Center Field Gate

Remember Bobby Bragan? The bent-backed big-bellied curse of Brooklyn and Birmingham and the fair-haired best buddy of Branch Rickey before that kid infielder Jackie Robinson came along, Bragan was his generation’s Bobby Cox. He could bait an umpire by just being there, but was at his best while shuffling to the mound, muttering under his breath. And the umps would yell at him: “What did you say Bragan? What was that?” It seems a required part of Braves’ baseball even now, a “given” on the single-sheet job description: “Must know the game. Must hate umpires.”

Bragan was that, and classically Birmingham fat, aging gracelessly as the players got younger around him. So Bragan would come out of the dugout, muttering about the unfairness of it all (carrying his Denny Lemaster hook — “oh thank God, he’s pulling Lemaster”) and you would swear he was going to lose his balance, tipping forward as he walked. I never thought he was that heavy, but back in 1965 Milwaukee Braves fan would razz him, ceaselessly, relentlessly, cruelly: “Go on a diet Bobby,” and “you’re a pig, Bragan.” He was of a “type” — a southern boy who was okay behind the plate, a player forever of the verge of being something more than just average. Neither a peripheral great nor even mediocre, Bragan was one of those guys you put in the line-up until someone better comes along. There is a whole community of guys like Bragan wandering through the underworld: Dennis Menke and . . .  well, Dennis Menke.

Bragan would have been a forgettable character, were it not for his memorable 1947 decision to circulate a petition from white players saying they wouldn’t play with Robinson, whom Rickey had brought in the break baseball’s color barrier (and transform the Trolleys from a very good to a great team). Bragan even asked Rickey to trade him: he would not play with a black man. You have to wonder what Bragan was thinking. Did he really believe Rickey would send Jackie packing because his second string catcher was a racist? Bragan quickly changed his mind. “After just one road trip, I saw the quality of Jackie the man and the player,” Bragan later remembered. “I told Mr. Rickey I had changed my mind and I was honored to be a teammate of Jackie Robinson.” Trumpets. Organ music. Fade.

Bragan never lived down that moment, but he tried. He pushed Maury Wills to the majors when he was a minor league manager in Spokane, praised Rickey as the person who had “made me a better man,” and became one of baseball’s smartest and most well-respected administrators — as head of the Texas League and then head of the governing body of minor league baseball. In the 1980 he started the Bobby Bragan Youth Foundation, which raises money for scholarships to keep kids in school and was elected into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame. But back in 1965, Bragan was viewed by the people of Milwaukee as anything but a hero. Bragan was the manager of the lame duck Milwaukee Braves, who had announced the previous year that they would be moving to Atlanta. Milwaukee partisans were shocked — and angered. 

When a group of local businessmen sued, the Braves were forced to stay an extra year in Milwaukee. Bragan, the on-field symbol of the Braves’ ownership bore the brunt of Milwaukee’s anger, but he was never known for being a stoic (or knowing what the word meant). You could see him seeth, and the more he seethed the more fans let him have it. As I remember it (and I was there — blessedly), the anger towards the Braves and Bragan culminated on a hot August day at Milwaukee County Stadium when Bragan walked to the mound to remove a pitcher (probably Lemaster, but I can’t remember for sure) and on the way back to the dugout he motioned in Rico Carty from left field. Carty had just misplayed a fly ball and Bragan was punishing him — in public, humiliating him front of the fans. On purpose. And the Braves fans just let him have it. And I mean they let him have it. I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought the fans in front of me, along the third base line, were going to come out of their seats. And Bragan looked up into the stands and just smiled and nodded his head: yes, yes, I took him out. So go do yourself. You know, whatever else you might think about Bragan, he knew when not to give a damn.

Bobby Bragan died last week in Fort Worth, Texas.  Major League Baseball paid homage to Bragan in a public notice that quoted Bud Selig. “He was a dear friend of mine for nearly 50 years,” Selig said. ”He had a long and wonderful baseball career as a player, coach, manager and executive.” What the announcement failed to mention is that the group of Milwaukee businessmen who forced the Braves to spend ‘65 in Milwaukee was organized and led by prominent local car dealer — named (oh yeah) Bud Selig. Selig was convinced that the Braves, and Bragan, owed their home town fans something more than a single press release and an empty stadium. 

Bobby Bragan was 92. Actually I kinda liked him.

This is the way the ratings work: if you want people to listen to you, you had better do something interesting — and local. And so, to celebrate Mark McGwire’s coming out party on Monday, one local sports talk show asked its listeners to decide who had hurt their sport more: Mark “the needle” McGwire? Or Washington basketball semi-great Gilbert “Wyatt Earp” Arenas. The calls flooded in, though Sports Talk Radio afficianados are nothing if not predictable. If you don’t like baseball then Mark McGwire is “fatal to the game” (as one caller would have it) and if you don’t like basketball (”Let’s get ready to Gam-blllllllle“) then Arenas is a talisman of “a league of thugs.” There’s a better answer: if Mark McGwire had brought a gun into the Cardinals locker room he would have been immediately suspended for half-a-season – and right now he’d be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

McGwire’s sin, or so it seems to us (and here we are — after a long hiatus), is not so much that he used steroids (didn’t we already know that), but that he took so long in admitting it. Oh, and in admitting it . . . well, he didn’t really admit it: he didn’t avow that somehow it had increased his power (which is what steroids do) and he refused to acknowledge that without them he might not have hit the 70 home runs that made the ‘98 season so memorable. That is to say, twenty-four hours after coming clean, McGwire is now being castigated for not really “coming clean.”

The most outspoken McGwire critics appeared on the MLB Network in the backwash of McGwire’s interview with Bob Costas. “The fact is, it is a form of cheating. And the question in my mind is can you award a guy with the highest award in baseball [election to the Hall of Fame] if he cheated? And my answer is no,” Peter Gammons said. Gammons took a surprising view: he said he had voted for McGwire’s entry before admitting to taking steroids, but that he would not do so now — and he predicted that it would be “a couple of tough years” for McGwire. That is to say: there’s no reward for coming clean, at least in Gammons’ mind, and it might have been better for him if he kept his mouth shut. “He wanted to be in uniform [as the new St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach] more than he wanted to be in the Hall,” Gammons reflected. There’s something to that: our guess here at CFG is that Cardinals’ owner Bill DeWitt probably insisted that McGwire clean up the past — if for no other reason than to keep the press from hounding him through all of Spring Training and beyond. But that meant a public admission and an apology. McGwire agreed.

MLB Networker commenter Joe Magrane added his own voice, wondering whether McGwire’s admission was really an admission — McGwire admitted to taking steroids to “heal faster,” Magrane noted, but without explicitly admitting that he used them. “I just don’t buy it,” Magrane said. MLB Cardinals’ reporter Matthew Leach had it the other way: “If there was anything that surprised me about the whole deal, it’s that he was a little more explicit than I thought he would be.” Leach then added a classic zinger: McGwire apologized, but without really saying what he was apologizing for.

Yeah, I buy that — but let’s get serious. McGwire could come absolutely clean (”I put the needle right here, Bob , because I knew it would help me break the Maris record) but such an admission, while fueling America’s twisted obsession with public and tearful repentence, wouldn’t make any of us actually feel any better. We still wouldn’t know what to do with all those records and (for those of us who watched every minute of the ‘98 season) we still wouldn’t know how to think about that day when Mark and Sammy made baseball history. (All I can say is, thank God Sammy didn’t take ‘em!) And that kind of admission (an I-did-it-just-to-hit-home-runs admission) might actually make us feel worse. Then too — lest we forget —  Bud and a gaggle of owners and senior baseball executives were all arrayed in the box seats at Busch watching when Mark and Sammy put on their show. And while Bud ”Claude Rains” Selig has appointed every kind of commission possible to investigate the problem, he stood and cheered just like the rest of us when Big Mac put one over the McDonald’s sign to break the record: ”Steroids? Steroids? I’m shocked to learn there were steroids in baseball.”

McGwire apologized and wants to coach St. Louis hitters. Let’s leave him alone. And let’s hope, for the sake of the Nats, that he does a lousy job.

There have been 26 Yankee juggernauts in major league history — 27 if you count the 1960 team, that could have, might have and should have won a world title: were it not for the heroics of Bill Mazeroski. This team, the 2009 version, is even more formidable. The twin killers of the Twins on Friday night (that put the reeling Twinkies down by two games to zip) were Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira, one of whom is headed to the hall and the other who might well be. It’s easy to see why Teixeira — offered an off-season gift basket from the Nationals — decided to play for the pinstripes: the New Yorkers know how to spend money, and they know how to win: a requirement for any ballplayer who prizes not only a large bank account, but a handful of rings.

What was billed as a pitchers’ duel turned out to be exactly that: as Yankee A.J. Burnett mixed four kinds of fastballs to put the Twins down through six innings. But Burnett, a puzzling mess at odd times, was pulled after six complete, with Yankee manager Joe Girardi suddenly dependent on a relief core that has often been shaky. And so it proved: even Phil Hughes and Mariano Rivera were merely human, while former Ahoy fireballer and reclamation project Damaso Marte was a disaster. The often so-so Nick Blackburn, meanwhile, was brilliant — posting a 1.59 post season ERA and befuddling Yankee hitters through 5.2. So when Joe Nathan arrived with the Twins’ lead intact we could be forgiven for thinking the game was over. Not so: Alex Rodriguez’s ninth inning home run tied it, while Tex’s walk off against Jose Mijares in the 11th won it. “It’s really disappointing,” Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said. “I’ve been walked off enough times here. Some of the things that happened out there were pretty disappointing. It was a good baseball game. A lot of things could have went either way, but didn’t go our way again tonight.” 

The Boston Red Sox Are Being Eaten In Anaheim. After a not-even-close 5-0 drubbing at the hands of the Belinskis on Thursday, “the Nation” sent ace Josh Beckett to the mound against Jered Weaver. It was a bookie’s fantasy: the lanky if talented Weaver brothers have “never quite” and have a tendency to implode (and what a sight it is!), while Beckett is calm to the point of perversity — and it’s downright weird. If Jered is Yosemite Sam (arms akimbo, fist slapping glove), then Josh is Mr. Magoo (calmly asking for another ball, as the one he just pitched sails into the night). So it was that — if you were to actually bet (and you wouldn’t would you?) — you would have been all-in on Beckett. And you’d have lost.

It happened in the seventh inning in Anaheim and it went something like this: Vlad Guerrero walked (Howie Kendrick runs for him), Kendry Morales lines out, Kendrick steals second, Juan Rivera grounds out to third (two outs), Maicer Izturis singles (Kendrick scores), Mike Napoli HBP, Erick Aybar triples, (Izturis and Napoli score), Chone Figgins strikes out for out number three. Score: 3-1 Angels.  What was most unusual was that Beckett seemed to lose his cool — complaining to homeplate umpire C.B. Bucknor that Mike Napoli hadn’t moved out of the way of a fastball that hit him in the back. Beckett seemed to come unhinged. “I wasn’t much [ticked] that he wouldn’t overturn the pitches, but show me a little bit of respect,” Beckett said. “He just straight-faced me and then walked away. I was just like, I went up to [catcher Victor Martinez]. I said, ‘Vic, he’d be [ticked] if I did that to him.’ I’m not asking him to even overturn it, just listen to what I have to say. Don’t like, take your mask off, straight-face me and then walk away. I can’t say anything to the point of getting thrown out.” 

The Red Sox, now down two games to none, must win three games in a row to advance to the league championship series. “We’ve just got to regroup,” Beckett said. “We know what we need to do now. We can’t lose another one. A lot of guys in here have been through this. It’s not an ideal situation, but we have to win.”

Back in July, I took a friend – a lifelong Yankee fan — to a Nats game and we sat reminiscing about all the games we had seen as kids. My friend had grown up in New York when the Trolleys, Giants and Yankees were all the rage in baseball, so he had lots of stories: about Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Tom Tresh and the games he had seen them play. As it turned out, the game we attended resulted in one of those unlikely Nats’ victories, and near the end of the game my friend issued this judgment: “There are two good things about being here,” he said. “The first is that that Nats are winning and the second is that we haven’t heard “Sweet Caroline.” I laughed and shook my head: “I’m not a big fan of Neil Diamond,” he added, “and that song drives me nuts.” The other thing that he said that struck me came in about the 7th inning, when we were trading stories: “Remember the harmonica incident?” he asked. I blinked, trying to remember. Harmonica incident? And then it hit me: “Oh yeah, geez. Sure, I remember,” I said. “What in the hell was that guys’ name?” He smiled: “Phil Linz,” he said. And then he told me the story.

Back in the late summer of 1964, Phil Linz was a utility infielder with a Yankees team that was struggling to win its fifth consecutive pennant. Locked in pennant race with the pitching heavy White Sox and upstart Orioles, the Yankees were in chaos: Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and Tony Kubek were battling injuries — and new Bombers’ manager Yogi Berra was having trouble in the clubhouse. The problems had started in spring training, when Berra (who was picked by Yankee owner Dan Topping to replace Ralph Houk — that icon, that marble man), decided that he would set down some rules for how he expected the Bombers to behave. Yogi laid out the rules during his first clubhouse meeting, but when he finished his talk the sound of a scraping chair came from the back of the room. Mantle got up, threw up his arms, and shouted: “I quit” and pretended to stalk from the room. His teammates roared with laughter and Yogi smiled – but the tone for the season was set. The Yankees played horribly and by the end of August they were four games behind the surging Orioles and Pale Hose.

In mid-August, the Yankees made a key midwest swing, traveling to Minnesota for a set against the Twins, before moving on to Chicago to play the Pale Hose. The Twins series would be tough, but there was every expectation the Yankees would triumph in Chicago: they had already beaten the White Sox in ten consecutive games during the season. As Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson would later tell it, in Minnesota he and Tony Kubek (two of the Yankees self proclaimed “milk shake boys”) visited the U.S. headquarters of Billy Graham’s ministries, where they were given a set of chorus books that Graham used in his “crusades.” Richardson (”the Right Reverend Richardson,” to his Yankee teammates) grabbed some of the chorus books and when he and Kubek returned to their Minneapolis hotel room they decided to sing some of the hymns. They were joined by Spud Murray, the batting practice pitcher — who brought his harmonica. The three sang for several hours and two days later, while the team was in Chicago, Kubek went out and bought four harmonicas — one for himself, one for Richardson and one for Tom Tresh. He gave the fourth one to Phil Linz.

As it turned out, the Yankees were swept by the Pale Hose in four games and seemed finished for the season. When the Bombers boarded their bus after the last loss, Berra (whose job was in danger), didn’t feel like celebrating. But in the back of the bus, Phil Linz broke out his harmonica and started to play. He was just learning and was following the instructions in a book that came with his instrument: “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” As Richardson later remembered: “So now we lost the four games in Chicago, and Phil — who didn’t play an inning of any of those games — was in the back of the bus and decided to choose this time to learn how to play the harmonica. When Yogi heard him, he jumped up and yelled: ‘Put that thing in your pocket.’ Unfortunately, Linz didn’t hear him and when he asked what Yogi had said, Mantle, who was sitting across the aisle, yelled: ‘He said to play it louder.’ So Phil kept playing and this time, Yogi jumped up and he was really mad. He grabbed the harmonica and threw it and it hit Pepitone, who started screaming for the trainer.” The bus broke out in gales of laughter — but Berra didn’t think it was funny. Enraged, he returned to his seat.

Inevitably, the incident reached the New York papers. It was a huge story and viewed as emblamatic of the Yankees’ troubles — and of Berra’s inability to handle the team. “In the end,” Richardson relates, “Yogi had the last laugh. The team got together after that and rallied to win the pennant. I think we went 22-6 in September to finish a game ahead of the White Sox.” The Yankees faced the Cardinals in the ‘64 Series and lost in seven, but despite their late season success, Yogi was finished. The harmonica incident had convinced Yankees’ owner Dan Topping that Berra couldn’t handle the team and after the season he was fired — and replaced by Cardinals manager Johnny Keane.

After retiring from baseball, Kubek became a television broadcaster and active Wisconsin Democrat. In 1976, when his friend Bobby Richardson (who had become a minister) was a candidate for a Congressional seat in South Carolina, Kubek refused to campaign for him. Phil Linz did not have as nearly as good as a career in baseball as either Kubek or Richardson (.235 BA in seven years), but his dust-up with Berra made his reputation: after the incident was made public, Linz was offered offered $5000 by the Hohner Company to promote their harmonica and after the season he made so much money on the banquet circuit (telling the story) that he was able to open a successful New York bar. ”Yogi never held it against me,” Linz says. ”All my jobs have been because of that; people remember me because of that one incident. I only hit eleven home runs my whole career, you know, but I’m in all the books and all that.”

Bobby Thomson hit “the shot heard round the world.” Thomson’s walk off home run came at precisely 3:58 pm, New York time, on October 3, 1951 — and is considered the most dramatic moment in baseball history. Thomson’s bottom of the 9th shot came off  Brooklyn Dodgers’ right hander Ralph Branca with two men on. With the Dodgers leading 4-2, Branca threw Thomson a first pitch fastball over the center of the plate. The next pitch was inside and high and Thomson swung. The hit was not a towering fly ball, but a line drive that sailed into the left field seats of the lower deck in the Polo Grounds. It gave the New York Giants a 5-4 win and the N.L. Pennant, two games to one. The two teams had finished the season with identical 96-58 records. The Giants had taken the first of the three game playoff series (3-1) and the Dodgers the second (10-0). Deadlocked at one game apiece, the third game would decide the pennant. What made Thomson’s home run even more dramatic is that the Giants had won 37 of their last 44 games to force the playoff, having trailed the Dodgers by 13 games in mid-August.

Also known as “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff,” Thomson’s home run is celebrated in the immortal broadcast of Russ Hodges that was heard on WMCA-AM radio — “The Voice of the New York Giants”: “There’s a long drive… it’s gonna be, I believe…The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they’re goin’ crazy, they’re goin’ crazy!”

For many years it was not known what happened to Thomson’s home run ball. While innumerable myths have surrounded its whereabouts (most recently in Don DeLillo’s Underworld), it is now believed that a Franciscan nun recovered the ball and kept it in a shoebox for fifty years. When she died, her sister collected the shoebox and deposited it in a landfill. Willie Mays, then 20, was on deck when Thomson hit his home run.