The Last Character of the Game

“You know, Lou Gehrig says, ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’ 

Well, if he’s the luckiest man in the world, I’m the second luckiest.” 

Don Zimmer

Don Zimmer passed away yesterday.  He spent 60 years in the greatest game on the planet.  Sixty damn years as a player, manager, coach, consultant.  He had a World Series ring from playing with the Dodgers.  He had several rings from being Joe Torre’s Zen master bench coach for the Yankees.  He’s played with and coached Hall of Fame players such as Jackie Robinson, Carl Yastremski, and Ryne Sandberg.   He also played on the 1962 Mets team that lost 120 games that season. 

Baseball, more than other sports, is rife with nicknames in its history.  Zimmer’s was “Popeye” because of his forearms.  Zimmer also had a steel plate in his head, the result of a bean ball he took early in his career as a player.  He used to joke that he’d set off alarms at airports.  I like to think the character of “Coach” from the television series, “Cheers,” was modeled after Zimmer.

Zimmer was a character of the game.  This is not to say today’s players are not good.  They are.  But, they also have milquetoast personalities.   They are big and strong.  They get angry when they strike out, but for the most part, they lack pizzazz.  They aren’t going to, at age 72, come charging out of a dugout to try to take on a guy half his age and about a foot taller, as Zimmer did to Pedro Martinez.

They announced Zimmer’s passing during an ESPN broadcast of the Yankee game.  Color commentator, Rick Sutcliffe, who played under Zimmer when he managed the Cubs, nearly broke down in tears.  As the news traveled to the Yankee dugout, Derek Jeter just held his head in his hands.  After the game manager Joe Giarardi broke down, too.   

When he managed the Cubs to division championship in 1989, people referred to the team as “The Boys of Zimmer.”  When he was Torre’s bench coach, Jeter would rub his head and Buddha-like belly for luck. 

Yes, Zimmer was a true character, the last true character of the game.  I honestly can’t think of anyone in the game today that even comes close to being worthy of a nickname, let alone being a character.  And certainly none of them will be sticking around in the game for sixty years.

Sixty damn years.

John Donne wrote, “Every man’s death diminishes me.”  Anyone who loves baseball is diminished today.

A Book Review - Sorta - Well Not Really

I heard George Will on the radio the other day promoting his new book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, which I have not yet read.  Will also has another baseball tome, Men at Work, which is a revealing look at the inner workings of our national pastime. 

Will knows baseball and I suspect this latest foray into the game is more personal and reflective.

Still, I had a problem with the thoughts he had regarding the retirement of Bud Selig.  Will had nothing but praise for the man I consider to have come up with some really dumb ideas for baseball.

In short, I don’t like Bud Selig.  Not from the start.   The owners booted Fay Vincent out of the Commissioner’s office in 1992.  Then, in a classic example of putting the fox in charge of the hen house, named Selig, then owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, to be in charge of baseball.  True his title of Commissioner didn’t become permanent until 1998, but the role of Commissioner is supposed to guard the best interests of baseball.  I believe Selig has only guarded the best interests of the owners.

Just two years into his tenure, Selig was unable to prevent a baseball strike.  I suggest that holding firm against the Player’s Association had nothing to do with the best interests of the game.

He combined the American League and National League ostensibly to have the rules uniform throughout the game, yet did nothing to eliminate the designated hitter rule that only serves to lengthen careers of players who otherwise would have been off the field.  Paul Molitor would have never got 3000 hits had not his career been artificially extended as a DH.  I admire Robin Yount’s achievement of that batting benchmark far more because he also played the game on the field for his entire career with the Brewers and didn’t spend the vast majority of time sitting on the bench.

Will cited a number of other supposed achievements of Selig’s reign:

1. The wild card and expansion of the wild card.   This has basically eliminated the meaning of the pennant race.  Hockey and basketball regular seasons are basically meaningless now because so many teams make the playoffs.   It dilutes the game’s essence of the best meeting the best in the World Series.

2. Interleague play.   This, more than the wild card, has eliminated the level playing field of all teams in the game.  While it will be nice to see one of the great Yankees, Derek Jeter, play at Wrigley in his final season, interleague play has totally eliminated the balanced schedule of each team playing the same teams the same number of times.  It gives an advantage to some teams and an unfair advantage to others.  Adding American League games to the National League schedule means that any given team now has fewer opportunities to beat the teams they actually have to beat to get into the playoffs via the dumb wild-card system.  Under the balanced scheduled, each team would face teams within their division the same number of away games and home games.  They would also face teams in other divisions the same number of home and away games, albeit fewer.  Under the balanced schedule divisional teams would face each other 18 times, nine at home, nine away.  Teams faced teams in other divisions 12 games, six and six. 

Now with interleague games, the schedule is convoluted.  For example in the 2014 season, the Cubs and Brewers face each other 19 times.  The Cubs, however, have ten home games to the Brewers’ nine.  The Cubs face the Yankees four times, two at home.  The Brewers face the Yankees three times, all of which are at home.  The Cubs play the White Sox four times while the Brewers never face them at all.  

The real benefit to interleague play is not that fans get to see players.  Rather it is that the owners get to make these "marquee" games and jack up ticket prices.  In the case of the Cubs versus the Yankees at Wrigley, for example, bleacher seats cost $72 for the night game.  Those same seats cost $19 dollars for a night game with the Arizona Diamond Backs. 

3. Revenue sharing.  The idea behind revenue sharing is to allow small market teams to compete monetarily with large market teams like the Yankees.  It seems that everybody thinks the Yankees bought all those World Series titles, and they did indeed have, and continue to have, the highest payroll in the majors.  But high payrolls don’t bring titles. During the first decade of the 2000’s the Cubs ranked in the top five for payrolls, and we can see how successful they’ve been.  The jury is still out on how much money plays a roll in winning championships. 

4. Over twenty new stadiums in the majors.  When Selig was still owner of the Brewers, he wanted to build a new stadium to replace County Stadium, which opened in 1953, and promised that the only cost to taxpayers would be for infrastructure, namely roads and water.  In 2000 Miller Park opened to the tune of 450 million taxpayer dollars.  In 2014 the stadium sales tax that paid for the millionaire’s playground was supposed to end.  It hasn’t. 

Professional sports teams use two tactics to get local governments to dig into taxpayer pockets to foot the bill for their buildings.   The first is the opposite of the line from Field of Dreams.  Instead owners say, “If you don’t build it, we will leave.”  The second tactic is more insidious.  The claim is always made about some economic benefit to the community that somehow is attached to having a professional sports team.  More and more studies have shown that that is more than a sham and borders on a flat out lie.

Will also praised Selig for a number of other things including the new instituted instant replay rules.  I don’t like that either.

I will, however, buy Will’s book and read it.  I just wish he would stop schilling for Fox News and the worst Commissioner in history.