Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1540: Don’t Leave it All on the Field

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about an anecdote in David Halberstam’s book The Teammates about prescient Cardinals pitcher Harry Brecheen, the uproar when players were first prevented from leaving their gloves on the field, and the 20th anniversary of Glenallen Hill’s rooftop home run, then revisit Michael Jordan’s motivations for playing baseball and discuss […]

I get away from the hustling crowds And all that ruckus more down the street On the roofs, the only place I know place I know where you just have to wish to make it so oh let's go up on the moon Good morning and welcome to episode 1540 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hi, Ben.

Hi. Do you have anything you want to talk about to start? Yeah, a couple things. All right, hit me. First, I just finished the David Halberstam book, The Teammates. Have you ever read that? Oh, yeah. A long time ago. Yeah, at some point I did. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I really liked it. It's just a short little book. It's about 200 pages, but it's about the friendship really between the four longtime Red Sox teammates, Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky.

And it's sort of a bittersweet kind of book because it's about a trip that DiMaggio and Pesci took to see Ted Williams right before Ted And this isn't about any of The four teammates this is about Harry Brickin the great Cardinals Pitcher who was a star against the Red Sox in the 1946 World Series And it's talking about The former Cardinals sports writer Bob Braig and it says Brickin Braig thought knew the game

Exceptionally well and understood new Trends in it before many of his teammates Did this is talking about 1947, I think. So in 1947, Braig had gone out to dinner with both Brickeen and Dixon, Murray Dixon, another Cardinals pitcher, and he heard Brickeen caution Dixon, who had a tendency to coast a bit, that the game was changing and that Dixon had better adjust. Murray, he said, times are changing. You can't do what you used to do anymore.

You've got to go out there and throw as hard as you can for as long as you can. So this was 1947. And that sort of stood out to me because we talk a lot about what the talent level was in baseball in the past and how the style of play varied and how good guys were and how hard they were throwing. So I don't know if this is earlier than I would have guessed or later than I would have guessed, but 1947, that's a long time ago. And even then, I guess, A, you could conclude from this that it was kind of common still for pitchers to coast and to take something off their pitches because they were expected to pitch the whole game. And then you had this visionary, Harry Bikin, who saw that things were changing and that you would have to go all out on every pitch as players do today. But that just

kind of goes to show how different baseball was. And I mean, most pitchers probably weren't capable of throwing as hard as pitchers do today. But above and beyond that, they weren't trying to on every pitch because they were trying to pitch complete games. And to pitch complete games, you had to sacrifice some velocity. So that's how the game was played back then. I mean, that's how it was played for many years, like the whole Christy Mathewson pitching in a pinch idea where you just save something extra for that crucial moment. And now I don't know that anyone really saves anything for any moment. You're kind of going all out at all times because we know it's important. And we know that when you get gassed, there will be a fresh arm waiting to relieve you. So it's a sign of how much things have changed. But also, I guess, how long ago things were already moving in that direction. So Burkine is the one who was giving the advice.

Yes. Okay. Right. Interesting. And so this was, you said this was 1947? Yes. Do you know, I don't suppose you know what month? I don't.

Before, okay. Because Burkine the next year won the ERA title. Yeah. And led the league in strikeouts and led the league in FIP, though he didn't know it, and finished fifth in MVP voting. And I would be interested in reading what else Harry Burkine knew that nobody else knew. But it's hard to figure out whether his complete game rate

was much higher than the league average that year. But, of course, you would expect that from an ace, the ace of the league. His complete game rate in the years before was also higher than the league average so it's not as though he was some forerunner of the seven inning start he was still completing most of his games more than the average pitcher was up to that point so i don't know how he managed to to square those two things if he was both not coasting going as hard as he can for as long as he can but also as long as he can generally covered nine innings uh well what's the loss there if you can go nine innings as hard as you can then then that does seem right yeah why not

both i guess he was good enough to do both so good for him yeah well go read it if anyone's interested in picking up some pandemic reading the The Teammates, A Portrait of a Friendship, one of David Halberstam's last books and his last baseball book. Very good. And another thing I wanted to mention, I have talked or we have talked previously on the podcast about the practice of players leaving their gloves on the field when they went into the dugout between innings, which I think everyone is always shocked to hear that this happened, because it sounds like if you left your glove in the field of play, the ball would constantly be hitting the glove, and it would be a farce. And best as we can tell, that doesn't seem to have happened all that often. There's no really famous story about, you know, Game 7 of the World Series and the ball hit the

glove that was left out in the field. I think it did happen, but rarely, and rarely in any moment that really mattered. This was changed in November of 1953. The rules committee met for the first time in a couple of years, and they made a few changes, one of which was Rule 3.16, which required players to remove the equipment from the field when they came to bat. And it was just reported matter-of-factly. It didn't seem like it would be a huge issue or anything, as you wouldn't think it would. Now, looking back, it doesn't seem like a huge issue.

Seems like it would have been long overdue at that point. But people flipped out when this was announced, and people were very upset when this was announced in the spring of 1954, when this was supposed to go into effect. So up until that point, middle infielders and outfielders would leave their gloves in the outfield grass sort of close to the infield. And then the third baseman and first baseman would flip their gloves into foul territory, just close to the bases, but still in play. And pitchers and catchers would take their gloves with them to the dugout but at that point it had become a more acute problem and i'm reading here from a recent edition of craig wright's great newsletter pages from baseball's past baseballspast.com go check that out too this had become a bigger problem because people had started to leave their sunglasses on the field at that point too. And so this was creating even more clutter. And Hank Greenberg was on that committee and he said, okay, enough is enough.

It's time to stop this. And there was a lot of support for the rule to be passed. But then everyone was up in arms about this. People were blasting it. Managers in the American League, Jimmy Dykes, Bucky Harris, Paul Richards, all publicly criticized it as unnecessary and argued that it would add considerable length to the games and provide another way for teams to stall when hoping to get a rainout. Frank Lane, the GM of the White Sox, claimed, I don't know of a single player who likes it. A veteran American League umpire who spoke anonymously against the rule said it would stretch games to four hours, which I don't know. Maybe that's it is. Yeah, maybe that's what happened.

It's the gloves all along. And in the National League, there was a little less opposition, but there were some people who were up in arms about it. Hall of Famer. OK, that's weird that there is a league split on this. The weirdest part. Yeah. So Richie Ashburn was a National League player and he really attacked it. He said, it's a silly rule. It makes our work just that much harder. It means a lot more running. And believe me, especially when the weather is hot in the dog days of August, a major league ballplayer has to conserve his strength.

You can't do that by running to the dugout to get your glove all the time. So he was painting this picture of just exhausted players in the dog days of summer because they would have to run back to their dugout to get the glove. And in retrospect, all of this seems very silly. I mean, you never think of players getting tired or taking extra time to get their gloves in part because players get their teammates their gloves. They bring their gloves out to them in the field so everyone doesn't have to be running back and forth. And maybe that's something that seems obvious in retrospect but wasn't as easy to predict. I don't know. But I think there was also some sentiment involved here because this is one of those baseball traditions. And anytime anything imperils a baseball tradition, people get upset about it.

And anytime anything imperils a baseball tradition, people get upset about it. So there was an interview with the then 88-year-old former player Hugh Duffy, who was born in 1886, and he confirmed that people always left their gloves on the field even before he was born. And so people had sort of a soft spot for leaving their gloves in the field. And one thing that I wasn't aware of here that Craig points out in his newsletter, he says, to be honest, it was lamentable to lose the moment of accent after a particularly good play ended an inning when the infielders would take a hop of celebration toward the dugout and then pivot and toss their gloves with a bit of joie de vivre into the outfield grass. And what were you supposed to do with the dead mouse found in the dugout if you could not sneak it into the finger hole of an opponent's glove left on the field my word that's yeah so that was not something i thought of that that would be like a like a closer save celebration or something you'd make a great play on the field and then you'd turn and toss your glove into the

field and run off which i guess now people toss the ball into the stands or something or i don't know what they do but not as fun as tossing your glove maybe yeah so they basically like every every half inning would end and it'd be like the end of a of a college graduation ceremony right just fling fling things into the air i wonder if it was considered bush league to throw the glove too high like yeah if you couldn't you couldn't flip it too high you could only not like the jesse arasco where it never comes down right yeah yeah like i wonder yeah i mean if if i wonder if glove flips were as fraught as as bat flips yeah at the time yeah so there was almost a revolt about this because the american league teams again weird that it's american league

teams but there were few enough teams at that point that I guess it could split that way where you might have some people who are against something who happen to be concentrated in one league. So during spring training of 1954, the AL teams voted seven to one, with the exception of Greenberg and his team Cleveland, because he had proposed the rule, to petition Jimmy Gallagher, head of the rules committee, to call a special session to rescind the rules. When Gallagher told them that it was too late

and that they had to play at least one season with the rule before it could be considered, the American League threatened to revolt. American League president Will Herridge said that the AL clubs were prepared to make their own interpretation of the rule in the regular season, even if that interpretation violated what was clearly stated in the rulebook. The call for rebellion spread to many of the minor leagues, where 13 of the 36 minor leagues, there were many more minor leagues back then, said that they would join the AL in not enforcing the rule,

and five more minor leagues indicated that they were considering a similar action. And the president of the NL said, like it or not, it's a rule. They're going to strictly enforce it. And then Commissioner Ford Frick weighed in a few days before the start of the season. And at this point, the league presidents had a lot more authority than they would later. And the commissioner was less looked to to settle these sorts of disputes. But still, Ford Frick sent out a memo saying that it would be enforced and threatening people who did not comply with this rule. And there was a similar edict that was issued to the minor dugout. And all of the resistance just sort of faded away in one year because it became clear that it was such a non-issue. There is still such an attachment to certain things that have been part of baseball history and part of our own histories with baseball. And so when someone threatens to take them away, we get very upset about that.

But then when they actually go away, usually it just doesn't really matter and no one really cares. So I think this is one of the more interesting examples of that, because really, who could possibly argue you would think that there should be gloves just lying all over the field with sunglasses too that the ball could conceivably hit it seems like such a small price to pay to get rid of those obstacles so it seems like it should have happened before that and the fact that people were complaining about it even in 1954 just seems somewhat silly yeah well not just that it could change without any downside but in fact so there was a tweet a couple weeks ago that everybody was replying to and this tweet was you probably saw it you probably saw some people replying to it it was what all caps very specific thing do you miss about sports the most be as specific as possible the street was by steve braband by at the zone and i hadn't answered it i i enjoyed reading a lot of the replies to it but i

did not answer it and now i'm ready i'm ready to answer it my very specific thing that i miss about baseball the most is in fact the teammate bringing a glove out to his teammate who made the final out of an inning i mean i guess he's either you could work it where it's either the guy who was on base or the batter who made the final out but but either way there's something touching about a teammate delivering the glove he knows where his teammate stores his glove he knows his teammates equipment and he brings it out to him and he hands it to him and they they, they share a moment of, you know, commiseration that the inning is over, maybe a moment of planning, or maybe it's just simply like, here you go, here's a thing. And we, you know, we do it in, we do it, we do it in slow pitch softball too. And it's a good feeling it when

someone brings you out a glove, you feel like, you know, you have a friend and when you bring out another person's glove, you feel like you're contributing to the friend and when you bring out another person's glove you feel like you're contributing to the team effort it is very small but it's a it is kind of a touching moment and by doing this rule change they created this interaction and and so that is a very specific thing that i currently miss about baseball and so on the one hand i i am saying oh how silly to worry about it but on the other hand my attachment am saying, oh, how silly to worry about it. But on the other hand, my attachment to that very specific thing, you could easily take that same attachment, map it onto the old way that they had of doing it. And you could imagine lots of people in 1954 would miss that very specific thing about baseball simply because it is a very specific thing about baseball.

The specificity of it is in a lot of ways the charm. I mean, I just created an emotional reason why I like the player handing the glove to the teammate. I created a little storyline to give it poignancy, but really that was all kind of made up. You just like it because you've seen it and because it's specific and there's that ritualistic aspect of it, whether it matters or not. So, yeah, I kind of feel for the American leaguers who had that feeling. No, but why? It seems to me that I should just end it on that, but it seems to me that it would be perfectly fine

for outfielders to leave their glove in the, I guess, well, you don't want someone to trip on it. All right, never mind. Yeah, it's dumb. It's a dumb place to put your gluck. I don't think. Yeah. I think I solved the Harry Brickin mystery, how he was able to throw at max effort and

still pitch complete games, maybe because he just didn't throw hard, period. He was kind of a crafty lefty, and he threw a screwball and a curveball. And there's actually a quote in this book by dom dimaggio who said if he hit you in the back with the fastball you'd barely feel it so maybe brookine throwing as hard as he possibly could just wasn't even hard enough to tire himself out i don't know but his success was more from his off-speed pitches so i guess that's how he did it a very specific thing that i like about this podcast is that we just, you and I both choose not to be offended that the other is clearly doing other research while we're sharing our

thoughts about, you know, making friends and slow pitch softball. Like you're reading a book. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. You sometimes return to something you said half an hour after you said it. Yeah. Frequently.

And it would be very easy for you to take half an hour after you said it. Yeah, frequently. And it would be very easy for you to take offense to that, but you don't. Last thing is happy 20th anniversary to the Glenallen Hill home run. This is the 20th birthday of the famous Glenallen Hill Wrigley Field rooftop homer. One of my favorite home runs of all time, just visually. And if we had done that draft that we did last week where we tried to save five items for the hall of fame and i wanted one to symbolize the pd era i took the ball that bonds hit off of gagne in 2004 but i could have taken the ball that glenn allen hill hit in 2000 the only ball that's been hit during play onto the Wrigley Field rooftop across the street

from the ballpark. And Hill, of course, was in the Mitchell Report and also in Jason Grimsley's affidavit. And I think he maybe has owned up to some of that. I don't know. But he certainly has been connected to steroids and HTH. And perhaps that could have played a role in that particular home run. He was Brown of Yahoo just did another one in honor of the anniversary, and he talks to a lot of the teammates who were there then and talked about how it was the most impressive homer they had ever seen, and really it still is when you look at it, and there are various estimates of how far that ball went, and it seems to have probably been somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 feet, so it's not like necessarily longer than a few of the homers that have been hit in recent years that have been tracked by StatCast, let's say.

But it was quite a shot. And just the way it soared out of the ballpark, over the street, onto the roof. I mean, if it had been somewhere else, then it might have just landed in the park. It might have just landed in the bleachers or it might have hit some obstacle and fallen down and would have been impressive. But the fact that it soared out of the park and over the street and onto a roof just made it so much more impressive. And I know that the wind was blowing out that day, which probably had something to do with it. But really just the short little stroke he takes too. It's like a very flat level swing that he has it's just like a little chop and it's a chop yeah and somehow the ball just absolutely launches and it

just disappears into the distance and i just love it i've watched that highlight so many times and i will link to it on the show page if you haven't seen it go check it out yeah i spent a few years of my life uh rooting for glenn allen hill and it was fun yeah yeah it's it's it is a it is not a swing that gives you confidence no until until he connects and you know over the course of a year there's enough mistakes in in the game that that he put up numbers it was a lot of fun yep all right all right we're just gonna keep going in that vein basically no no real topic i just wanted to talk about some things that I have been consuming lately and that I wanted to bat around with you, just like you just did. So let's start with the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance.

Are you watching it at all? No, I think I'm the one person not watching it so far, but I'm sure I will at some point. All right. By the way, I would like to warn people. We are going to probably in the rest of this episode, we are going to be saying a specific bad word a bunch. And so, you know, if you got issues with that, just know that we're going to say the same single word a lot, I think. All right. I think. All right. So Michael Jordan, before I start talking about Michael Jordan,

I got to tell you, there's this story that basketball fans probably are sick of by now. I don't think I knew about this story and it's bonkers. And so I'm going to tell you in 1994, when, you know, Michael Jordan had retired and the Bulls were playing without Michael Jordan, they go, they're in the playoffs. They're still a pretty good team. They go to the playoffs. They win the pretty good team they go to the playoffs they win the first round they go to the second round they're playing the knicks they're behind two games to none and they're winning by two late in the game patrick ewing makes a shot with 1.8 seconds to tie the game and so they get the last possession of um regulation what do they call that do they call it regulation in basketball? I feel like there's another. I'm happy they do. Yeah, anyway, the last possession. And so, Scottie Pippen was the star. People are, this is like if a basketball fan right now were telling the story

of Bonds and Gagné, I think. Yeah. But, all right, so Pippen was a star, the star of the Bulls. And so he thought, well, he would probably get the last shot. And Phil Jackson draws up a play that is going to actually go to Tony Kukoc, who was not the star of the team, but was a good scorer. And Pippen was actually going to be the inbounder of this. He was going to throw the inbounds pass. And Pippen, consider that very disrespectful to his status as the star. He wanted the last shot. He felt he had earned the last shot, just as Jordan would have had the last shot for years and years before that.

And so he tells Phil Jackson, I'm not doing it. I'm not playing that role. So you can give me the shot or else I'm not going to play. And so with 1.8 seconds in the playoffs in a must-win game, Scottie Pippen sits out. He sits on the bench. And the Bulls run this play. It's a very touchy pass to Kukoc. He gets it, turns around, makes an incredible shot for a buzzer-beating win. And the Bulls win.

And Scottie Pippen was just sitting on the bench. That is the greatest story in sports history, I think. And I want to be a basketball writer now. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Wow. My goodness. Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about. Michael Jordan played baseball on the documentary last night. And so this raised, it was a little bit more context for the conversation that we had a few weeks ago, but there was one point in particular, there's actually two points I would like to make. One point in particular is this, everybody says that he's, you know,

he probably like, there's a lot of people. It is not hard to find people who say Michael Jordan would have made it to the majors. He was getting better. He was driven. He was a hard worker. He would have made it. Now I a hard worker. He would have made it. Now, I have no doubt that he would have, quote unquote, made it. Did you know that the A's offered him a contract with a guaranteed major? Yes, I heard that. Sandy Alderson said that on Buster Olney's podcast recently. Yeah, I did not. I had not known that before this. And so it's clear that the White Sox probably would have found a way to bring him up. I mean, it would have just been too much money to leave on the table.

If Jordan was willing to do it, you know, without necessarily having, you know, proven himself, then I think they would have given him the opportunity. Maybe that fall or maybe the next year sometime. But would he have been a major leaguer? Lots of people will say yes, and I still have not been convinced. I'm not the expert. Terry Francona is the expert, not me. But Terry Francona has not convinced me yet. And I would like to be convinced,

but I haven't been. And so I have always been a little bit about these claims. And I think that Terry Francona said something on the documentary that really made me question whether they all believe what they're saying. And here is what Terry Francona said. He said, he drove in 50 runs. We had a lot of good prospects who didn't drive in 50 runs. And I feel like that is such a obviously unconvincing statement. And Terry Francona is so smart and so in control of what data he puts in his life that the fact that he is using he drove in 50 runs and we had a lot of good prospects who didn't drive in 50 runs is is kind of the tell that they don't really believe that he had proven it now there's one angle of this claim is that he was getting better

and he would have continued to get better. The other is that people will point to his stats. Like, so they'll point to the 50, he drove in 50 runs or, you know, Tom Verducci had a piece about Jordan's baseball career that ran, I think today. And he's got various statistics that demonstrate that Jordan was actually pretty good. So I'll read this. Jordan, for instance, batted 276 in August. After his season in AA, Jordan hit a very respectable 252 in the Arizona Fall League. And then in parentheses, Mike Trout hit 245 in the AFL in 2011, his third pro season. And then he says, Jordan totaled 51 runs batted in, 51 walks, and 30 stolen bases.

How impressive is that combination? Over the previous four seasons, there have been 1,200 player years in the White Sox organization, majors and minors included. None of them reached the thresholds of RBI's walks and stolen bases that marked Jordan's year at Birmingham. Over the past 30 seasons, there were roughly 8,000 player years in the White Sox organization among all those yearly statistical lines, which include combined minor league stats for players at multiple levels. Jordan is one of only nine players

to reach 51 RBIs, 51 walks, and 30 stolen bases. Five of those nine players reached the major leagues. So if you want to say Michael Jordan's trajectory, which could not be seen in the numbers, but was visible to people who were around him, suggests that he had a lot more room for growth and that if anybody was going to reach that room for growth, it was Michael Jordan. You had to see how driven he was and understand him as a person to see that. But I promise you, he was just going to be better and better then i am happy to listen but

this trying to find evidence in his actual performance feels like so so transparently bad and forced and cherry-picked that i feel like i i don't believe that these arguments are actually what people believe so much as they're a lot more fun to make and so people are making those fun arguments he drove in 50 runs come on yeah come on terry he drove in 50 runs he drove in 50 runs yeah there were out of the 100 players in double a that year who had the most played appearances, which include Michael Jordan, he finished 100th in OPS. Yeah, there were three players on his own team that year who drove in more runs than he did. Two of them never made the majors, and one of them who did was Chris Snopek, who had a 68 OPS plus in his 215 Major League Games, zero war.

So it was definitely not like an indicator, like you reach the magic 50 RBI mark in AA. That means you're ticketed for the big leagues. I would not have thought of that as any kind of statistical milestone that a player would be trying to reach. I mean, even on his own team, it was not particularly impressive, especially given the players who exceeded that mark. So yeah, that seems like a stretch. struggling with this question of whether Michael Jordan played baseball because he thought that he could make it and whether his, whether he went into it with the plan to also become a great baseball player or whether he went into it with the plan to specifically remove himself from that kind of ambitious circle that he had found himself in and to let himself finally relax. And I think there's not any evidence. There's not any conclusive evidence. There never will be. Michael Jordan himself might not really know the answer to that, but I think that there's not any evidence. There's not any conclusive evidence. There never will be. Michael Jordan himself might not really know the answer to that. But I think that there's some strong evidence emerged over the course of the documentary

that supports the notion that he did not go into this with the usual Michael Jordan competitiveness and unwillingness to fail. That this was very specifically a break from his normal personality, not just from his normal sport, but that he kind of wanted it to try a different way of living and being. And so there's a there's a there's a part where, well, all right, first off, you got to know that everybody on the Birmingham Barons that year, in all these oral histories and documentaries and interviews, and also from the time, they all talk about what a peach Michael Jordan was. Like, they loved him.

He was fun. He was great to be around. They loved him. He was a pal. He was a really nice guy. And in basketball, of course, the story has always been, and, you know, is pretty convincingly told in this documentary that around the Bulls, he was not a nice guy, that he was something close to a bully. Now, in a way that many of his teammates will say that they appreciated and that was necessary for the

Bulls to reach their potential and that he himself, you know, still defends 20 years later. It's not like he's like repenting of that. So it was all very intentional, but he was a tyrant. And so they asked his teammate, BJ Armstrong, you know, was he a nice guy? And BJ Armstrong says, was he a nice guy? And then there's a long pause. And he said, he couldn't have been nice. And basically he's saying that if you want to be Michael Jordan, you can't be nice.

It is impossible for him to have been nice. He could not have been the player he was. He could not have pushed the bulls to where they got and also been nice. Couldn't have been nice. And then Michael Jordan cuts to Michael Jordan and he says, winning has a price. I don't have to do this. I'm only doing this because it's who I am. And so, you know, the idea that winning has a price, that the way that Michael Jordan played basketball and the way that Michael Jordan apparently was in the clubhouse in baseball are mutually exclusive, that they don't coexist. And so the fact that he was so nice in baseball suggests that he really wasn't that ambitious

about it, that he was passionate about it, that he was driven, that he put a lot of mental energy into it, that like a hobby, or maybe hobby is not quite a strong enough word, but like a hobby that you truly, truly love, you can be extremely passionate about it. If you really, really love, like when I, I'll give another example. When I was in high school and I got really, really, really, really into pop punk music and ska music, I listened constantly. I wanted to know every word. I wanted to know every note, but not in any way was I competitive about it, right? It was removed from competition.

I think the fact that he was really nice in baseball suggests that that he he was not all that driven and that he didn't feel the need to succeed. And so there's another thing he says to where he says after BJ Armstrong makes a game winning shot and does a little trash talk. And then Michael Jordan talks about how that drove him in the bowls to win the next game. And he says, let's see if all that trash talking starts when it's 0-0 instead of a five point lead. That's the sign of a good man. If you can talk shit when you're behind in the score, when you're ahead in the score, it's easy to talk. And Michael Jordan went to play baseball and he was no longer ahead in the score, right? He was behind in the score.

He was not a great baseball player. He was not the best baseball player on the field. He wasn't even a successful baseball player, and he did not talk shit. So what he was saying, like, he would have respected B.J. Armstrong if Armstrong could have come out talking shit with the score tied instead of only when he was up five. But when he actually had the chance,

Michael Jordan goes and plays a sport that he isn't the greatest in the world at, and he keeps his mouth shut. And he's very respectful, and everybody loves him for it. So in a way, baseball gave him the opportunity to be the nice person that he couldn't have been otherwise. Yeah, that could be. Maybe that person was still inside and he was just kind of restraining himself because he had enough self-awareness to know that it's a little bit different to be that basketball Michael Jordan when you are actually the best ever and certainly the best at the time than it is to be that Michael Jordan when you are a double-A outfielder who's not very good compared to other baseball players and you're very inexperienced and you haven't played the sport in years. Presumably he had enough humility or at least just awareness to know that he couldn't walk in and act as if he was the best in the world because he clearly wasn't the best in the world. But maybe some part of him still believed that he could be, if not the best, at least very competitive in the majors. Like in RJ Anderson's piece that he did last week for CBS Sports, he talked to a couple of Jordan's double-A teammates, including

this guy Mike Bertotti, who made it to the majors for a few seasons with the White Sox. And all the elements of the typical Jordan baseball story are there. There are stories about how hard he worked, and he was the first one taking batting practice before batting practice. And there's also the element of he was just one of the guys and he carried his own bags and he hung out in the clubhouse and he was fairly normal given that he was Michael Jordan. And the only real story in here about his competitiveness is about when he was playing pickup basketball with the team, which is kind of amazing to think of that Michael Jordan, the best player in the world at the time, was just playing pickup games with White Sox AA players that year. But RJ relates a story here from Bertotti where Bertotti was kind of gloating because he shot a three over Michael Jordan. And he said, Michael, you just let me shoot a

three-pointer over you. You got defensive player of the year last year, and you just let me shoot And he said, He's like, are you ready? Are you ready? I'm down in an athletic stance and I'm saying I'm ready. Next thing I know, he did a crossover dribble and went past me and I didn't see him go by. His first step was that quick. So he did feel a need to respond to this taunt from this non-basketball player who was, you know, kind of jokingly joshing and ribbing him about having shot a three over him. But there isn't really a story like that about him responding to someone competing with him in batting practice or something, and he had to hit the longest home run because someone else said, you're Michael Jordan, and I hit the longest home run. So maybe it is true that that only came out in basketball, but I don't know that I would conclude from that that inside he was not burning with the same intensity. But maybe he just kind of kept the lid on it because he realized, like, I don't have the standing in this sport and in this clubhouse to act that way. Everyone's going to hate me because I can't back it up. But, you know, maybe even knowing that he couldn't back it up is a little bit different.

that he couldn't back it up is a little bit different. Like, you know, he wasn't just so competitive despite all the circumstances that he continued to think of himself as the best, even in this context where he clearly wasn't. Yeah, that's the key is that he kept at it despite knowing that he wasn't ever going to be able to back it up. So you give the example of playing pickup basketball against amateurs where he responds to someone having any success by having to humiliate them. There's other examples throughout the documentary. Like there's a scene where he's playing quarters with his security guard and his security guard wins 20 bucks off him. And you can just see like he doesn't say anything, but you can just see his face change where he's like, not friends with the guy anymore.

Like he just like you can tell he's really unhappy that he lost at quarters. And you would think if that if all of this were of the same, we're coming from the same part of his brain of his ultra competitive has to compete has to thrive at any cost part of his of his of his persona-competitive, has-to-compete, has-to-thrive-at-any-cost part of his persona, then over the course of a year failing at baseball, he would not have continued to be lovable and friendly and friends with people. And I think the fact that he did and the fact that all these stories talk about how great a teammate he was really suggests that this just was not in any way engaging the same part of his brain that all the other competition did and you you hear it all the

time it wasn't just basketball he was competitive about everything he was so competitive about everything yahtzee on the bus everything except seems baseball, where he was trying really hard and technically competing. And yet it didn't seem to affect his friendliness, his ability to be part of a community. And I continue to just get the feeling that this was just something really freeing for him because it let him get away from that darker and more driven part of his persona that had to be succeeding, because he had to back something up. He didn't feel the need to back anything up here. Yeah, maybe.

Although I wonder whether the fact that he went back to basketball meant that he missed that. I mean, he said that it was because of the strike, because the strike wouldn't allow him to continue to improve at the pace that he wanted to. But maybe could it have pace that he wanted to. But maybe could it have been that he just didn't like not being the best at something and maybe didn't like not even acting like he was the best or could be the best? I wonder whether the appeal of that just wore off after a year where he had such an intensity and hunger to be the best that he was not content with not being the best for more than one summer oh my goodness i just to see kukoc make that shot and you just you just

realize what it must have felt like for pippen yeah kukoc make that shot and to have that stand like if if this had just been like oh jordan was injured for a day and wasn't available. But the fact that it was the Bulls playing that season as the three-time defending champs trying to get out of Jordan's shadow gives that game. Anyway, all right. By the way, Sandy Alderson offering Michael Jordan a big league contract and a guaranteed spot on the roster. What do you think? Good or bad? What do you think? Good or bad? baseball, right? And that was when he was in AA, where normally no one even notices a player in AA. So if he had just jumped right to the majors, and you get people now complaining about Tim Tebow taking up a roster spot of some player in A-ball or whatever, I can't imagine that that would have gone over well. Obviously, it would have been an enormous story, and it would have put people in the park. So if that's why the A's would have done it, then it would have worked. They would have sold some tickets. But I think it probably wouldn't have been a good thing for Jordan because he would have been really overmatched and embarrassed if he had jumped right to the majors.

And all the things that we say now about how impressive it is that he did even decently well in double a at times or in the afl we would not be saying those things about him in the majors he would have looked terrible probably and that would have just been sort of sad and so i think now whereas we have that well we can dream and would he have gotten there and everyone thinks oh maybe he would have gotten there. His teammates think he would have gotten there. If we had actually seen him there with no seasoning, then it would have just looked like he never could have hacked it there. Would have been a real sort of farce, I think. So I don't think it would have been good.

It wouldn't have given us an opportunity to see something about him because he would have just been going in cold with no practice. And so it wouldn't have actually told us how good he was. We probably learned more about his baseball ability from a real season in double A than we would have from some kind of publicity stunt audition in the majors. Yeah, right. It's like if you watch if you watch a weightlifter you know a really great weightlifter who can lift 600 pounds like that's really amazing and if you had him try to lift 75 000 pounds it would actually not be any different than me trying to lift 75 000 pounds or you just would get crushed and there would be no there would be no movement whatsoever. Alderson says in the Verducci piece that it wasn't,

I don't know, publicity is an interesting word. I don't know if he would deny the publicity aspect, but he denies that it was about money. So this is his quote, I never started to quantify it. I knew it would be better, but I wasn't trying to quantify it. I knew we'd improve our attendance, yeah, but mostly I thought this would be fun. It wasn't about the money. It was more, won't this be fun? I think it was the sense, not that it would be good for the game in any sort of significant cultural way, but that it was about the celebrity that surrounded him. The notion that baseball is a game that ought not to take itself so seriously. It was sort of a why not question for me. And so what he's basically saying, I mean, if his theory is that the good that this would do is to specifically say we shouldn't take baseball so seriously. And any response we have is, well, as a person who takes baseball seriously, I don't like it.

Then Sandy might say, well, yeah, that's just the point. Like we're not speaking from the same premise here. I specifically think that the way that you view baseball as important and serious is itself something that needs to be torn down. And I'm intrigued by that argument. I think that the problem is you can't do it with one player. If you want to broaden the game and have baseball be broadly more adventurous, broadly less competition focused or narrowly defined success, then that would be good. And that would be a nice, maybe a fun project to imagine the league taking. But one player is just going to look like he's getting absolutely crushed the whole time and

there wouldn't think it would have been fun at all he would have gone 0 for 4 with four strikeouts in his first game and then it would have just been a matter of how long are the a's okay with actively trying to lose by playing michael jordan and how long is michael jordan okay with embarrassing himself so it would have really been the opposite of fun, I think, after that first day. All right, I'm going to change to a different topic here. This might be the last, the last one. So Lindsay wrote a great look at the history and application of the phrase eyewash, which is, of course, a baseball slang. I'll quote her for the concept of fake hustle or working hard for the appearance of working hard. She writes, it's my favorite baseball term. And this is a great baseball phrase that I think,

I think it was about 10 years ago that it started to become, there's always like baseball slang that is well known in the league and among players and maybe even down to like high school and college. But it takes journalists telling us that term for it to become pretty publicly known. And my feel, well, anyway, that's not really important. The point is that eyewash is a great phrase, and I have many of the same feelings about it that Lindsay writes about. But so she has a paragraph in particular that stuck out to me, which is she's quoting Bronson Arroyo, the former Major League pitcher.

And she writes, it took a few years in professional baseball for Arroyo to feel comfortable using the term. He heard it back in the Rookie League in 1995. But it wasn't until he progressed through the minors that he felt he had the license to complain about eyewash. he had the license to complain about eyewash. And I find that anytime there's baseball slang that the players use, there's this process where we learn it and we love it and we mentioned that we learned it and maybe we quote people saying it, but it feels a little like it's hard to actually use it ourselves. You're never quite sure whether you're using it right. If you're using it with quite the right nuance, you kind of feel like a dork because you're not a natural user of the baseball slang

as a non-baseball player. And as Lindsay puts it, these phrases can be frustratingly unclear to a reporter. And I have always felt that eyewash, even when ballplayers use it, a lot of the time, it doesn't quite feel natural coming from them. Like with something like let it eat, you hear a player use let it eat. And it sounds like, you know, it's just as natural as the stubble growing out of their face. It is like

that phrase is part of them. When they say eyewash, sometimes it sounds good but i always feel like it's not quite coming out right that it feels forced and i have lindsey's pieces great at helping me think through this but also in addition to that i've theorized that it might be because eyewash is not a phrase an idiom that actually comes from baseball usually we have i uh we have baseball slang that then becomes a broader slang or a baseball term that then becomes more broadly used outside of baseball. You know, Grand Slam. You don't have to know baseball to know the phrase Grand Slam or the World Series of. And eyewash went the other way. And so a few years ago, I was reading Swan's Way by Marcel Proust. And there is a passage in there that uses the term eyewash. And I was like sort of shocked.

I had always thought eyewash was just a baseball slang. But in Swan's Way, you thought I was pulling your legs, that it's all eyewash, one of the characters in Swan's Way says. And I thought, oh, my goodness. So eyewash is a phrase that exists outside of baseball. And then later I was reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. And he writes, as for the newspaper talk about this being a war for democracy, it was plain eyewash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope of democracy. And Harry Truman one time used eyewash to describe the primaries. He said, well, E.B. White was writing about Truman in the 1950s and was talking about how some people felt like

Truman was sort of used unfamiliar words and E.B. White used as examples, dinger and eyewash, both baseball phrases actually, but dinger and eyewash. both baseball phrases, actually, but dinger and eyewash. And eyewash comes from 1952, when Harry Truman said just before losing a primary, that primaries, quote, are eyewash. And so eyewash is a, you know, a phrase that comes as Lindsay writes, it comes from military history, but it's not totally clear how, A, how it made the jump to baseball, and B, whether the original usage is the consistent one that all of these instances were using. And so I went digging a little bit into this to try to resolve this so that I could cross it off. By the way, Treasure of the Sierra Madre uses it, quote, it's all eyew eyewash and superstition the book because i wanted to resolve this so i could cross it off my

list of things i don't want to have proust on my tickler file anymore so the common understanding of eyewash is that it is a false hustle right it's uh you're putting a lot of effort into looking good but the effort that you're putting in is not actually doing anything. Like George Costanza parking his car outside Yankee Stadium so that it looks like he's the first to arrive and the last to leave is maybe the quintessential eyewash in baseball. Like it's a lot of car at the stadium, but not a lot of work going on at the stadium.

But it could also be if you're, you know, false hustle. Running to first base on a walk would be something like i hustle because you already have first base there's no real benefit to getting there the instances that i found in non-baseball seem to mostly be about half of them are that they're that false hustle and about half of them are basically just synonyms for bullshit which is a much broader form of like falsity so it's not just false hustle but just anything that is you know meaningless and not true right and so a dictionary my 1961 webster's third new international from 1961 lists as a definition, statements, actions, or procedures designed to distract attention from or conceal ulterior motives or actual conditions.

An example they give is the eyewash handed out by dictators. So that's more of a lie, just a straight up lie. Second definition, statements, actions, or procedures undertaken merely to make a good impression. Empty display. So that's the baseball version. And then verb, to give misleading appearances, to doctor up or prettify. So that's kind of more the first one, the non-baseball version, where it's just a lie. The military definition, going back to the 1800s, Military definition going back to the 1800s. First appearance in 1884 apparently is anything done for effect rather than any practical purpose, but also gives rubbish, nonsense, humbug, and then anything done for appearance rather than effect. So it generally does stick to that basic definition, but is used more broadly.

I think if you look at like the Orwell example, I think that it's more broadly used just to mean bullshit rather than this very specific one. But anyway, to finally conclude this search, I want to go back to the Proust because Proust, of course, as I realized later, was not writing in English. He was writing in French. And so the fact that I was reading a book in which he writes eyewash is misleading. It was translated by an English speaker. And so I wondered what did he actually say? And so the phrase that he uses, qu'est-ce du chic, is roughly is an idiom as well. I asked French speakers today to explain what it means. And it's an idiom that a lot of people said it basically just means it's nonsense, it's bullshit, it's fake. But someone who is a

French teacher says that they would not use fake. Fake is actually the wrong usage for that phrase, but specifically that it's all an act. It's an old phrase that is no longer in use, an old idiom that is no longer in use. And the interesting thing is that it is literally that word chic, C-H-I-Q-U-E, is also literally translated to chewed. And the chewed part of that comes from what the French call chewing tobacco that has been used. So strangely enough, the French idiom also uses a baseball specific kind of meaning of chewed chewing tobacco. But the translation of the French version of eyewash is actually pretty accurate. They have a different phrase for the same concept.

And I am impressed that this translator in 1960 something managed to find this exact same phrase, basically, in a different idiom, different words in English. So there's something universal about eyewash as a concept. It turns out the French have the same concept, but with different words. It turns out the French have the same concept, but with different words. The world at large had eyewash before baseball, and baseball has really popularized it again. I think after a period of it only existing in old usage, baseball brought it back and has made it modern again. But yeah, there you go. Eyewash, a phrase that baseball has adopted rather than the other way around. Yeah, I became much more familiar with that phrase during the Stompers summer.

I don't know if I even knew eyewash before then. Maybe I did. But in my mind, it's associated with that summer because some of the players would say it sometimes. They really did say it. And I think we used it once in The Only Rule when we were mentioning the manager, Yoshi, who one of his complaints about

a player who we liked and we wanted to play more, but a lot of other people didn't like him that much just as a player more so than as a person. But one of Yoshi's complaints about him was that he did not display enough remorse for his misplays, which we said in the book that essentially he was asking for eyewash, a public display of penitence, which is sort of silly or so we thought at the time because obviously he felt bad about his strikeouts or his dropped flies or something. Whether he made some great lamentation about it or not, he clearly felt that way. He was a rookie. He was trying to just get his place in the game. But that's another way that you can have eyewash is just like making a big deal out of something you

did. I guess not in the way that like, you know, pebble hunting of an infielder after you make an error and you're trying to sort of blame it on the pebbles. That's trying to duck responsibility, but just trying to show that you realize that it's a very bad mistake and you're very sorry and you're properly remorseful for that. So at the time, this player was a rookie and everyone wanted to see, or at least our manager wanted to see, that he was atoning for his errors. The thing that I really like about iWash is that there's actually a second part in our book when we used it, a second usage. And it was when Will Price was, Will Price, who we just mentioned a couple weeks ago,

was a talented player who had kind of annoyed everybody with his, what they considered immaturity. He was younger than everybody else and had a very brash manner that didn't really blend with the culture of many of the other players on the team. And we were doing cuts, and he was in danger of getting cut, and he was trying to improve his public persona. So when we went to San Quentin to play a game at the prison, he volunteered to carry the equipment bags into the prison. And there was like, you could tell that there was this feeling that there was actually, I think,

a discussion that I overheard between a few of the players about whether him carrying the bags was a sign that he was taking responsibility and showing a little bit of maturity and humility, or whether it was eyewash and that he was just trying to look good when cuts were happening.

And it's just such an interesting thing to care about right as a as a as a teammate you're trying to judge whether the good thing your teammate is doing is being done for the right motives and that's really what eyewash captures as much as anything else is this extremely touchy nuanced demonstration of your good intentions where like if you look like you're trying too hard to be a good person then it doesn't count anymore yeah and so that there was something that it was deemed was fake about it and that his motives were more important than than what he was actually doing and i guess part of that is that if you're trying to get credit for something that doesn't have much intrinsic value, then like it's a waste of your energy. You shouldn't, you should be putting your energy

into things that we really need. And if you're trying to do it in a way that gets you attention, then you become kind of a liability for the team because you're not going to do the good thing that gets no attention. You're not going to be out on your own seeking the truly good thing to do that isn't going to get you attention.

So nobody can trust you to do the right thing if you're only trying to get attention. So when you're out there, you're both constantly judging people for their eyewash and I think probably also trying to be alert to whether you are also committing eyewash accidentally like you just think you're doing the right thing yeah if you're not selling it right and the more thought you put into it the more it becomes by definition eyewash because you're only doing it for the public response yeah so it's a very, it's a, yeah, it is a great concept

that you can just go round and round on. And I love it as a concept. I think another reason that it always sort of feels a little awkward coming out of even ballplayers' mouths when they say it, though, is that maybe that the word actually has no, like, why eyewash? Why, like, the word itself has no literal connection to what

you're describing it just feels like any random word like you can't explain why eyewash in fact lindsey talks to someone who hypothesizes that it's really just kind of a bastardization of hogwash that it started as hogwash and somehow became eyewash and it could just as easily have been like car wash or like uh you know hog smash or anything it could have been anything and so when you say you're you're very aware it's weird because i'm this is the last thing i'm gonna say using the phrase eyewash as with much jargon as with much slang jargon and slang often exists to communicate that you're part of the group that you're in the in group that you're smart and with it that you know the phrases that that the layman

don't know and so by using the term eyewash you are putting extra effort into a demonstration that has no intrinsic value it is itself an act of eyewash. And she quotes Aaron Boone mocking her for saying writing an essay about eyewash is the ultimate act of eyewash. And using it in the dugout as well is, I think, eyewash. Like what ballplayers would really prefer you do is to think eyewash, but never actually say it because you're too thirsty for attention. Yeah. Well, there might be times when you refrain from doing something good because you're worried about looking like a typewriter, which doesn't really benefit anybody. I mean, it's kind of like we have these discussions and we wonder these

things about people in non-sports context. Obviously, if someone appears to be very selfless and they're always committing great acts of kindness, then you might wonder, and maybe this says more about you than the person, but you wonder, what are they getting out of this? Because I'm not as selfless as this person. And so maybe it's that they're actually this selfless, or maybe it's that they're selfish, but I can't see exactly what they're getting out of it. And maybe it's that they're just getting the acclaim for being so selfless. And does that mean that they aren't selfless because they actually are getting something out of it? Or is that okay? Because ultimately, maybe it's the deeds so that you'll get praise for helping people. It still benefits the world at large. But that kind of comes up with eyewash because it's like, well, Will Price was carrying the equipment bag. At least no one else had to carry the equipment bag. So it was still that point, then he was sort of screwed whatever he did after that because if he tried to reform and change his ways, then it's eyewash and then he looks even more insincere.

But it's also better than just continuing to do the things that was getting him criticized in the first place. So you're kind of trapped. You almost have to either be selfless from the start or whatever you do will look like eyewash because people will assume that the first impression you made is the real one. And after that, you're just trying to keep up appearances. Yeah.

I always assumed it. Eyewash was like, I don't know, in my head canon for the etymology was just like you're trying to make yourself look better. And so it's eyes and you're like rinsing out the person's eyes so that you will look better to them, even though you're not actually better. That's kind of how I made sense of that term being used. But you're right, it's not really a natural fit.

More and more I just have gotten to feeling hopelessly like we're just not meant to be social creatures at all. That putting two people together in any like it cannot help but make make them behave worse that like we would that somehow it might be better if we were all on islands uh working towards quarantine full-time quarantined for instance in our houses no i don't yeah no i think another modern example of this situation is maybe like we talked about where cleveland baseball hitters were were sacrificed bunting on their own a lot and we were finding that very mystifying because their manager was actually like yeah i don't tell them to do that and we're like well maybe you know maybe their

manager terry francona by the way who we talked about earlier in that. And we're like, well, maybe, you know, maybe their manager, Terry Francona, by the way, who we talked about earlier in the show. So we were like, well, maybe tell them not to do that. If you don't want them to bunt, then don't bunt. But they were off bunting on their own. And it is, I think when we had the conversation about these extra bunts, we talked about how sacrifice bunting is a way to selfishly look unselfish. If you sacrifice bunting on your own,

it's like going, hey, everybody, look how unselfish I am. But once it crosses over into that, into wanting to get attention, it becomes selfish. And so that would be an example, I think, where eyewash could be actually destructive. Yes. I want to close with one thing that I forgot to mention about the Glenallen Hill home run story that was mentioned in Tim Brown's Yahoo story. So the home run was given up by Steve Woodard, and Steve Woodard was probably one of the only people in the park who did not see how far that ball went because he just turned immediately and didn't see it go. And then when he went back to the dugout, Bob Wickman told him that it landed

on the roof and Woodard initially didn't believe it until he saw the replay. But what I had not realized was that this home run came in a stretch during which Glenn Allen Hill totally owned Steve Woodard. So his last six plate appearances against Woodard went home run, home run, home run, double intentional walk, home run. So the famous home run was the third consecutive Hill versus Woodard plate appearance that ended in a home run. And then after that, they faced each other three more times and Woodard never got him out. And there were two more extra base hits. And Woodard says in the story, like his bat had a magnet to the ball I'd throw it and just look at it and think my gosh so didn't even appreciate that aspect to it the complete

ownership that expended on both sides of that player appearances which makes it even better for me all right well okay so that's good I would uh like to thank Brad, Keith, Marcus, Abraham's French teacher wife, and Bortles Alamer for your help translating Proust for me. Okay. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening, as always. It sounds as if we are on the verge of some big news that could have major implications for the likelihood of a season being played this year, as well as what that season would look like. MLB owners approved a plan on Monday to present to players, and according to some reports, it seems likely that they will be asking the players to make some economic concessions, even though the two sides did agree to a deal already in March, and so that could cause some fireworks, and we will see if it jeopardizes a season at all. As Sam and I spoke, the details

about the proposal were not yet fully available, and of course we don't know what the union's reaction is, so a lot of that should go down by the next time we talk, so I imagine we will cover it on our next episode. Wanted to bid a fond farewell and serenity now to Jerry Stiller, who died on Monday at age 92. Stiller, of course, among many famous roles, played Frank Costanza on Seinfeld. Seinfeld was a baseball show many times over, but Frank Costanza played a part in maybe

the most memorable baseball scene in Seinfeld when, of course, he confronts George Steinbrenner about the Ken Phelps for Jay Buhner trade. You've all seen the scene. You've probably seen it in the last 24 hours, but just in case, here's a clip. My name is George Steinbrenner. I'm afraid I have some very sad news about your son. I can't believe it. He was so young. How could this have happened? Well, he'd been logging some pretty heavy hours. First one in in the morning, last one to leave at night.

That kid was a human dynamo. Are you sure you're talking about George? You are, Mr. and Mrs. Costanza. What the hell did you trade Jake Unifor? He had 30 home runs and over 100 RBIs last year. He's got a rocket for an arm. You don't know what the hell you're doing. Well, Puna was a good prospect, no question about it. But my baseball people loved Ken Phelps' bat. They kept saying, Ken Phelps, Ken Phelps. I'm not here. Leave a message. Jerry, it's Frank Costanza. Mr. I think the best part of that scene is actually the answering machine message at the end. Jerry, it's Frank Costanza. Mr. Steinbrenner's here. George is dead. Call me back. That's from the season seven episode, The Caddy. Maybe as good as the season eight episode when George sings his own answering machine message. Believe

it or not, George isn't at home, so leave a message at the beep. You know how the rest of it goes. Anyway, the Steinbrenner scene, which was repeated in the Seinfeld finale when Frank Costanza yells at Steinbrenner about Hideki Rabu. It's great, of course, because of the context. George is presumed dead. You assume that Frank Costanza is upset about George's passing. You can see him stewing on the couch, deciding whether to say something looks like he's overcome with emotion. And you expect his outburst to be about George. And then, of course, it's his long-harbored resentment over the Jay Buhner trade. I do feel a little bit bad for Ken Phelps, though, to be part of this punchline.

And I think Phelps has been a good sport about it, and he said it's nice to be remembered for something. But the interesting thing is that Ken Phelps is remembered for being overrated by Steinbrenner's baseball people. And really, for years, Ken Phelps was known for being underrated. He was one of Bill James's pet players in the 80s. In the 1987 abstract, Bill James came out with the Ken Phelps All-Stars, which was his collection of players who he thought were good enough to be big leaguers but were underrated for various reasons because baseball people at the time focused on what they couldn't do as opposed to what they could do. And look, that trade was terrible. It made no sense at the time. The Yankees really were going nowhere that year. They were fixated on Phelps for years. They thought they needed left-handed power. Even

though Phelps' swing wasn't really all that suited to Yankee Stadium despite his being left-handed, they just had no place to play him because he was really a DH and they already had Jack Clark and Dave Winfield and they couldn't even find playing time for the guy after they acquired him. And they acquired him a few days before he turned 34, so he was already on the downside. But in fairness to Steinbrenner, he was having a fantastic year at the plate that year. 162 OPS plus in 1988, and that wasn't a fluke. He was a great hitter in 86 and 87, and even earlier than that. If you lower the playing time minimum to 350 plate appearances in 1988, the season he was traded, only Jose Canseco and Wade Boggs were better on a per-plate appearance basis. Of course, he was platooning and getting to feast on right-handed pitching, but still, he was also like a top five hitter over that

three-year span, so it really wasn't a fluke. And the thing about Phelps was that he was blocked in AAA first with the Royals and then with the Expos for years, and scouts didn't like him because he couldn't run and he couldn't field, really. He wasn't terrible at those things, he just wasn't great at them. And he was also kind of a low batting average, high on base percentage slugger, the kind of hitter who was often underrated in those days. And if you look at the OPSs he put up in AAA over like a four year span or so while he was getting almost no playing time in the majors, it's really kind of incredible. So 1979, when he was still with the Royalsals he got to AAA for the first time that was his age 24 season he put up an 885 OPS pretty darn good next year 1980 repeated the level with Omaha again that time 988 OPS okay clearly ready right 1981 in only 19 games at AAA because he missed part of the season 1148 OPS at AAA 1982 he's 27 by now again in AAA now with Montreal 1175 OPS then the next year now with Seattle this is 1983 he's 28 years old 1209 OPS in AAA

then finally the next year he gets semi-regular playing time in the majors but it took like five years of being good at AAA to break in at all. It was just a combination of poor player evaluation and bad luck in terms of who was ahead of him. So really, it's kind of a shame that Phelps is remembered for his failures or for not being as good as Buhner, who, by the way, one reason the Yankees dealt him, he was right-handed so he didn't fit into their immediate fixation on lefties, but also he had come up and sort of struggled with them that season. In his last stint at the big league level with the Yankees, he went one for 30 with 15 strikeouts. Not so great.

I did find a contemporary account in the New York Times that mentioned that the Yankees were reportedly considering a trade that would involve sending the injured infielder Mike Pagliarulo to the White Sox for Harold Baines. Now that would have been a much better trade for the Yankees. But the White Sox were said to be asking for more than just Pagliarulo. So that didn't happen. Baines got traded the following year instead. So to close, I'm just going to read an excerpt from Bill James' 1987 essay about Ken Phelps where he set up a contrast between Phelps and this guy, Henry Cotto, who was a more athletic, but James believed, inferior player. And James wrote, play Omaha, a tough park for a hitter. Through 1985, he had 567 at-bats in the major leagues, one season's worth, with 40 home runs and 92 RBI. The Mariners still didn't want to let him play.

See, the problem was that Mariners manager Chuck Cottier, in his day, was a Henry Cotto, a guy who could run and throw, but couldn't play baseball. Most major league managers were those kind of guys. Ken Phelps, on the other hand, can't run particularly well, though he isn't exceptionally slow either, and doesn't throw well. And if you're that kind of player and want to play Major League Ball, you'd better go 7 for 20 in your first week in the majors, or they'll decide it's time to take another look at Henry Cotto. Ken Phelps in his first two shots at Major League Pitching went 3 for 26. Despite his limitations, the man is a Major League player. He's a Major League player because he plays good defense at first base and has a secondary average over 500 so that he can both drive in and score runs.

Ken Phelps's are just available. If you want one, all you have to do is ask. They are players whose real limitations are exaggerated by baseball insiders, players who get stuck with a label, the label of their limits, the label of the things they can't do while those that they can do are overlooked. So really, Steinbrenner wasn't wrong about Phelps. He was just a few years too late, as he often was in those days when acquiring over-the-hill players instead of playing younger guys. Even so, I think we can all envy Frank Costanza for getting to air his grievances at a major league owner face-to-face, something that many of us may want to do in the days to

come. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going while getting themselves access to some perks. David Cohen, Dan Anderson, Rob Maines, Terry Spencer, and Jeffrey A. Friedman. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode soon. Talk to you then. I'm not your enemy Here I am your friend Come with me on a journey On a journey to the end

In the garden of serenity In the garden of serenity In the garden of serenity In the garden of serenity In the garden of serenity