This year for Christmas, my secret Santa (my step-sister’s husband) got me a 1996 World Series baseball autographed by Joe Torre. How cool is that? I don’t care much about autographs but this one I like. It’s the perfect gift to get from a secret Santa. Thoughtful.

One of the things I’m most excited about 2008 is the release of The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, a book I edited, with help from Gabe Fried at Persea books and Pat himself. As I’ve mentioned on the Banter previously, Jordan played with Torre in the Braves’ minor league system in the early ’60s.

In 1996, Pat did a piece on Joe Torre for the New York Times magazine in the middle of the summer as the team was surging then slumping. It wasn’t a long profile or a particularly memorable one. By Jordan’s own admission, it is a minor piece. The story did not make the cut for our collection; in fact, it didn’t make the B-list. However, I have a couple of drafts of the story, one called “The Patience of Joe,” and another one, completely restructured, called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” that have some good stuff in ’em.

Here is the begining and end of Pat’s working draft of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Joe Torre, the New York Yankees’ manager, is sitting behind his desk in his office off the clubhouse in Yankee Stadium, talking to Rick Cerrone, the team’s director of media relations, while making out today’s line-up card.

Torre is a big, dark, sinister-looking man of 55. He has the blocky build of a professional wrestler, The Villain, recently gone on a diet. He has dark, olive-colored skin, black stubble of beard, and bushy black eyebrows that hand low over his threatening, black eyes. He does look villainous…a Mexican bandito about to pillage a town of peasants…a vengeful Saracan warrior about to sack the camp of a hated enemy.

A sportswriter barges in, unannounced. He starts haranguing Cerrone over his late-arriving press credentials which caused him to be an hour late for his interview with Torre. The sportswriter’s face is flushed with anger. Torre’s threatening eyes shift up, only the whites showing. Torre stands, a dark, threatening presence. He raises his hands, palms out, as if to fend off heat.

“Calm down,” he says, almost pleading. “Calm down. I’ll give you all the time you need. Have some coffee. Someone get him some coffee. Please!”

When Torre was a pudgy, 20-year-old catcher in the Milwaukee Braves’ minor league farm system in 1960, he looked every bit as old and dark and threatening as he does now. He always looked like an old man playing a young man’s game. At 20, Torre would waddle out to the pitcher’s mound in his catching gear to confront his baby-faced pitcher, red-faced, furious, kicking the dirt, making a spectacle of himself, embarrassing himself and his teammates because of their latest error. (Torre never embarrasses his players, he says, because, “I hit .360 one year, and .240 another, and I know I tired just as hard both years.” When Yankees’ rookie shortstop, Derek Jeter, made a crucial error that lost a game in August, Torre said, “He’s played his tail off for us and has won a lot of games. More than the error, that’s what to keep in mind.” Which is why, Wade Boggs, the Yanks’ veteran third baseman calls Torre, “A player’s manager.”)

Even at 20, Torre knew not to embarrass his teammates, and when he saw his young pitcher doing it, thrashing around the mound, he would stop ten feet from his raging pitcher, raises his hands, palms out, and say, in the same, pleading voice he uses today, “Calm down. Relax. We’ll get ’em for you. Don’t worry.”

After Torre has calmed the sportswriter, he says, “I have a temper, I just don’t vent it. (He also has stomach troubles.) Maybe it’s more healthy to show emotion. I don’t know. I’m a patient person.”

Torre always played the game with the patience of an older man. Even at 20, he had what was called “a professional attitude.” Which meant he approached the game unemotionally, diligently, doggedly, the only way possible if a player is to fashion a long career over 100-plus games a year. Each season, each game, each inning even, can be a lifetime of emotional highs and lows. Young players, furious pitchers, caught up in those emotional high and lows don’t last long in the game. Torre lasted 17 years. He finished his playing career with a lifetime .297 batting average and is the only player to be voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player, in 1971, when he led the league in both batting, .363 and runs batted in, 137, and the National League’s Manager of the Year, in 1982, when he led the Atlanta Braves to a division title. This is Torre’s 15th season as a manager (New York Mets, Atlanta, St. Louis Cardinals) and his first with the Yankees, who are leading the American League East with the third best record in baseball, and are considered one of three teams with the best chance at winning the World Series, the last of which the Yankees won in 1978.

Torre has blended a team of youthful players and grizzled veterans, born again Christians and recovering substance abusers, into arguably one of the most well-balanced teams in baseball. The present-day Yankees play an unremarkably adept game Torre calls “a National League game. We grind it out, one run at a time.” The Yankees pick away at their opponents, a single, a stolen base, a sacrifice bunt, a sacrifice fly ball, and a run, in a way that makes every player feel he’s contributing to their success.

(more…)

So last weekend my wife was away, and do you know what I did with my wild and nerdy ass self? Went down the the public library on 42nd street and checked out old issues of Sport magazine and Inside Sports on microfilm. (I’m nuts, what can I say.) Sport was an amazing publication in the fifties and sixties, and even in parts of the seventies, but by the eighties, it was a shell of its former self. The roster of writing talent at Sport during it’s heyday is remarkable: Arnold Hano, Ed Linn, W.C. Heinz, Ray Robinson, Roger Kahn, Frank Graham Jr, Dave Anderson, Myron Cope, Al Hirshberg, Jim Brosnan, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin, George Vecsey, Pat Jordan, Vic Ziegel, and Jerry Izenberg to name just a few. (All of the Sport compilations are out of print, but Bob Ryan edited a solid collection just a few years back that is well-worth picking up.) I’m not exactly sure when Inside Sports started. It was either at the tail-end of the seventies or the start of the eighties. Tom Boswell was their baseball guy for a long time, and they were very good, at least through the first half of the eighties. I found a lengthy and very entertaining profile on Nolan Ryan by Tony Kornheiser (yes, he had chops), and an excellent piece on Pistol Pete Maravich during Larry Bird’s rookie year with the Celtics by David Halberstam.

Anyhow, here a few random nuggets on a favorite Yankee, Willie Randolph, that I came across. First, from a profile in Sport, Octover 1976, “Hey, Say, Willie Can Play…Willie Randolph, That Is,” by Kevin McAuliffe:

Randolph is one of the American League’s top rookies of 1976, but unlike Detroit’s Big Bird, who thrives on attention, Randolph avoids it. He has never believed in stardom, for others—”As a kid, I never said, ‘Oh, there goes so and so,’ and tired to get his autograph”—or for himself. “I’m not what you call a starry-eyed fella,” he says.

Then, from Inside Sports, August 31, 1980, “Willie Randolph: The Making of a an Advance Man,” by George Vecsey.

“It’s an old cliché, but it’s true. A walk is as good as a hit,” Randolph said earlier this season, sitting in front of his locker in Yankee Stadium, a huge portable radio-cassette player—his “box”—propped on the rug. The cassesttes are mostly Isley Brothers, Roberta Flack and “a lot of jazz.”

Says Willie: “I knew I’d walk a lot. I know the manager appreciates it when you take a 3-1 pitch, when you get on base…you’d have to swing at anything close on 3-1 when you’re batting eighth,” Randolph says. “When you’re batting leadoff, you take the walk. That’s how I do it.”

…”Willie knows the most important thing is to get on base,” [Reggie] Jackson said. “He has learned to steal when it counts. He doesn’t wait until there are two strikes. He goes down early, so the hitter has a chance to bat…The only two things he has never done are hit .300 and win a Gold Glove. That’s it. Willie is a winter. He’s not a laugh-and-joke guy, which I like, because I’m not either. He’s a good family man, too. I’ll tell you what: If Willie does hit .300, you won’t notice the difference. He’ll do it the same way he hits .270.”

Willie from Brooklyn. He was a good one.

Bob Klapisch has covered baseball in New York since the heyday of the Mets in the 1980s. He is a columnist for The Bergan Record and a contributor to ESPN. Now in his forties, he continues to play semi-pro baseball. Yesterday, he contributed a terrific post about playing ball to The Baseball Analysts. Klapisch’s article has some keen insights into the pysche of ballplayers, and it is nice to see him write something longer, and more personal. But Klap isn’t just a guy who loves to play the game, at heart he’s a pitcher, and they are a breed apart:

From Little League all the way to Cooperstown, there’s a fraternity convened by the adrenaline rush of throwing a baseball. Bret Saberhagen once told me, “Nothing matches making a hitter swing and miss. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. Guys who retire, they spend the rest of their lives looking for it, but once you stop pitching you never get it back.”

…So why do I keep pitching? Probably for the purest reason of all – it’s what I do, at least when I’m not writing or helping feed the kids. To stop now would mean tearing away layers of psychological flesh. I guess I’m afraid of what’s underneath. Middle age, maybe.

I sent the article to Pat Jordan, the veteran journalist and former pitching prospect for the Braves. He replied:

The allure of pitching is about being in control and playing God. Nothing happens without you. You control the game, good or bad. also the feeling of ball off fingertips and your ability to make it spin and do things is exhilarating. I love to throw a baseball. The feeling of artistry and power in making a ball approach the plate with the speed or curve that I dictate is unrivaled in anything else I’ve ever done, including writing. I was born to be a pitcher, but taught myself to be a writer. I was an artist on the mound, but, alas, am merely a craftsman, like a brick layer, in front of a typewriter.

Which brings me to another thought. Why do the best jock-turned-writers all seem to be pitchers? Jordan, Jim Brosnan, Jim Bouton. Glenn Stout pitched in an over-30 league for years. What gives? Michael Lewis was a pitcher when he was in high school, Rich Lederer was a pitcher back in his playing days, and Will Carroll was too. Bouton thinks that it “may be that pitchers spend a lot of time sitting around.” What do you think?

SWEET LOU

Pat Jordan is one of my favorite baseball writers, and I think he’s surely the best former-player turned writer. Jordan contributes pieces to the Times magazine several times a year, and his latest is on our man in Tampa, Lou Piniella. Worth taking a look at.