Daily Archives: February 6, 2003

MILLAR: HELL NO, I WON’T GO

The Boston Globe reports that chances of Kevin Millar playing in Japan this season are becoming less and less likely. Tony Massarotti (Boston Herald) adds:

Major League Baseball vice president of baseball operations Sandy Alderson categorized the Millar matter as “still unresolved” early yesterday, though he might not have known about the reports from Japan. In any case, Alderson hoped for a resolution that would appease all parties.

“We’d like to see a situation that results in the best interests of the player, the best interests of the Chunichi Dragons and the best interests of the rules,” he said.

The former general manager of the Oakland A’s, Alderson acknowledged that he rarely has seen a case as peculiar as the one involving Millar, who was claimed off waivers by the Red Sox last month.

Alderson said “the uniqueness of the situation really stems from the claim made by the Red Sox,” but was careful not to direct blame at Sox officials by stressing that it was within the club’s rights to claim Millar.

Major league teams typically have refrained from claiming players bound for Japan as a matter of etiquette, but there is nothing in league rules that prohibits teams from complicating the process.

“Had (the Red Sox) not made the claim, the circumstances would be different,” Alderson said. “(But) it’s their right to do under the rules. I’m not being critical.”

LONELY AVENUE

The Times ran a terrific profile on Jose Contreras yesterday. Like Godzilla Matsui, Contreras has a sense of humility that should make him right at home with the likes of Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams.

“This guy can pitch,” said the Cleveland Indians’ international scouting director, Rene Gayo, who signed the last prominent Cuban free agent, pitcher Danys Baez, in 1999. “In my opinion, he’s a lot like John Smoltz or Curt Schilling. He’s got a forkball that’s just nasty.”

Pat Gillick, the Seattle general manager, thought enough of Contreras to override the Mariners’ philosophy against giving contracts of longer than three years. In Nicaragua, Gillick offered $24 million for four years. “This guy’s special,” Gillick said.

…”I think he’s a really good person, excellent, in fact,” Gillick said. “It’s just the way he handles himself. He’s a very humble guy, very sincere, and there’s a level of genuineness there. What you see is what you get. I don’t think there’s any hidden agenda.”

…”He had already put a lot of time into learning specific big league hitters, how he would attack them,” [Boston GM, Theo] Epstein said. “He had a game plan for how to pitch Barry Bonds, how to pitch Ichiro Suzuki. He knew more about some big league hitters than some major league pitchers I’ve come across. He was clearly a thoughtful guy.”

Like El Duque before him, one of the most interesting aspects of Contreras’ initial season in the United States will be how he handles the loneliness of being a stranger in a strange land (his family is still in Cuba). Of course, he’ll be paid handsomely. In fact, his staggering salary may only complicate his sense of isolation. After all, this is a man who previously made $50 a month in Cuba.

I ran across a passage from John Updike’s famous tribute to Ted Williams (“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”) that addressed the concept of baseball’s inherent lonliness:

…For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upond but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. [Consider that Updike wrote this before the days of the designated hitter.] It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams, such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is essentially a lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

PETE’S PICKS

Check out Peter Gammons’ American League preview over at ESPN.

What does he make of the Yankees’ chances?

The fact is that only age, injuries and owner hysteria can keep the Yankees from being really good.

All three of those factors could easily rear their ugly heads this year, but if they don’t, it’s hard not to agree with Gammons’ take.

SHOOT ME NOW

Regardless of how the Yankees do, it looks as if us dopes who are stuck with Cablevision will be screwed once again. I haven’t spent much time writing about the depressing state of affairs, because what else is there to say? I try not to think about it, or the fury that is building in the pit of my stomach. And while I’m not holding my breath for a deal to get done before opening day, I must hold out hope, foolish as it may seem.

Another season of Sterling and Steiner is too much to bear.

According to Newsday:

Cablevision subscribers who were shut out of watching 130 Yankees games last year should brace for another dark season. Six days before the Yankees’ spring-training camp opens, the 16-month dispute between the YES Network and Cablevision shows no sign of being resolved. In recent weeks, prospects for a settlement have dimmed, and yesterday, the rhetoric between the principals increased.

EATIN’ RAUL

Yankee right-fielder Raul Mondesi commented on the possibility of being traded by the Yankees yesterday.

“If they trade me to another big league team, there’s no problem,” Mondesi said Wednesday. “It would be difficult if they traded me to a football or basketball team because I don’t know how to play that.”

What about Roller Derby, Fat Guy?

BOBBY BITES BACK

It didn’t take long for Bobby V to get his licks in. I thought he might wait until the 14th, which would make for splashy headlines, but according to Ira Berkow in the New York Times, and Joel Sherman in the Post, Valentine was reserved and clipped in his comments two nights ago at the the Thurman Munson Awards Dinner. Valentine isn’t the sort to ignore the kind of attacks directed at him by members of the New York Mets, but he also didn’t seem particularly interested in starting a tabliod war.

There is an unflattering photograph of Valentine that accompanies the Berkow piece in the Times. Though Bobby V looks fit and dapper, the photo also suggests he’s wound tight enough to be the proud owner of a cleft asshole.

“We had a lousy year last year and I did a bad job. That is the easy statement and a truism.”

…”I find it almost rather criminal that after putting almost 10 years of my life, 24 hours a day, into an organization and a community that a couple of people who have never worn Met uniforms and one who wore it for one year and did not do much [Vaughn] can say things,” Valentine said.

…”I don’t know if it was orchestrated or not, but it’s all nonsense.”

…In regard to Glavine in particular, Valentine said: “His remarks are unfounded. I think I met him once in my life, and we shook hands. Glavine is a union leader and appears to be a very intelligent fellow. You would think he would base his opinions on experience and personal knowledge.”

As for the theory that his departure fostered the ability to recruit more alluring players, Valentine said, “I’m not going to comment on that. I don’t think it is worthy of comment. I’d like to find a person who really didn’t come here because of me. There are 29 other teams out there. Go find that person who was a free agent whom the club wanted that didn’t come because I was there, or else I say it is nonsensical to comment on that.”

Bob Raissman reports in today’s Daily News that Valentine will get his chance to speak his mind this season for ESPN after all. Perhaps Bobby will lie in the weeds and exact measures of revenge against his former team as the season unfolds.

The outspoken former manager will replace Buck Showalter in ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” studio and work a limited number of games for the all-sports cable network.

Two weeks ago, it appeared that talks between Valentine and ESPN had reached an impasse. As part of its three-year contract offer, ESPN had insisted that if Valentine bolted the TV gig for a manager’s job, he would have to pay a penalty to the network.

Sources said Valentine initially rejected that stipulation. He obviously changed his mind.

“It’s like any negotiation,” a source familiar with the situation said. “You go through different phases. That was just one of them.”

MOVIE MINUTE: DON’T SLEEP ON GARFIELD FESTIVAL

Bernard Weinraub wrote an interesting article in the New York Times last week on one of Hollywood’s most-neglected stars, New Yorker, John Garfield, whose career is being celebrated throughout the month of February on Turner Movie Classics.

Before James Dean and Marlon Brando, before Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, there was John Garfield.

A tough kid who grew up in the 1920’s on the streets of the Lower East Side, Brownsville and the Bronx, Garfield (whose original name was Julius Garfinkle) was one of the first dark-haired, working-class ethnic outsiders to turn into a Hollywood star, following the path of actors like James Cagney.

…Garfield’s chip-on-the-shoulder style and his rugged looks often cast him as a social outsider on the screen: a boxer, a gangster, a soldier. The persona affected actors from the 1950’s onward.

His relatively brief but dazzling career was cut short by a heart condition and the Hollywood blacklist. He was never a Communist, but he refused to name those, including his wife, Roberta, who had been. He died of a heart attack in 1952 at 39, and 10,000 fans gathered outside Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan. At the time it was the largest turnout for a celebrity funeral in New York since Rudolph Valentino’s.

My grandfather, who for years worked for the Anti-Defamation League, helped Garfield during the Blacklist Era, though to what extent I’m not sure. I do know that Garfield was one of my father’s idols. Pop’s adoration was intensified I’m sure, by the fact that he actually met Garfield, who visited my grandfather’s apartment on several occasions.

“He’s a forgotten star,” said David Heeley, one of the producers of “The John Garfield Story,” a documentary that will have its premiere on Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel, on Monday, followed by a festival of 25 Garfield films, to be shown on Mondays through February. “He never lived long enough to become an icon like Humphrey Bogart.”

His daughter, Julie Garfield, an acting teacher in New York, put it another way. “He was horribly neglected, forgotten, pushed aside,” she said. “It was almost as if Hollywood was so ashamed of what was done to him that they almost made him disappear.”

…Garfield is most remembered for his role opposite Lana Turner, in Tay Garnett’s sexy drama “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946), based on James M. Cain’s novel. His other films included “Humoresque” (1947), with Joan Crawford; Robert Rossen’s classic “Body and Soul” (1947), in which he works his way up from poverty to become a champion boxer at great personal cost; and Abraham Polonsky’s “Force of Evil” (1948), in which Garfield was acclaimed for his role as a greedy lawyer for racketeers. He also played the Jewish friend of Gregory Peck’s character in Elia Kazan’s “Gentlemen’s Agreement” (1947), about anti-Semitism. Garfield was nominated twice for Oscars, as a supporting actor for his first film, “Four Daughters” (1938), and as best actor for “Body and Soul.”

“He didn’t know what happened to him in the end,” Mr. Heeley said. “He didn’t understand why they were hounding him. In the end he was scared.”

Ms. Garfield, 57, was 6 when her father died. In an interview she spoke about him in a cracked voice: “It killed him, it really killed him. He was under unbelievable stress. Phones were being tapped. He was being followed by the F.B.I. He hadn’t worked in 18 months. He was finally supposed to do `Golden Boy’ on CBS with Kim Stanley. They did one scene. And then CBS canceled it. He died a day or two later.”

Peep Garfield’s complete credits, and while you’re killing time waiting for the Grapefruit League to get started, check out some of Garfield’s impressive film work over at Turner Movie Classics. “Body and Soul,” one of my favorites, will give you a knew appreciation of the work Scorsese did years later, in “Raging Bull.”