The year that began with the Boston Red Sox defending a World Series championship didn't quite make it to the finish before the architect of that championship resigned. Something about the boss undercutting and still trying to underpay him, at least in terms of the money once offered Billy Beane to defect. Before Theo Epstein unsigned his contract extension, another shade of Sox became the new defending World champions.
The last time the Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox won back-to-back World Series, the order was reversed, and it preceded a thrown World Series and the sale of a lout who doubled as a slugging pitcher or a pitching slugger, depending on your point of view. Actual or alleged, the corresponding curses broken in back-to-back seasons gave new hope to Chicago Cub fans. For at least a week.
On paper, the White Sox were 2005's most dominant team. Oops — no they weren't. Not on their own terms, and not across baseball's board. The paper showed the White Sox coming thisclose to one-upping the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies and blowing a 15-game lead to a band of upstart Cleveland Indians. The resurrected Tribe had the Blizzard of Ozz approaching the ropes, and the St. Louis Cardinals ended up one game better with nothing approaching the White Sox swoon on their resume.
Good thing the Indians exhausted themselves in time for the White Sox's road to the World Series to be merely one team of fractured defending world champion Red Sox (how sweet was it to say that all year long?), and one team of fractured and spent Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The Houston Astros upended a slightly more powerful band of Cardinals to meet the White Sox and learn the hard way that they had left their best — including their manager's tactical gamesmanship and their dramatic enough pitching — in St. Louis.
"This was an unbelievable World Series," said White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf as the World Series trophy nestled in his left arm. "We won four straight, they could easily have won each and every one of those games. A great battle by a valiant club." Reinsdorf could have been talking about the umpires easily enough. (The early watchword of the American League Championship Series: "One, two, three strikes — you're safe!"). Seeing the architect of the 1994 players' strike accept that trophy from the man who fiddled while baseball burned was equal only to a castor oil over the rocks.
It took only three days following the Series' end for one of the White Sox's postseason bellwethers to file for free agency. Some remember Paul Konerko fiddling at first base while then-Kansas City Royals coach Tom Gamboa burned, under the blindsiding of a pair of father-and-son drunk punks hopping the the U.S. Cellular Field fence and poleaxing him from behind. So much for the gracious host protecting his guests from home invaders.
The nation's least qualified Supreme Court nominee since G. Harrold Carswell (about whom came the unintentional epithet: "Mediocrity deserves representation, too") yielded to one of the nation's better-qualified Supreme Court nominees within a fortnight and a froth of fustian. Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Alito is an admitted Philadelphia Phillies fan, which serves him right. Ken Griffey, Jr. was the National League's Comeback Player of the Year, which served him right, too: he didn't quite make it to the finish line without yet another season-ending injury on his resume.
"We lack any credible evidence that would indicate how widespread the use of performance-enhancing drugs was at a given time," wrote Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus in his new book, The Juice. "This vague epidemic of steroid users has infiltrated the game at a time of accelerated change, as expansion, realignment, interleague play, and a host of new ballparks have altered the playing field both literally and figuratively. Discerning the impacts of those factors is difficult enough. Add adjustments to the strike zone, changing tastes in baseball bats, and the widespread and oft-refuted charge that the baseball itself has been tampered with, and you have an issue so murky that it’s no wonder so many theories abound."
No wonder people paid more attention to Howard Bryant's Juicing the Game. Carroll should have known better than to let the evidence or the lack thereof get in the way of a spellbinding innuendo. On the other hand, Jose Canseco, who doesn't know better, sent spellbinding innuendo and looseness with the facts to the best-seller lists — for about a fortnight. Juiced turned up in the secondhand shops faster than Gigli turned up on cable television.
Alex Rodriguez hung up an MVP-calibre regular season and got hung up in the postseason — again. Albert Pujols hung up an MVP-caliber regular season and damn near hung the Astros by the pennant he stole from them for one night with one Hobbesian swing. Jason Giambi was the American League's Comeback Player of the Year. Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger in defiant denial before the House Committee on Sending Great Messages to Kids (thank you yet again, Mr. Will) a couple of months before he turned up a positive steroid tester — and tried to blame a teammate's giving him a vitamin B12 shot. The incumbent Baltimore Orioles told him to take a powder for the final few weeks of the season. Two Orioles emeritus suggested positive steroid testers should have their lifetime's statistics, including Palmeiro's 300+ home runs and 3,000+ base hits, wiped off the books.
Alan Trammell was wiped off the Detroit Tigers' books, at least as their manager. Tony Pena walked away from the Kansas City Royals' throne amidst speculation about his involvement in a local divorce case. The Royals captured the nation's imagination with a 19-game losing streak. One year earlier, streak-ending Royals pitcher Jose Lima pitched a magnificent National League Division Series shutout for the only Dodger win against the St. Louis Cardinals. That'll teach him.
An unwitting television cameraman who just dropped in to see what condition the Texas Rangers' condition was in for a pre-game workout learned the hard way from Kenny Rogers. Rogers' pitching coach, a former Los Angeles Dodgers pitching star, ended the season under consideration enough as the new Dodgers' manager. That was because the old Dodgers' manager left rather than put up with a general manager who retooled a division winning team right out of contention by reading statistics and ignoring the personality issues that can turn a teamload of on-base virtuosi into squabbling siblings. And that, in turn, made the general manager the old general manager — at the ripe old age of young enough to be Tommy Lasorda's great grandson. It also made the still-new Dodger owner resemble the village idiot, even if canning the now-old young general manager was actually the right thing.
Steve Finley ended 2004 by hitting the Dodgers' division-winning grand slam. He finished 2005 as a graciously bewildered Los Angeles Angel, an early-season shoulder injury ruining his swing and making a man with a distinguished resume resemble the clueless. Missing most of the season recuperating and rehabbing from knee surgeries, Barry Bonds just didn't have what it took to be Roy Hobbs down the stretch. The New York Yankees' pitching staff looked so fractured so often that the Bombers were reduced to scouting everyone else's discards for help, including but not necessarily limited to Jim Bunning, Bob Feller, Whitey Ford, Mark (The Bird) Fidrych, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Bill Lee, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, and the late Warren Spahn. (Rumors that they were just a few dollars away from resurrecting either Ford or Perry proved unfounded.)
What are we doing here? The San Diego Padres almost won the worst division in baseball with a losing record, then got swept out of the postseason in round one. For one glorious month the nation's capital could brag, "Washington — First in war, first in peace, and first in the National League East." They had baseball's rude awakening to thank for bringing them to town and baseball's first black manager to thank for putting them into the pennant race. Meanwhile, the man who made him baseball's first black manager in the first place, former Cleveland Indians owner Ted Bonda, died at 88. For a while enough, New York's first black manager actually had the Mets in the pennant race. It took as long for the city which broke the baseball players' color line to see a black manager as it took for Damon Runyon to receive the anthology he richly deserved of his groundbreaking baseball journalism.
The Atlanta Braves lost their usual round one postseason series and a pitching guru. Leo Mazzone answered the tug of friendship and joined his buddy Sam Perlozzo, newly-minted as the permanent Orioles manager. The Braves gained the former Met Most Likely To Be Committed. New pitching coach Roger McDowell is preparing a training regimen including but not necessarily limited to hot feet, upside down uniform calisthenics, John Smoltz wigs, Jimmy Carter masks, whoopie cushions under the team flight seats, roller skating on any leftover artificial turf fields, knockdown pitch drills with a lifelike dummy of Gregg Jefferies in the batter’s box, and perhaps explosives launching trick streamers up from under the pitching rubber.
Roger Clemens led the world in earned run average and filing court orders against his teammates for non-support. A.J. Burnett went 1-7 down the stretch, screamed bloody murder about "negative reinforcement" in the Florida Marlins' clubhouse and from their manager and coaches, and got ... thrown off the team, two days before they were eliminated from the pennant race. Within a week, manager Jack McKeon decided he had had it trying to manage a baseball team and getting the Romper Room instead.
The White Sox triumph made it 19 different teams since the advent of free agency to have won the World Series, and the Yankees ended their fifth consecutive season without a World Series ring. There went the arguments about "competitive balance," and the Yankees being the root of all baseball evil. If they're "cheating the system" they are the most incompetent burglars since Watergate.
Jim Bunning once intimidated batters; now, Senator Bunning tries to intimidate baseball's (admittedly incompetent) government. "We have heard a lot of talk from professional sports leagues that they would do something to clean up this mess, but so far it has been just that: a lot of talk,'' he said, as he and Sen. John McCain re-introduced legislation to standardize drug testing for all professional sports. "Hopefully, Congress' action will light a fire under their feet to come to an agreement before we do it for them.'' Who died and elected them the nation's daddies?
A mayoral hopeful on Washington's city council said anything but local ownership of the Nationals — who are still owned, disgracefully, by Major League Baseball — would be "unacceptable." He offered no similar observation about another externally-owned Washington business: the federal government. Doug Mientkiewicz, who caught the final out of the 2004 World Series, began 2005 under orders to surrender local ownership of that ball — his. He ended it with the Mets declining to pick up his option, after devolving to a good field/little hit first baseman.
The Great Umpire called a few too many safe at home, as usual. Al Lopez died as the next to last man known to have managed the White Sox to the World Series — he had lived just long enough to watch Ozzie Guillen manage them to the World Series ring. Lopez at 97 left the nation Phil Rizzuto (88) as its oldest living Hall of Famer. Chico Carrrra-skellll (as legendary announcer Bob Elson introduced him) was the White Sox's first Latino shortstop. Mickey Owen in Ebbets Field dropped the first most powerful World Series strikeout of all time — to Tommy Henrich, telegraphing a single, a two-RBI double, a walk, and another two-RBI double. The Angels got off easy by comparison.
"I want to be first off. You didn't lose this. I did." So pronounced Gene Mauch to his dead-at-last 1964 Phillies, as their last flight home pulled up to the terminal. Marv Grissom was the answer to this trivia question: "Who was the winning pitcher when Willie Mays made The Catch in Game 1, 1954 World Series?" Dick Dietz tried to steal Don Drysdale's shutout innings streak by trying to get himself hit with the bases loaded, until the umpire ruled his failure to get out of the way. (Juan Marichal eventually ratted him out.) Eddie Miksis slid home laughing when — driven in by Cookie Lavagetto — he scored the winning run that consummated the wreckage of Bill Bevens's would-be first World Series no-hitter.
Future lawyer Donn Clendenon was on deck when Gil Hodges showed home plate umpire Lou DiMuro the shoe polish smudge on the ball that ricocheted from Cleon Jones's foot. Jones took his base, Clendenon shot a two-run homer off the auxiliary scoreboard hanging from Shea Stadium's left field loge, the Miracle Mets were within a run of meeting and passing the Baltimore Orioles for that World Series triumph, and Clendenon had nailed down the Series MVP. Dick Radatz was "The Monster" out of the Red Sox bullpen (the nickname was a gift from Mickey Mantle, who couldn't hit him with a telephone pole) and a gentle giant away from it. "Earl," he once told teammate and starter Earl Wilson, "why don't you go and crack me a beer. I'll be in in a few minutes." Wilson, the first black to pitch for the Olde Towne Team, went to his reward within a month. That was Radatz waiting for Wilson with a freshly-cracked beer.
"I used to argue with him a lot," Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson recalled laughing about longtime St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports editor and Hall of Fame writer Bob Broeg. "We used to argue about a lot of things. I was right, of course. I don't think anything was ever resolved. I never wanted to back down and I think he appreciated me for not backing away on what I thought about things. I don't know if I appreciated him for not backing down." Broeg, who listened to Brooklyn Dodger fans in nicknaming Stan Musial, also listened to truth and not innuendo in clearing the air about the Cardinals' reputed threat to boycott Jackie Robinson — it was a taken-out-of-context figment of owner Sam Breadon's imagination.
Broeg reportedly wanted his epitaph to read, "He was fair. As in just, not mediocre." Such a pity that he was too old and ill to umpire this postseason, never mind being nominated to the Supreme Court.
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