Daily Archives: March 31, 2005

I had my first real good laugh of the baseball year tonight. It was just a small thing, but sometimes, well, it’s the little things that do it to you. Erstwhile Yankee first baseman Travis Lee–we hardly knew ye–was batting against Mike Mussina in the top of the fourth inning of the Yankees-Devil Rays exhibition game at Legends Field. I was only half-watching when Mussina delivered an 0-2 breaking ball that just missed the outside corner for strike three. Mussina glared in at the home plate ump. He came back with the same pitch, only this one was lower, and well out of the zone. Lee did not chase it. So Mussina comes back and floats a change-up around Lee’s eyes. Lee swung and missed and I instinctively started laughing. Anyone who has ever taken a Conan swing in whiffle ball could empathize with what Lee was thinking. How do you lay off such a pitch? And how do you have the chutzpah to throw it?

Emily didn’t get what was so funny. Man, baseball slapstick can be so obvious (the blooper reels they play between innings on the Jumbo Tron), and yet so subtle, the ultimate inside joke. I couldn’t help but immediately jump to the fantasy of Mussina getting a quality lefty like David Ortiz out on a bullcrap pitch like that sometime, oh, round October. Yeah, I’m about good and ready for the season to start. You?

The 1977 Yankees have been written about to death, but there is a new book which incorporates the Bronx Zoo antics of George, Billy, Reggie, Thurman and company, into the social dynamics of New York city during the Summer of Sam. “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Buring: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City,” by Jonathan Mahler received a mostly favorable review in the Times yesterday from William Grimes:

The city needed a win in the worst way. If the Bronx was burning, so were large swaths of Brooklyn, notably Bushwick, which had imploded in a frenzy of looting and arson when an electrical failure plunged the city into total darkness on July 13. All summer, a crazed killer dubbed Son of Sam had preyed on young couples in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. There were not enough firefighters or police officers to deal with either problem, because the city, virtually bankrupt, had laid off thousands of workers. There was an edge of desperation when New York fans chanted “Reg-gie, Reg-gie.”

Grimes is impressed with Mahler’s writing skill but doesn’t believe that the author’s themactic ambitions work in the end:

…In a last-ditch effort to tie up loose ends, Mr. Mahler anoints Mr. Koch, Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Steinbrenner and Mr. Jackson emblematic figures of the new New York. The idea is not nearly as compelling as the stories in which they have played pivotal roles, and which Mr. Mahler tells with such skill. In the end, the Yankees, however heroic, cannot carry the conceptual weight assigned to them. It’s probably better not to think too deeply about Mr. Jackson’s three home runs in Game 6. Just savor the moment.

In a very crazy year, oh, what a moment it was. I’m putting this one on my wish list for summer reading. Looks highly entertaining at the very least.

Jay Jaffe is an admitted fair-weather fan when it comes to the New York Yankees. Jaffe grew up in Utah rooting for the Dodger teams of the late 1970s, so it’s natural that he was no fan of the boys from the Bronx. But when he moved to New York city in 1996, Jaffe fell fell for Joe Torre’s Yanks. Jaffe then rooted for the Bombers during their recent glory years, but now, the affair appears to be over. What gives? Well, it mostly has to do with the way the Yankee front office has operated for the past several seasons. In a recent article for Baseball Prospectus, Jaffe writes:

It’s painfully clear the Yankee front office is, if not out of ideas, then at least at an impasse as to how to implement the ones they have with creativity and foresight. In this regard, the pesky Red Sox have not only surpassed them, they figure to hold a distinct advantage going forward. Nowhere was that more clear than last October’s LCS clash. Sox GM Theo Epstein and his charges created a big edge for themselves in constructing and deploying their roster, while the Yanks drastically misused theirs. Emblematic were Game Six’s flailings of Sierra and reserve first baseman Tony Clark–two aged hitters with more than a few holes in their swings–which occurred while reserve outfielder Kenny Lofton looked on from Torre’s doghouse. Can’t anyone here run this team?

…As a fan, I look over this expensive Frankenstein knowing that it’s laden with superstars, even future Hall of Famers, a team projected by PECOTA to win 95 games, second-best in all of baseball, and likely to provide a good run in October. The Big Unit aside, however, this has the feel of déjà vû all over again. It’s not too difficult to imagine either Pavano or Wright as the next episode of Mystery Stottlemyre Theater, in which a previously effecive(ish) starter falls apart on the Yankee watch. Beyond that, it’s even less difficult to envision injury-induced collapses, major or minor, of a few older vets, the kind that can turn a 95-win wild-card team into an 87-win squad making tee times in October.

Jay isn’t the only member of Prospectus who is down on the Yankees. Joe Sheehan, a native New Yorker, and lifelong Yankee fan, has them missing the playoffs for the first time since 1993.

Part One

One of the best books that I’ve come across in my research for the Curt Flood biography for teenagers that I’m currently working on, is a history of the Players Association by Chuck Korr, “The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players Union, 1960–1981.” Korr is a professor and sports historian at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His book on the union is the ideal companion to John Helmer’s “Lords of the Realm” (not to mention the “A Whole Different Ballgame,” by Marvin Miller and “Hardball,” by Bowie Kuhn). Now available in paperback, “The End of Baseball As We Knew It” won the Elysian Fields Quarterly’s Dave Moore Award as the best baseball book published in 2002 and was runner up for SABR Seymour Medal for the North American Society for Sport History’s award best sport history book of the year.

What distinguishes “The End of Baseball As We Knew It” is the fact that Korr had complete access to the Association’s papers and files. It is a remarkably well-documented work, a simply fantastic resource for anyone interested in the history of the union. But Korr wasn’t only interested in the Association’s point-of-view; his interviews with Judge Robert Cannon, who presided over the union before Miller entered the stage, as well as John Gaherin, the owners’ head negotiator during the Miller-Dick Moss years, give the book balance and depth. These two men, along with Frank Scott, who ran the Association on a part-time basis during the Fifties, are often overlooked. But they were key figures in baseball’s labor saga, and Korr makes sure to get their side of the story.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Korr, who is a generous and engaging guy. Here is the first part of our conversation. Enjoy.

Bronx Banter: How did you manage to get access to the records at the Association and how did that help form your book?

Chuck Korr: Ted Simmons read an article I’d written that analyzed how free agency and large salaries for professional athletes in the U. S. and Britain had changed the relationship between them and the fans. He sent a copy of the article to Don Fehr, who was interested in it. Maryanne Ellison Simmons (Ted’s wife and the founder of a very important magazine for wives in baseball, The Waiting Room) and Ted thought it was important to have a historian write about the union and suggested that I should look into the idea. I contacted Fehr and Marvin Miller and when both of them said they would make the records of the union available to me, I decided to set aside the work I was doing and see if it would be possible to write a history of the union. Fehr, Gene Orza, and Mark Belanger did everything possible to assist my work–they gave me an office space when I needed it and wrote letters to everyone whom I wanted to interview. Everyone involved with the union made a commitment to have no control over the final product. In fact, no one involved with the union saw any of the manuscript until after it had gone to the press for outside peer review.

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