Wednesday, January 6, 2021
2020: Once More For the Others Safe at Home
Last year — doesn't that sound like sweet relief already? — the passages of seven Hall of Famers added particular extra grief to an already pandemically miserable year. The further bad news is that the Magnificent Seven (Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford, Joe Morgan, Phil Niekro) were not the only ones Grantland Rice's Great Umpire called safe at home, unfortunately.
Assuming Dick Allen will be elected to the Hall by the Modern Era Committee later this year, that election will turn the Magnificent Seven into another kind of Eight Men Out. Allen played surrealistically through battling unconscionable racism in Philadelphia before he was dealt out of town at long enough last — for Curt Flood, who refused to report and elected to make his groundbreaking reserve clause challenge.
How sadly ironic. To Flood, the trade meant he was still a piece of property, even earning $90,000 in a year. (What he began, Andy Messersmith eventually finished.) To Allen, the trade was surely his Emancipation Proclamation. He posted a few more seasons of surrealistic hitting (and the 1972 American League Most Valuable Player Award) before injuries finally ground him away, and overcame a few more personal tragedies (especially the murder of his daughter) to become a respected and loved Phillies elder statesman and community outreacher. Life and baseball couldn't beat him but cancer finally did at 78.
"The imperfect man pitched the perfect game," is what sportswriting legend Dick Young offered when his New York Daily News colleague Joe Trimble was stuck for an opening to write up Don Larsen's perfecto in the 1956 World Series. "The million to one shot came in," wrote Washington Post legend Shirley Povich of Larsen's perfecto. When 2020 was the new year, it wasn't a day old before Larsen expired of esophageal cancer at 90.
Lucky him. Larsen lived a life that went from randy to responsible and his reward, above and beyond the pleasure (and excuse for friendly needling) he took when fans and writers asked him to revisit his million-to-one game ("You want to talk about my year with the Browns," he loved to tease), was to miss the pandemic ruination the year to come would yet wreak.
Tony Fernandez was a smart shortstop in the field and at the plate for the 1980s/1990s Blue Jays and a few others. Complications of kidney disease claimed him at 57 with far less style than he played the left half of the keystone. Yet he held a strange distinction during his brief spell in New York: in 1995, he was the first Yankee to hit for the cycle since Bobby Murcer ... two and a half decades previous.
Before Johnny Antonelli became a 1954 World Series hero pitching for the New York Giants, he inadvertently provoked Boston Braves pitcher Johnny Sain into a contract demand. Antonelli's $65,000 signing bonus in 1948 was more than the combined salaries of the Braves' two best pitchers, Johnny Sain and Hall of Famer Warren Spahn. Sain leveraged Antonelli's bonus into a $30,000 salary of his own.
Antonelli proved himself as a pitcher after leaving the Braves and the Army and being dealt to the Giants, but when the Giants moved out of New York Antonelli found San Francisco less to his liking. A couple of trades and an expansion draft later, Antonelli retired to his tire business and his family. With his second wife, he also took up extensive travel, reveling in what he couldn't see while he traveled as a pitcher, until his death at 89.
Jimmy Wynn (78) was nicknamed the Toy Cannon for the compact body that hit screaming, prodigious home runs, even in the indoor death chamber known as the Astrodome. A few too many Astro coaches and managers monkeying around with his hitting style probably did him few favors. Same thing elsewhere, at least until he became a Dodger. Ultimately, Wynn proved you could live and learn tenfold; he became a valuable Astro asset after his playing years especially among impressionable youth who thrived at his Astro-created youth training center.
Glenn Beckert (79) shared the keystone with Don Kessinger for several Cubs teams that looked pennant competitive until their insouciantly ancient manager burned them down the stretch. "Beckert was the Billy Herman of the 1960s," Bill James once wrote, "a pretty good second baseman, and the best hit-and-run man in baseball." Matt Keough (64) was one of the Five Aces burned almost as swiftly as he rose when Billy Martin got hold of the early 1980s Athletics. Mike McCormick (81) pitched himself into the National League's Comeback Player of the Year Award and the Cy Young Award in 1967, but he was also Mr. 500 — for hitting the 500th home run to be hit by any major league pitcher.
Claudell Washington (65) was a likable, long-serving journeyman whose 1980 free agency deal (five years, $3.5 million) jolted the game enough to provoke Phillies owner Bob Carpenter — who'd extended Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt big rather than lose him to free agency and chased down Pete Rose to sign big — selling out, because he feared fellow owners' brains had gone to bed. John McNamara (88) barely lived down Game 6 of the 1986 World Series (he left ankle-dissipated Bill Buckner in to play first for the bottom of the tenth), but his wife remembered a good, kind, loving man whose life shouldn't be judged by one egregious mistake. Appropriately.
The Yankees' 1965-75 term in purgatory was once nicknamed the Horace Clarke Era, but it wasn't the fault of the smooth-fielding second baseman from the Virgin Islands who wasn't much of a hitter but handled the right side of the keystone with sure hands and feet. Clarke (81) was proud to be a Yankee to the end of his life. He was also the poor soul who didn't get to hit against Washington Senators pitcher Joe Grzenda with two out in the top of the ninth — when heartsick Senators fans rioted on the field and forced a forfeit in the Senators' last game before leaving for Texas.
Bob Watson (74) was a sharp hitting first baseman and, in due course, the first black man in baseball to be the general manager of a World Series winner. Lindy McDaniel (84) was a long-serving relief pitcher of above-average excellence for lots of below-average teams and a devout Christian who became a minister after throwing his final pitch. (He's also the last American League pitcher to homer before the league introduced the designated hitter.) Fellow reliever Ron Perranoski (84) held down the back end of the Dodger fort in the early-to-mid 60s and for two World Series championships before becoming a long-serving pitching coach.
Jay Johnstone (74) was a solid outfielder with a flair for periodic big hits (especially Game Four of the 1981 World Series) and a bigger flair for mayhem — one of the greatest flakes in the game. Over three engaging books, the fun-loving Johnstone wrote his own eulogy:
Tommy Lasorda once fixed up Ernie Broglio on a date with a female impersonator.
Mark Fidrych talked to baseballs.
Don Stanhouse shared his post-game beer with monkeys and frogs.
Mickey Hatcher left a pig in Lasorda's office.
Bert Blyleven gave his Little League team chewing tobacco.
John Lowenstein likes to attack cakes with a baseball bat.
Richie Zisk filled Rene Lachemann's hotel bed with Jell-O.
Ross Grimsley once snapped a losing streak by consulting a witch.
Billy Loes once refused to pitch unless Buzzie Bavasi bought him a new dog.
Joaquin Andujar was known to shower wearing his uniform.
Rick Reichardt stole razor blades, forgot he had them, and sliced his own hand when he reached into his pocket.
Dizzy Dean placed a cake of ice over home plate to "cool off my fastball."
And I'm over the edge?
Steve Dalkowski (80) once joined Bo Belinsky in the minors in a plot to help their teammates get good looks at a comely South American Miss World contestant when her mother proved bent on keeping her away from those rapacious ballplayers: drilling holes in the wall separating his and Belinsky's room from hers. The plot succeeded until one bozo brought a flashlight so his viewing wouldn't stop after dark. Oops.
Unfortunately, Dalkowski fought demons from his own surrealistic but uncontrollable fastball (Hearing him warm up was like hearing a gun go off, Red Sox infielder Dalton Jones once said of him) to alcohol and all the way to COVID-19 when he died last April. After decades in the post-baseball wilderness, his sister brought him home to Connecticut where he lived with some dignity but a lot of his memory from those decades wiped out.
"Dave McNally, Cal Ripken, Sr., Bo Belinsky, and others from his generation in Orioles history have died," wrote the Baltimore Sun's John Eisenberg in 2003, "but Dalkowski, the one everyone thought would go first, is safe at home." That's all his loving sister wanted for him, and it proved enough for himself, as well. When invited to throw out a ceremonial first pitch in Camden Yards, Dalkowski tossed the ball, then threw his arms up in triumph from his wheelchair. Only his body and face showed the net result of a lost life. The arms up showed the spirit resurrected.
Now Dalko and all who played the game and passed last year — including such other once-familiar souls as Frank Bolling, Ted Cox, Ray Daviault, Ed Farmer, Damaso Garcia, Lou Johnson, Eddie Kasko, Phil Linz (baseball's unquestioned master of the harmonica), Denis Menke (he was once Hall of Famer Joe Morgan's slick double play partner with the Astros), Bob Oliver, Les Rohr, Tony Taylor — truly are safe at home, in the Elysian Fields, suffering no more, and may they bask in the light, love, and game of the eternal sunshine.