Bronx Banter Book Excerpt

Everybody Loves Yogi

One of the most anticipated baseball books of the spring is Allen Barra’s biography on Yogi Berra: Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee (W.W. Norton).  Yogi is perhaps the most beloved Yankee of them all but he is also one of the most underrated great players of all time.   In his enthusiastic and provocative manner, Barra makes the case for the unadulterated greatness of Yogi.

Here is an exclusive excerpt.

By Allen Barra

He was the guy who made the Yankees seem almost human.

—Mickey Mantle

Sometime in the summer of 1941, two of the great legends of baseball narrowly missed making a connection that would have radically altered baseball. Some historians place the date in 1942, but the two men with reason to remember it best, Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, say, and I have taken their word, it was ­1941.

Lawrence Peter Berra, a then somewhat stocky, ungainly looking ­sixteen-­year-­old Italian-American kid from the “Dago Hill” area of St. Louis, had attracted the attention of the best organization in the National League for a tryout in Sportsman’s Park. Jack Maguire, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals, told his boss, general manager Branch Rickey, that Berra had a powerful left-­handed swing, a great arm, and heaps of potential. Rickey wasn’t sure; he was more interested in another kid from the Hill, Joseph Henry Garagiola, a year younger than Berra. Garagiola was thought by Rickey to be faster, smoother, and more polished. Dee Walsh, another Cardinals scout, talked Rickey into signing Garagiola with a $500 bonus, but Rickey was skeptical about offering anything at all to ­Berra.

Rickey had been getting reports on both boys all summer, not just from his scouts but also from two of his outfielders, Enos Slaughter and Terry Moore, who occasionally showed up to give pointers at the WPA baseball school at Sherman’s Park. Rickey’s initial offer to young Berra was a contract—but no bonus. To a boy that age, a professional baseball contract, even without a bonus, was nothing to be scorned. But Lawrence, displaying the kind of stubborn integrity that would, in just a few years, stymie the most powerful organization in sports, balked. “In the first place,” he would tell sportswriter Ed Fitzgerald nearly two decades later, “I knew it was going to be tough enough to convince Mom and Pop that they ought to let me go away. But if Joey was getting $500 for it and I wasn’t getting anything, they would be sure to think it was a waste of time for me.”

Hedging, Rickey offered $250. Branch Rickey was the most influential executive in baseball—by the end of the decade, it was estimated that nearly 37 percent of all big league players had been developed in one of his farm systems—and Larry’s brash reply took him aback: “No, I want the same as Joey’s getting.”2 Rickey did not mention to Berra how much a month he would be earning under the contract, and Berra never asked. “That didn’t matter to me. I would have taken anything. All I was interested in was that if Garagiola was getting $500, I wanted $500, too.” Yogi would later take pains to emphasize that he wasn’t jealous of his pal, but he was convinced, from years of sandlot and street games, that he was as good a ballplayer as Joe. Garagiola disagreed. “Yogi wasn’t better than me,” recalls Joe. “He was much better. There were a lot of good ballplayers on the Hill at that time, and ‘Lawdy’—as his friends called him, echoing his mother, who couldn’t pronounce ‘Larry’—was the best. You know how kids choose up sides with a bat, one hand on top of the other until you reach the end of the handle? When the last hand got to the top, the first thing said was ‘We want Lawdy.’ ”

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Hey, if anyone is around tomorrow night I’m going to be part of Baseball Night, the latest in Gelf’s Varsity Letters reading series down at the Happy Endings Lounge.  (Here are directions to the bar.)  Greg Prince, Matt McCarthy and Frank Messina are also on the bill.   I’m going to talk  about Banter and then do a little reading.  It should be a good time.  Love to see you if you can make it. 

Here is a Q&A I did for Gelf magazine.

Big Shot on the East Coast.

S.L. Price profiles C.C. “Lots of Lovin” Sabathia today in the annual SI Baseball Preview.  It’s a fat, juicy piece.  

Dig ’em, smack.

Prior to Bucky Dent’s 1978 home run against the Red Sox, I have to confess I wasn’t the man’s biggest fan. Although Dent was reliable defensively, he had ordinary range and rarely made spectacular plays. He also seemed to regress as a hitter each year, to the point that former WPIX sportscaster Jerry Girard came up with one of the best lines I’ve ever heard delivered on the nightly news. As Girard narrated Yankee highlights one night, he blurted: “There’s Bucky Dent, with another line drive to the catcher.” My father and I chuckled over that crack for days.

For most of the latter half of the 1970s, I wanted the Yankees to replace Bucky Dent with one man: Toby Harrah. I think George Steinbrenner shared that same dream, because every summer we Yankee fans in Westchester heard rumors that the Yankees were working on a deal for Harrah, the starting shortstop for the Rangers. One summer day, while we were eating lunch at Badger Camp—yes, I spent summers at a place called Badger Camp, and I’m embarrassed to admit it—we exchanged some conversation on a particularly hot Harrah rumor. I can’t remember the exact names, but I think the deal would have sent Dent and one of the lesser starting pitchers (Dick Tidrow?) to Texas for Harrah. Heck, it sounded good to me, since the pitcher wasn’t named Guidry, Figueroa, or Hunter.

I didn’t much care that some people regarded Toby Harrah as a subpar defensive shortstop. I preferred to obsess about another fact: the man could hit. He reached the 20-home run mark three times with the Rangers, usually hit .260 or better, annually achieved double figures in stole bases, and drew a ton of walks (though I didn’t know that much about on-base percentage at the time). Even though the Rangers moved Harrah from shortstop to third base in 1977, largely because of knocks against his range and reliability, I figured he could make the switch back. As long as Harrah could play shortstop reasonably well—you know, better than Bobby Murcer once did—I was going to be satisfied. So I kept dreaming that Steinbrenner and the Yankees’ GM at the time (Gabe Paul, followed by Al Rosen) would do whatever they could to get that deal done.

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Gary Sheffield was released by the Tigers today.  He is one home run shy of 500.  Sheffield has had a great career.  I think he’s a Hall of Famer, but he’s also burned more than a few bridges in his time. 

Think anyone will pick him up?

A few days ago a friend asked me what I had learned on my recent trip to Belgium and I told him that I discovered just how good my family is at keeping secrets.  But does this make my family special?  Doesn’t every family have more than its share of secrets?

And really, some of the things that I found out for the first time–stories of alcoholism, violence–both physical and emotional, infidelity–are these kinds of secrets necessarily bad?  After all, there are reasons to keep secrets and sometimes it is to protect people from being hurt.

Still, I keep thinking about this word: secrets, and how it struck me as the major theme of my trip.  I now realize that just by using that term, I was holding on to a fantasy about my family, in particular, my parents’ marriage.  I wanted to believe that there was a Garden of Eden period for them, a time, no matter how brief, when my parents were happy and truly in love. 

I don’t believe that time ever really existed.  But clearly, it was important for me, on a subconscious level, to hold on to that myth.  (I’ve spoken to my brother and sister some during the past few months and my impression is that they see my parents far more clearly than I do.)   The more I delve into my family history, the more sadness I find.  But I am not afraid to look at it now.  And the most important word–or theme–for me has nothing at all to do with secrets. 

Instead, it is about something more complicated and difficult:  compassion.

The last week of March signals the beginning of the regular season like light at the end of a tunnel. In Florida, beat writers and their backups, many of whom have been stationed there since the beginning of February, are gathering the final roster notes and putting the finishing touches on their season preview specials for next Sunday’s paper, while the columnists, most of whom are based in New York, continue to track the off-field news and craft profiles of the key players involved in those scenarios.

It’s an exciting and stressful time for all the moving parts of a baseball operation, from the team itself to the media outlets covering the team, but if you work in sports and if baseball is the sport in which you’ve chosen to specialize, it’s the best stress you can have outside of being involved in the postseason.

STORY OF THE WEEK
Much has been made of Joe Girardi’s decision to flip Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon in the batting order. Much was written about this topic in the winter and spring leading up to the 2006 season, Damon’s first in pinstripes. At the Baseball Writers Association of America dinner in December of 2005, I remember asking SI’s Tom Verducci, who is a proponent of Sabermetric analysis, what he thought about putting Jeter in the leadoff spot. He agreed that the combination of Jeter’s ability to get on base more consistently (he was coming off a year with a .389 OBP to Damon’s .366), and Gary Sheffield batting third—which would have kept the righty-lefty-righty element in play that Joe Torre favored—made Jeter the better choice for the leadoff spot. But that spring, when the writers asked Torre about his plan, the Yankee manager was undeterred about keeping Damon as the leadoff hitter. Torre, in his way, usually deflected the discussion by saying, “You only have to worry about the leadoff batter for the first inning. Then the rest of the lineup takes care of itself.” It was as if the decision was predetermined from the moment Damon signed with the Yankees.

What we know as baseball fans is that the numbers rarely lie. Jeter’s lowest seasonal on-base percentage pre-Damon was .352 in 2004. Head to head, Damon, whose career has spanned the same exact time frame of Jeter’s, had a higher OBP than Jeter only once prior to his arrival in New York (in 2004: Damon .380 to Jeter’s .352.). The trend has held true since 2006, as Jeter has bested Damon in OBP twice: .417 to .359 in ’06, and .388 to .351 in ’07.

Adding further credibility to Jeter as a leadoff batter is the number of times that Jeter has grounded into double plays versus Damon. Over the course of their respective careers, Damon has grounded into 120 fewer double plays than Jeter (75 to 95), an average of nine fewer GIDPs per season.

Cliff Corcoran, through Pete Abe, did a great job of breaking down the numbers earlier this week.

Here’s a thought, though: If Girardi is adamant about Jeter in the leadoff spot now, did he think about this at all in 2006 when he was Torre’s consiglieri on the bench? If so, and if he had Torre’s ear, why didn’t he suggest it? By the numbers, and the fact that Damon is entering his Age 35 season and Jeter will turn 35 on June 26, this decision appears to be three years late.

OTHER THINGS WE LEARNED

• Alex Rodriguez not only wooed escorts and strippers and admitted his steroid use to them, now he doesn’t care what people think of him. (Does this list include WWE star John Cena?) The good news: the last time he adopted this M.O., he had an MVP season.
• FOX Sports.com’s Ken Rosenthal is a master of the obvious. On a similar note, the recent surge by Melky Cabrera may lead to a trade, as MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch reported
• Joel Sherman, while he’s on point in this article, is about two weeks behind Bronx Banter on the analysis of Chien-Ming Wang.
• Newsday’s Anthony Rieber is not a fan of Hideki Matsui, v.2009.
• Arthur Richman and Johnny Blanchard, two indelible links to Yankees history, will be missed.

Until next week . . .

There are a bunch of good Yankee-related articles in the Times today, starting with Richard Sandomir’s profile of Randy Levine, the Yankees’ own bad cop:

Levine’s headstrong style has been visible in telling the Boston Red Sox to tend to their own business; encouraging questions that put Joe Torre, then the Yankees’ manager, on the spot after games on the team’s YES Network; and in talks to secure the stadium deal and to create Legends Hospitality Management, a food-concession company with the Dallas Cowboys.

“It’s tough love with Randy,” said Gerry Cardinale, a friend and managing director at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that is a partner in YES and Legends. “He is brutally honest, has a very high demand for performance and little tolerance for not getting his way. He respects me because I won’t back down.”

During labor negotiations with correction officers in the mid-’90s, the union’s president, Norman I. Seabrook, said recently, Levine’s closed-door demeanor was close to a blood sport that neither man took too seriously.

“He’ll smile, shake your hand and cut your heart out if you’re not prepared,” Seabrook said. “Don’t mistake that smile for anything but a knife.”

Next, is a story about a promising documentary project, followed by a compelling piece about the fate of Stan’s sports bar.

Finally, an essay by William Zinsser:

My Mets are moving into a park named for a bank that I’m helping the government to bail out. The Yankees’ new stadium comes wrapped in a vocabulary that has no connection to baseball: luxury boxes, bond issues, cost overruns. My fellow taxpayers and I are also footing that bill, though the announced prices will dissuade many of us from going there to enjoy the fruits of our charity.

I assume that the new stadiums will feature the newest advances in audio-visual assault. I stopped going to Mets games at Shea Stadium when my friend Dick Smolens and I could no longer hear each other talk between innings — such was the din of amplified music and blather from the giant screen in center field. But baseball is also a game of silences. After every half-inning, it invites its parishioners to meditate on what they have just seen and to recall other players they once saw performing similar feats. Memory is the glue that holds the game together.

Excellent job by the Times.

Ba Ba Booey

I groaned when Pat Jordan told me the Times assigned him to do a piece on the playwright, screenwriter, director, Neil LaBute.  Pat’s writing has an almost feral quality and when matched with a plump, if deserving target like LaBute, well, you know it is not going to be pretty.  I’ve seen a couple of LaBute’s movies and can’t think of one good thing to say about them.  I found them empty and vicious and completely phony.  The thought of what a hard old sharp shooter like Jordan would do with a misanthropic mo mo like LaBute was not exactly appetizing.

The story is in this week’s New York Times Magazine.  I think Pat went easy on him all considering though I don’t imagine that LaBute will see it that way.

At the Sunday market in Waterloo:

Groggy but still standing–okay, sitting–I am happy to back in the States, home with my wife and our two kittens.  I returned from a week-long visit to Belgium yesterday and with flight delays and traffic jams, it was a long day of travel.  But I had a truly wonderful trip re-connecting with my mother’s family, French-speaking Belgians, who live just outside of Brussels.  I ate frites and yes, a waffle, cheeses and chocolates, salamis and hams and wonderful bread (if only I drank beer; dag, that place is like heaven for beer drinkers). 

I learned a ton about the family history, both in Belgium and in the Congo.  I also learned to better appreciate what I have inherited from them as far as personality, taste and even talent is concerned.  My grandmother had a gift for drawing.  My aunt is a photographer and painter.  My uncle is a graphic designer.  My interested in paiting, in movies, in cooking, that all comes from them. 

My grandfather in the Congo:

Here I am in an African shop in Brussels:

I also recalled the summer vacations I spent there as a kid and noticed how much about the world has changed since.  I used to pine for my grandfather to take me to get the Herald Trib so that I could read three-day old box scores; I eagerly awaited letters from my family back home, which took more than a week to arrive.   Now, everything has changed thanks to technology.  I checked in on e-mail and the blog while I was gone, and saw my wife every day via skype, which is really a fantastic thing–and free, to boot. 

Here’s a shot of my mother and my aunt, Anne–kids in the Congo.

Still, while there is plenty of Americanization there, some cultural differences exist of course. For instance, nobody has ever heard of Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez (if they were ever to hear about Rodriguez it would be as a footnote, as Madonna’s lover).  It is a place where baseball does not matter at all, and I found that to be refreshing.  It reminded me that while I love the game, really what draws me to it more than anything else, are the stories, the characters, the language, and the way it brings people together.

By Hank Waddles

Imagine that it’s the spring of, say 1931, and you’re starting to think that Babe Ruth just might end up being one of the best players ever to grip a bat. The recent downturn in the economy has left you without a job, so you figure, hey, why not spend the year following the Babe – every game, every at bat, every swing. You drive to places like Boston and Philadelphia, take the train to Washington, and ride busses to Detroit and Chicago. Along the way, you make friends in the bleachers in Cleveland, catch a series with a cousin in St. Louis, and sleep on couches in all corners of the American League. Your bank account feels the bite of your mission, your wife and children become strangers, and close friends question your sanity, but somehow it’s still worth it. I mean, this is Babe Ruth we’re talking about, right? If you could, you’d go back in time and do it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?

Now flash forward to 2008 and the Babe Ruth of this generation, Tiger Woods. Writer Bob Smiley shadowed Tiger for every swing of every hole of every tournament in places like San Diego, Augusta, and Dubai, and the result is an extremely engaging book, Follow the Roar: Tailing Tiger for All 604 Holes of His Most Spectacular Season. Last week Bob was kind enough to spend some time talking about his journey. Check it out…

BronxBanter: One of my favorite aspects of the book was that it wasn’t just about Tiger Woods, it was secretly about you, so I thought we might start with Bob Smiley. How important was golf to you when you were growing up?

Bob Smiley: It was really important. It was the first and really only sport I could every really play with my dad. I mean, I played little league and basketball, but golf was something that he taught me how to do when I was eight years old. We would go out and he would try to teach me the point of the game, but I would purposely hit it in the sand trap so I could play in the sand. He really wanted me to embrace the fact that golf is fun and when you get older you’ll appreciate the challenge of it. So for me it was always just a great place, and I had so many memories with my father as I was growing up. When my parents split up when I was a teenager that sort of remained the one spot, even to this day, where he and I still see each other is on the golf course.

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According to this AP report posted at ESPN, Hideki Matsui will not be playing the field anytime soon.

Thanks to Chyll Will, we have an interview with Sadat X, one of my favorite emcees, by D-Nice.

Ah, Sadat X.

Oh, and you remember D-Nice, right?

Here is my favorite version of the New Orleans classic “Big Chief.”  Thank you, Professor Longhair.  We are not worthy. 

Just makes me want to jump up and wish I could like so:

I’ve been reaching out to some of my father’s old friends recently and talking to them about the old man.  Family members too.  It’s been an engaging if sometimes painful experience.   It’s not that I’ve discovered things about Pop that I didn’t necessarily know–although I do have more details than I ever did before–it’s just that so much of my childhood was filled with sadness that it isn’t an easy time to revisit.  I also realize how much of that sadness I’ve chosen to leave behind.

In the course of learning more about my dad I’ve spoken to my mom and also reviewed her story and her family’s history.  Mom was born in Belgium but moved to Zaire in 1948 when she was four years old.  She lived in the Congo until 1960 when she and her mother and her sister fled back to Europe as the revolution broke out.  She was picked up at school one day and brought directly to the airport.  Didn’t get to say goodbye to her friends or her pets, didn’t get to take any of her things.  Poof, they were gone.

My grandfather, a mechanic who co-operated a Renault dealership in the Congo, remained for a few years trying to salvage his business.  He also helped preists and missionaries escape.  He loved living in Africa and later returned in the Seventies for another ten years.  The Congo was really my mother’s childhood home.  And it no longer exists as she knew it.   She never returned.

Mom finished high school and went to college in Belgium, then met my father and came to the States by the time she was 23.  So Belgium was never as much a home.  Still, her brother and sister live there, along with lots of cousins and aunts and uncles.

I haven’t been to Brussels since my grandfather died, fifteen years ago next month.  I remember four priests who he had helped escape from the Congo were present to pay their respects.   This is the longest stretch I’ve ever had not visiting.  My siblings and I took turns during the summers when we were growing up.  Turns out my grandfather’s younger brother is still alive.  At 87, he’s still lucid and alert.  I said to my mother recently, “Well, someone has to interview him and get the stories.”

One thing led to another, I saw that flights are cheap, so hell, I’m off to Belgium on Thursday night for a week to visit my family, and learn more about their lives and their history.  My mother has complicated feelings about her childhood and has never been comfortable talking about the political nature of being a Colonist (and Belgium, like so many European countries, had an undeniable history of brutality in Africa). Ever hear of Heart of Darkness?

So, I’m curious. To see how things have changed since I was there last. To hear what my aunt and uncles’ experiences were, to see old photo albums and 8 mm movies from my mother’s childhood.

I won’t be gone long, and who knows, maybe I’ll even blog from overseas. In the meantime, Cliff and Diane, Will and Bruce will hold the fort down over here.  Oh, and I’ll have some frites and think about y’all.

Here’s a great mega-mix by my friend Steinski.

Quiz: What movie is quoted at the start of the track?

In 1973, just one year before this card appeared, the Texas Rangers initiated the destruction of a young pitcher’s career in an effort to revive a languishing franchise. Team owner Bob Short devised an ill-conceived plan to rush phenom left-hander David Clyde from high school ball to the major leagues as a drawing card for the struggling Rangers franchise. Clyde’s debut season did much to help attendance at Arlington Stadium, but at considerable damage to Clyde’s career, which seemed so promising after throwing nine no-hitters in his senior season of high school.

At onetime a household name, Clyde has become a forgotten man in baseball annals. Here’s what happened. Drafted first in the country out of Texas’ Westchester High School in the spring of 1973, Clyde received a bonus of $125,000 and donned a Rangers’ major league uniform only a few days later. The immediate call-up to Texas was the brainchild of owner Bob Short, which conflicted directly against the advice of manager Whitey Herzog, who believed Clyde needed considerable schooling in the minor leagues.

Equipped with both Short’s blessings and a mechanically sound delivery that some scouts compared to that of Sandy Koufax, Clyde made his highly publicized major league debut against the Minnesota Twins on June 27, 1973. (Only 20 days earlier, Clyde had made his final appearance as a high school pitcher.) That night’s game at Arlington Stadium became such a focal point of local attention that the first pitch was delayed by 15 minutes, allowing more fans to free themselves from the massive logjam of traffic outside the stadium. Perhaps rattled by the late start and frazzled by his own nervousness, the 18-year-old Clyde walked the first two batters he faced—infielder Jerry Terrell and Hall of Famer Rod Carew—before settling down to strike out the side. Clyde went on to pitch a respectable five innings, walking a total of seven Twins, but struck out eight batters while allowing two earned runs and only one hit. Unfortunately, Clyde struggled to match his celebrated debut performance over the balance of the season, posting an ERA of 5.03 and winning only four of 12 decisions with the lowly Rangers in 1973. His pitching only worsened in 1974, leading him down a slippery slope to baseball obscurity.

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I caught two innings of AJ Burnett yesterday and he was throwing cheese. I want to like Burnett even though I’ve spent a lot of time not liking him over the past several years. It’s hard to get overly excited by him because even in his best seasons he hasn’t been as great as you might like to see from a guy with great stuff. Will he throw 200 innings? Can he make 25-30 starts? Can he post a sub 4.00 ERA? Or will he strike out a lot of dudes, have an ERA of 4.30, make 21 starts and throw 160 innings?

One thing…if he manages to improve over his performance last year, the Yanks are going to be tough.