umpire Tim Tschida started to think that maybe Joe was doctoring the baseball.
Tschida approached Joe. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. It is timelessly funny, kind of like a Marx Brothers movie. Tschida asked to check out Niekro’s glove, and Niekro tossed it to him haphazardly. If this had been a silent movie, the words Yougotnothin’onme,copper!might have popped up on the screen.
Tschida looked over the glove. Meanwhile, Joe stealthily dug his hands into the back pockets of his pants. Crew chief Dave Phillips thought that suspicious and said, “Hey, whatcha hiding back there?”
Niekro acted even more hurt by these allegations. He innocently held out his hands to show that he had nothing. But Phillips was unconvinced. “I want to see what he’s got back there in his pocket,” he yelled at Twins’ manager Tom Kelly. Niekro then pulled out a lineup card, and Phillips said something like: “No, I want to see everythingyou have back there.”
Then Niekro did something so magnificent and wonderful, it makes me smile every single time I think about it. He reached into his back pockets and turned them inside out to show they were empty. But while doing that, in one motion, he clearly threw a couple of items away.
What items? Well, he threw away an emery board. And he threw away some sandpaper.
You could not get two better tools for doctoring a baseball.19
When the umpires picked those up, Joe brilliantly pantomimed: “I’ve never seen those objects in my life!” He got tossed from the game. But it was not all bad. Joe ended up on LateNightwithDavidLetterman. He brought out an electric power sander and wire brush with him.
And we’re only getting started with our story here.
joeandphil niekrohavetherecordformostwinsby brothers,* with a total of 539.† But Joe also has an accomplishment all his own. He pitched 20 postseason innings without giving up a single run. That’s an MLB record.
Joe Niekro was 43 years old when he threw his last pitch for the Minnesota Twins. After that, he settled in Plant City, Florida, the Winter Strawberry Capital of the World and home to Cincinnati Reds’ spring training. He kept a low profile, showed up for some charity events, watched his son Lance play for the San Francisco Giants. He also coached some kids around the neighborhood. His younger son J.J. was playing Little League, and Joe would come out to the games, always smiling, always positive. Sometimes, when the kids asked nicely, he’d even throw them a few knuckleballs, which always made them laugh.
This was especially true for one player. Her name was Chelsea Baker.
Joe liked her right away. She was quiet but still feisty—undaunted about playing on a boys’ team—and she wasn’t a bad little pitcher. She asked him a few times to teach her how to throw a knuckleball. “He always told me it was a secret,” she says. “But one day he finally said, ‘OK, here’s how you do it.’”
At first her hands were so small that she had to use three fingers to 20hold the ball rather than the normal two. Still, she could make the ball move. Joe showed her how to make the ball come out with barely any spin. That’s the key to the knuckleball. The pitch looks magical the way it zigs and zags, but it’s scientific; as SmithsonianMagazinereported, the ball dances because of an aerodynamic phenomenon called unsteady lift forces.
Well, Chelsea was only 8, but her knuckleball began to zig and zag. Joe loved it. He told her he would keep teaching her the knuckleball, and all he asked in return was a peck on the cheek before she went out to pitch in a game.
This was 2006. Joe died that year of a brain aneurysm. He was only 61. “Coach Joe taught me so much,” Chelsea wrote as an obituary tribute. “Most of all, he taught me to throw his famous knuckleball. I will always remember and love you.” She placed a baseball in his casket at the funeral.
And then, in Joe’s honor, she worked to perfect her knuckleball. There was nobody left to teach her, so she taught herself. Chelsea’s stepfather built a wall for her to throw against. “Every day after school, I would throw the knuckleball against the wall,” she said. “I taught myself to use two fingers as my hands got bigger.”
The next year, she began throwing it in Little League games.
And nobody could hit her.
She did not lose a single game for four years. In 2009, she played for the Plant City League 10–11 All-Stars, and late in the year she pitched the district title game against North Lakeland. She threw a perfect game. That made some local news.
Then on April 9, 2010, she made national news. She was pitching for Brandon Farms against J.R. Farms. And she threw anotherperfect game. Not only that, she struck out 16 of the 18 batters she faced. The Baseball Hall of Fame asked to display her jersey. ESPN did a feature on her with ALeagueofTheirOwnstar Geena Davis narrating.
“At age thirteen,” Geena Davis said, “she may be the best Little League pitcher in the country.”21
Chelsea Baker was not exclusively a knuckleball pitcher—she also threw a fastball and a curve—but it was the knuckleball that got people dreaming. “It’s her Golden Ticket,” said Justine Siegal, who founded Baseball for All, an organization dedicated to encouraging and providing opportunities for girls in baseball.
“A lot of times, I couldn’t see the movement of the ball when I’d pitch it,” Chelsea says. “I could only tell it was floating. When I’d see a video of it from different perspectives, it always surprised me.”
Soon the attention was overwhelming. Reporters. Cameras. Travel. Awards. Some of the kids in her school would stop and ask for her autograph. In Japan, they called her “Knuckleball Princess.” In the United States, people started talking about the possibility of her becoming the first woman pitcher in the big leagues. She was only 13.
