Basher and baseball

Obama keeps avoiding Syria because Basher Assad is alive and well here in the USA and rented from me. He left very suddenly, in the dead of night 3 days ago -- bashed 4 holes in the sheetrock, two windows, one door, and a hole in the wall of the garage.  The furniture rental company got back two bashed and smashed chairs.  The corner of the dining table was bashed down like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.  Basher Assad, no?

Now I’m remodeling.  Maybe I will turn that house into a Second  Baseball Hall of Fame—the players that should have been noted but never got in.  They didn’t make it because the baseball writers elect HOF members.  Those famously alcoholic writers now refuse to recognize players who might have used steroids. And they know little of the significance of history.  Here’s who I would put in.

The writers seem only able to read statistics. “Old Hoss” Radbourne is in the Hall.  He won 60 and lost 12 games pitching for Providence in the National League in 1884, the most games ever won. But his career was very much shortened because he fought with everyone and went from team to team.  Ed Delahanty also had a shortened career.  He hit over 400 twice and had a lifetime .346 but he was a drunk.  Playing for the Washington Senators in 1903 he had a .333 going when he got in a drunken brawl on the team train. They kicked him off the train, he tried to re-board, fell in the Erie River and was swept over Niagara Falls. His body was found a week later.  Just thought you’d like to know what wonderful, “non-drug using” guys are in the current Hall of Fame.

Cap Anson is already in the HOF but no note is made of “the Grand Old Man of Baseball’s” most significant and awfulest contribution.  He was a superstar in the 1880’s, player coach who first innovated spring training. But his worst contribution was that he was a blatant racist who refused to let his team play any team that had a player of African ancestry. That forced black players into a negro league that segregated baseball for 70 years. By the way, Anson changed the name of the Chicago team to the Chicago White Stockings.

So perhaps you’ll forgive some of my nominees to the true history of baseball hall of fame.  How about Andrew Freedman, owner of the Giants in the 1890’s and a big wheel.  He advocated ‘syndicate baseball’, that is, all the teams in the league should be in a trust and teams would then become franchises, players salaries would be capped, and players would be jointly pooled, shifted around as profit opportunity was found.   His system was not wholly adopted, but you can see parts of it still today, and players salaries were once capped.  Not until Curt Flood, one of the better defensive center fielders to play and still not in HOF, sued MLB and won rights of players to become free agents, did player servitude end.  Flood’s contractual free agency changed the game profoundly.

Before 1900 there were numerous leagues, the National League being the biggest, but American Association and Players League being rivals. In 1900 baseball drew fewer fans than did polo, another popular sport.  It was a rough game of men who brawled and cheated.  The National’s Baltimore Orioles of the 1890’s have 5 Hall members.  Skipping a base if the umpire wasn’t looking was routine.  Honus Wagner of the Pirates explained how he didn’t get a home run because he was roughed up by Orioles as he rounded the bases, “the first baseman gave me the hip as I rounded the base, the second baseman slugged me, Jennings tripped me at shortstop and when I got around 3^rd, McGraw was waiting with a shotgun, I think.”

So what made baseball grow and polo die off?  Baseball could be a family sport. You could play baseball at a picnic.  Women in long skirts could bat with a child as designated runner.  For the honor of making baseball civilized, I would nominate Mr. and Mrs. Frank Robison who bought the St. Louis Browns in 1899.  His wife thought the uniforms were hideous and had a new set of bright red uniforms tailored with red striped socks.  The wild colors caused quite a stir in the press, the team was jokingly nicknamed ‘Cardinals’ when Willie McHale of the “St. Louis Republic” overheard a woman say “what a lovely shade of cardinal!”, and game attendance by families soared with special discounts for families to attend.  The red uniforms were scrapped, but not the new nickname and the team logo now became two birds on a bat, the first truly recognizable logo (rather than just a letter or town name). Cardinals sold their “Browns” name to another team in the city.

Most of the original MLB teams were in a narrow eastern belt from Chicago to Boston.  But baseball grew to be enormously popular in the west.  And the guy who helped fund many minor league teams was the oil tycoon Harry Sinclair.  In 1914, he formed the last rival league to challenge MLB with the Federal League.  They raided players from the American and National Leagues and sued MLB (quite correctly) under Sherman Anti-trust Law.  The judge who presided was Kenesaw Mountain Landis who dallied and delayed not wanting to make the obvious decision in favor of the Federals.  Eventually MLB negotiated a settlement with Sinclair and changed some of its monopolistic rules to allow owners to have greater autonomy.  For this, Sinclair is nowhere near the HOF but Landis, the opportunistic judge who secretly favored the established leagues, was awarded “Commissioner of Baseball” and became a dictator for 26 years at the head of Major League Baseball.

Since HOF recognizes guys who fell off the wagon, like Delahanty, why don’t they have “Shoeless” Joe Jackson?  In 1919, the overwhelming favorite Chicago White Sox lost to the upstart Cincinnati Reds.  Big shots lost money they had bet on the Series and brought pressure on Landis.  Commissioner Landis determined after interviews, that 8 White Sox players had consorted with gamblers to “throw the series”.  Jackson was the poor country kid who was completely intimidated by his audience with Landis, the bullying prosecutor.  But most historians now believe that Jackson was innocent.  After all, he hit .385 during the Series and made several sensational plays—not exactly behavior expected of a guy throwing a game.  Considered the greatest hitter in baseball, he was banished from the sport. By the way, a jury acquitted all 8 players in 1921. None were ever allowed to play again and none are in the HOF.

There are weird deletions from the HOF.  Why didn’t Heinie Zimmerman, the great third baseman of the early Chicago Cubs get included?  In 1912 he hit .372 and led his team to the championship.  Ken Boyer of the 1950’s Cardinals? Pete Rose?

This brings me to players unlikely to ever be inducted because of steroid use.  MLB had no anti-steroid sanctions until the 21^st century, but they sure had a big problem after 1995.  Those were the years of the baseball strikes in which the Players Union demanded a larger share of gross profits and nearly destroyed MLB when fans went on strike.  Attendance by 1997 had dropped by half—drawing fewer fans than hockey that year.  All the rosy predictions of how the national sport would come back after the strikes went horrifyingly wrong.  20 teams were bleeding money and the Montreal Expos had attendance of 8000 people per game.  But in 1998 Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire got into a home run hitting contest that the game had not seen since Mantle vs. Maris, 35 years before.  The publicity and excitement saved the game.  Baseball made a big comeback in 1998.  Well, then it turned out that not just Sosa and McGwire, but also another 50 or so players were juicing themselves with a variety of drugs--all legal at the time.  Keeping McGwire, Sosa,Clemens and Bonds out of the Hall seems to me equivalent of saying that Picasso’s or Van Gogh’s art was illegitimate since they both had mental problems and drank.  Worse still, is the treatment of players who “seemed to play as if on something” and are now shunned by the Hall of Fame via rumor.  All this from dopey sportswriters who are electing nobody to the Hall. Perhaps they can’t find somebody who wasn’t suspicious in the 90’s.

Here’s my opinion.  Sportswriters make a living spinning mostly candy-coated versions of the game.  Their version of history is not always accurate because of their biases.  When confronted with a controversy, like steroids use, or gambling, or anti-trust law they scapegoat the problem. See, I should remodel my old house and make a museum.