Bullpen Diaries

lost in the sun

Last season saw many variations of the walk-off: a balk-off, a WP-off, and off-the-glove-for-a-HR-off, but nothing quite compares to the sun-off yesterday. Torii Hunter of the Angels lost a ball in the sun, and game over. Gotta feel for him and the reliever.

I played hoops with Yogi

            My mother was a bookkeeper for a non-profit community center in the Bronx, but despite our proximity to Yankee Stadium, she was a true-blue Brooklyn Dodgers fan. 

            “It’s because of Jack Robinson,” she would say, refusing to call him “Jackie” because “he’s not a little boy.”

            My father’s heart condition made him a housebound invalid.  He spent his limited pain-free time reading any book that had anything whatsoever to do with physics.   He hated all sports, particularly baseball. 

            “Think about it,” he’d say.  “If a baseball is round and a bat is round, then there’s only one possible point of contact between the two.  So baseball is theoretically improbable and therefore totally ridiculous.”

             Still, in January 1952, he saw in the papers that a winter baseball academy was in the offering, in which a group of major leaguers would be conducting weekly clinics for preteens at an armory in Manhattan.  Boys Clubs, YMCAs, and community houses throughout the city could each designate one needy youngster to participate.  Because of my mother’s job, I got a spot.

            Once a week after school, I’d take the subway down to a Midtown armory to be tutored in the fundamentals of the game by a faculty of Yankee heroes that included Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Eddie Lopat, and Gil McDougald (who had recently been named the American League’s Rookie of the Year).   Also on hand were Gene Hermanski, a long-time Dodger who had been traded to the Cubs; Ralph Branca, bravely making a semi-public appearance only months after delivering the Shot Heard ‘Round the World to Bobby Thomson; and Brooklyn-born Sid Gordon, who was currently under contract with the Boston Braves.

            There were about fifty students, but only two dozen of us regularly attended when the winter weather was fierce.  Using a softish rubber ball that had raised seams and was the same size as a regulation baseball, we learned how to play every position except catcher.  The two-hour sessions usually ended with a baseball game that lasted as long as it took for every student to play the field and get an at-bat.

            One afternoon, as we were filing out of the armory, some of the big leaguers chose to run wind-sprints in preparation for the opening of spring training.

            Phil Rizzuto had another idea. 

            “Let’s play some basketball,” he suggested.  “Look.  There’s a portable basket over there in the corner.  Why don’t we wheel it out and get a game up?”

            After much debate, the Scooter could only convince Yogi and McDougald to join in.  Scouting the last lingering students for a fourth player, I was chosen only because I was the tallest of my peers. (I was well on my way to my current 6’9”.)

            I had not yet discovered the joys of “real” basketball.  The only hoops in the neighborhood of my home on Fulton Avenue were situated in the schoolyard of Junior High School 44, a long and dangerous trek through the wilds of Crotona Park.   When we weren’t playing stickball, four-box baseball, punchball, or off-the-stoop, we street urchins employed a rubber Spaldeen and used the lowest rung of a fire escape as a horizontal goal. 

            So, paired with McDougald, I basically shuffled around and about, and in a panic, quickly returned any passes that he threw my way.  At 6’1”, the Yankees’ prized rookie was five inches taller than Berra and seven inches taller than Rizzuto.  Since Yogi was even more passive than me, and we ostensibly guarded each other, the game boiled down to a one-on-one affair between Gil and Phil.

            Rizzuto played with incredible intensity, driving and hustling like a pauper with his lunch money at stake, and rebounding like the ball was dinner.

            Unfortunately for Phil, Yogi had trouble hanging on to the ball.  Passes bounced off his fingers, and one even hit him square in the chest.  When Berra flubbed still another pass at a critical point in the game, the combative Rizzuto became irate.

            “Yogi!” he shouted.  “Here’s a basketball, see?  It’s about twenty times the size of a baseball.  So why can’t you catch it?  After all, you’re a catcher, right?”

            “I’ll tell you why.” Yogi faced the Scooter calmly.

            “Why?”

            “Because the damn thing’s much too big. And besides, how the hell can I catch anything without a mitt?” 

            Rizzuto threw his hands up and the game was over, but not my memory of it.

            I like to think that they recognized their tall teammate-for-a-day as I waited outside the gates of the Stadium when the season started, but tall as I was, there were a lot of kids calling out for autographs. We’d even tried to hand out self-addressed postcards to players, hoping we’d get a signed one back in the mail.

            But I knew it’d be a great spring day for baseball, and that I had once played a winter basketball pick-up game with McDougald, the Scooter, and Yogi.

 

 

quote of the week

“We had a very scientific system for bringing in relief pitchers. We used the first one that answered the phone.” – Chuck Estrada, Rangers pitching coach in 1974 in Baseball Digest

quote of the week

“Sympathy is something that shouldn’t be bestowed on the Yankees. Apparently it angers them.” – Bob Feller

Bullpen Diaries in stores today!!!!

quote of the week

“Play it? Man, that was my game. I liked to play punchball more than anything else.” – Rocky Colavito

Yogi and Joltin' Joe on knuckleballs

    Back in 1984, I was doing a story on knuckleball pitchers for a since-defunct magazine.  The only practitioners of this arcane art at the time were Charlie Hough, and the Brothers Niekro—Phil and Joe.  Since Phil was with the Yankees at the time, I wandered into the pre-game clubhouse at the Stadium to see what I could see and ask what I could ask.

            Yogi Berra was the Yankees manager, at age 59 still bumptious and wise.  Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw Yogi standing in the middle of the room, having a lighthearted discussion with Joe DiMaggio.  The Yankee Clipper still stood tall and stately at age 69, but was also beginning to list with arthritis. 

            They were talking about the rising cost of baseballs, the absence of the “Scooter” from the Hall of Fame, and the lapsed elegance of the nearby Concourse Plaza Hotel.

            Under normal circumstances, DiMaggio was always reluctant to deal with the media, but since he seemed to be in a jovial mood, and since I had a tight deadline, during a slight pause in their conversation I dared to intrude with a question that I hoped would spark a response from Joltin’ Joe.

            “Mister DiMaggio, sir?  Do you happen to remember the starting rotation of the 1945 Washington Senators?   Johnny Niggeling, Mickey Haeffner, Dutch Leonard, and Roger Wolf?”

            “How could I forget them?” DiMaggio replied, his interest clearly piqued.  “All of them were knuckleballers.  We’d see knucklers on a Friday night, followed by Saturday afternoon, and then a doubleheader on Sunday.”

            Berra didn’t reach the bigs until 1946, yet he puffed on a cigarette and nodded in quick agreement.

            “Let’s see,” DiMaggio wondered.  “There was also Nelson Potter with the Browns.  Bobo Newsom.  Ted Lyons.  Did Hank Borowy throw a knuckler?”

            “Maybe,” Yogi grunted.  “Sometimes.  Maybe not.”

            “Almost every team back then had a knuckler,” DiMaggio added.

            “How did you do against guys like that?” I asked.

            “I didn’t always make the greatest contact,” DiMag answered, “but I had my share of luck.”

            Luck!  From an all-time great who sported a lifetime .325 batting average.

            Other hitters whom I had interviewed claimed that facing knuckleballers messed up their swings for weeks at a time.  Did this also happen to DiMaggio?

            “No,” he said.  “I faced so many of them that I just took my normal swing.  Besides, I used to take a very short step with my left foot when I attacked a pitch so my weight was always back and my timing was always consistent.”

            At that point, DiMaggio began to look around the room for someone to rescue him from me.  But before he escaped, I proffered a baseball for him to sign.  “For my kid,” I said.  Since this was years before such autographs went for hundreds of dollars, he silently signed the ball.

            But just as DiMaggio turned to exit stage right, Yogi cleared his throat, threw his cigarette butt into a nearby spittoon bucket, and said this:  “I know the secret how to hit the knuckler.”

            DiMaggio turned back to Berra, leaned forward, and even cupped his ear.

            “It’s simple,” Yogi shrugged.  “All you gotta do is to only swing at the ones that don’t break.”

the first measured fastball

            One day early in the 1940 season, Bob Feller’s Cleveland Indians were in Chicago for a series against the White Sox when Lew Fonseca approached him before a game.  At the time, Fonseca headed the Major League Film Division, but he once was also an ex-player, good enough to lead the American League in hitting (.369) in 1929.  Fonseca’s idea was to have Feller throw his fastball in direct competition with a speeding motorcycle to determine whether the baseball or the cycle would reach home plate first.

            Not knowing the details of the test (which Fonseca would film), Feller showed up wearing civilian clothes, dress shoes, long pants, a white shirt, and a necktie.  The experiment was conducted on a street blocked off by the police near Lincoln Park, where the requisite 60’ 6” between the rubber and the plate were carefully measured and marked.  In lieu of a catcher, the target was a cantaloupe-sized bull’s-eye suspended from a wooden frame.

            Feller took off his tie, undid the top button of his shirt and warmed up with Fonseca for a few minutes.  When Feller was ready, the driver started his machine and began his run far enough in back of the pitcher so as to pass Rapid Robert motoring at 86-mph just as the ball was released.  But the timing was a bit off, and the motorcycle was about two feet beyond Feller when the ball came out of the pitcher’s hand. 

            The test had a pair of incredible outcomes:  Feller’s first and only pitch zipped through the middle of the target.  And the ball beat the motorcycle to the plate by 13 feet.

            Using some basic math, the speed of the pitch was determined to be 104-mph.

            Several years later, Feller was wearing a baseball uniform and pitching from a mound when his delivery was measured by an electric-zone device at the Aberdeen Ordinance Plant in Washington, D.C., and was clocked at 107.9-mph.

staking out the stadium as a kid many years ago

Besides my jingling coins, I also carried a tuna fish salad sandwich in a small greasy paper bag and my autograph book. To quickly lighten my burden, I usually ate my sandwich as soon as I transferred at 161st Street for the cross-town bus.  I also carried several dozen self-addressed penny postcards or the pre game business at hand. 

This had to do with my being an autograph hound.  That meant I’d arrive at the House That Ruth Built at about nine bells, just when the visiting players and the hometown heroes would arrive.  Then I’d join the desperate, bustling dozens of similar fanatics trying to get close enough to The Mick, The Scooter, Yogi, Battling Billy, Steady Eddie, The Chief, or whomever we could intercept during their thirty-yard walk between the players parking lot and the cops who kept us away from the players entrance.

The same relentless elbow-flailing, pushing-often-coming-to-punching melee would be repeated when the visitors bus arrived.

“Who’d ya get?”

“The Mick!”

“Wow!!”

“Andy Carey.”

“Aw, he’s no big deal.  I got a million of him.  He always stops and signs for everybody.”

“Who’d ya get?”

“Casey?”

“Where?  How?  When?”

“Just now.  He took the train and got off the el.”

“And he was signing?”

“For everybody.”

Some of us would then make a mad-dash for the train station at River Avenue and 161st Street in hopes of intercepting Stengel before he ducked into one of the Stadium’s private entrances.  I never did catch up with the wily Ol’ Perfessor.  In fact, the only celebrity subway rider whose autograph I ever did capture was on Old Timer’s Day when I came across a squat, burly, middle-aged man, and asked, “Who are you?”

Turned out to be Jimmy Foxx.

When players wouldn’t pause to sign, we’d try to thrust a postcard into their hands, pockets, belts, whatever.  As a last resort, we tossed postcards through open windows on the team bus. About fifty percent of the postcards were returned with bonafide signatures.  The rest vanished.

secret baseball mud!!

The Daily News reported today that pitching phenoms Dellin Betances and Manny Banuelos, who shined in spring training but were sent to AA Trenton to mature and improve, both developed blisters, supposedly due to the shift from MLB-quality balls in Florida to minor league quality!

This brought to mind what I observed one hot August night at a AAA Scranton game. Here’s what I wrote for Bullpen Diaries:

 It struck me during this game that a scuffed baseball stays in the game longer in the minors, not surprisingly. The home plate ump regularly rolled balls over in his hand, keeping most of them in use.

It’s actually his job to dirty up the brand-new shiny batch of five or six dozen balls before each game. The same “secret” compound is used in both the majors and minors, secret in that the company that provides the dirt doesn’t reveal where in the nearby Delaware River the mud is from. In fact, the owner of Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud says if he sees someone lurking around the designated spot, he comes back the next day.