In sports, as in so much of life, timing often carries the day.
The point guard’s no-look feed to the power forward in the paint; the QB’s last-second option pass to the tailback: surprise and execution — in most every game, the point is to keep the opponent guessing.
And while most writers wring their hands and swear that their gig is not a competitive venture, timing’s just as important on the printed page — and especially important when bringing those pages to market — as it is on the hardwood, the gridiron or, of course, the diamond. In John Albert’s exceptional debut, “Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates,” the eminently unpredictable sport of baseball serves as an ideal device for illustrating how lives once lost to drugs, despair and a rather tiresome quest for oblivion can occasionally, with effort and luck, be reclaimed. Albert’s story — one that, it seems, could only happen amid California’s golden smog — recounts how the author and a motley, damaged, rehabbing band of brothers gradually coalesced into an occasionally formidable, frequently haphazard and, it turns out, endearing baseball team fledged in 1998 in a municipal league run by L.A.’s Parks and Rec department.
Improbable? Of course. Happily, though — for the reader and, one comes to realize, for Albert and his crew — the book is the right nonfiction stuff; it feels, as one delves deeper into it, more and more genuine, even as its preposterous, infuriating scenes of willful self-destruction unfold again, and again, and again. Heroin and curveballs; punk rock and double plays; nihilism (both real and playacted) and batting practice: For the first time in a long while, here’s a book about baseball that actually feels like it’s also about life — or rather, life as it’s been lived by so many of us born after, say, 1960.
“You never know what’s going to save you,” the book begins. “Most of the time, salvation comes from the usual suspects — god, pharmaceuticals, romance — but occasionally, as in this case, it arrives entirely from left field.”
Cornball punning aside, Albert’s story lives up to the vague, compelling promise suggested in those two sentences. This is, indeed, a story of salvation, and like all such tales, the pilgrims whose progress the book recounts are about as deeply flawed as one could possibly expect (or hope). But as “Wrecking Crew” takes place entirely in Los Angeles, and Albert himself is a former member of some of L.A.’s most original punk acts (the “semilegendary cross-dressing band Christian Death,” as his bio has it, as well as the still-touring Bad Religion), the pilgrims’ flaws, while Chaucerian in variety, are heavily SoCal in specifics. Junkies, parolees, former glam-rock deities, pretty, vacant call girls, aging skate punks, Internet porn addicts, cross-dressers (of course) and one sodden neighbor whose big toe explodes, or “goes off,” one night on account of alcohol poisoning, or gout, or something.
So, it’s not quite a Rockwell vision of these United States, but in its own way, it is just as genuinely and recognizably American as anything old Norman painted. Baseball, apple pie and speedballs: This is the Right Fielder’s Tale, and Albert tells it like the veteran that, in many ways, he is. Like not a few ex-punk musicians — Richard Hell, Henry Rollins and others spring aggressively to mind — Albert eventually transferred at least some of his creative talents from music to writing, and has not looked back. Now a freelance writer (“Wrecking Crew” first saw light as an award-winning article in the L.A. Weekly in 2000), Albert also pens screenplays — without much luck. “Why the industry never embraced my gothic ghost story about a washed-up masked wrestler … always baffled me,” he admits.
“It was a scorching weekday in February,” he writes early on in the book, setting the stage for the craziness to come, “when I answered the door to find my illustrious screenwriting partner, Teo, standing there, clutching what appeared to be an antique portable typewriter. Teo was in his early fifties and weighed somewhere around three hundred pounds. No matter the weather, he always wore a slightly frayed, blue blazer that looked like someone had hurled a combination pizza across the front … Teo and I existed on the fringes of the film industry like a world-weary screenwriting Abbot and Costello, barely scraping by and always believing we were just one phone call away from success and eternal happiness.”
The typewriter, it seems, is (or might well be) one of Hemingway’s. The Hemingway’s. Teo’s socialite expatriate parents apparently knew Papa; Albert has seen pictures of them arm-in-arm with the man, back in the day. This very early scene, then — the struggling screenwriters; a tenuous connection to greatness; fame and riches always just around the next corner, or perhaps the next — sets the tone for one of the book’s central themes, adroitly maintained from beginning to end: that Los Angeles is still, more so than anywhere else, a sunny, sordid, intoxicating place where dreams are the one genuine currency. This is the L.A. of Nathanael West and Bret Easton Ellis, Billy Wilder and David Fincher and punk and glam bands like X, Faster Pussycat and a million other legendary and long-forgotten edge-of-the-continent seekers.
Albert’s insights into that particular, off-the-tourist-map Los Angeles weren’t gained vicariously, or without a price.
“I had known quite a few famous people throughout my life … and had even experienced a brief glimpse of very minor stardom myself. Not much … but just enough to know that success doesn’t do what most people hope it will.”
As the drummer for Bad Religion in the mid-’80s — “a few years after the group’s initial underground success and still some time before a creative resurgence would result in hit singles, gold records, and a dedicated worldwide following” — Albert is one of thoseguys. He was there. He saw. He survived. Barely.
“On a warm, humid night … we played to around three thousand kids in an aging downtown boxing arena … and by all accounts it was a flawless and well-received performance. I even have a videotape to prove it. Yet instead of basking in the post-show glory and dog-piling nubile young groupies or snorting blow at some raucous Hollywood Hills party, I fixated exclusively on the fact that not one of the five people on my personal guest list had shown up. The obvious conclusion was, of course, that I had not a friend in the world, and so my night ended up rather unceremoniously, near the drug-infested fields of MacArthur Park, sitting all alone in my yellow Toyota bumblebee and shooting colorful balloons of Mexican heroin until my money was gone.”
Such credibility has no demand or request for admiration attached, nor does it deserve any; it simply is. The author was a junkie who played in a punk band. What came after, however, might spark respect in even the most high-minded, blue-nosed reader.
Albert’s slow (and, it’s worth noting) ongoing redemption began on the heels of that solitary, smack-filled, post-show reverie, when he had the presence of mind, coupled with a well-founded fear of jail time, to get himself into rehab. He stayed at Impact House, a hard-nosed joint founded by bikers, for 18 months and got clean. “Sometimes,” he writes, with a winning mix of pride, embarrassment and something like wonder, “troubled, petulant kids just need to grow up, no matter what stage of life they believe they’re in.”
The route that Albert took back to his early love of baseball, meanwhile, started after he’d been clean for a while and a musician friend, Mike, asked him out of the blue — while he himself was going through withdrawal — a question that red-blooded American lads have been asking each other for a century or more.
“I noticed Mike’s hand trembling as he retrieved a single, bent Marlboro from his pocket … There was silence as he smoked, punctuated by the sniffing of his constantly running nose. Eventually, Mike looked over at me, wiped his nose with the back of his hand like a little kid, and asked, ‘Hey, do you wanna play catch?’”
In short order, a team consisting almost entirely of antisocial misfits is wreaking havoc — controlled, sanctioned, umpired havoc — on other, seemingly better prepared, better organized, less 12-step-reliant teams in the local Los Angeles hardball league. No beer-bellied, slow-pitch softball for these guys. Hardball, fast-pitch hardball, is the only way to go.
In quick, highly episodic chapters, Albert introduces the other members of the team, and it is in these characters that so much of the book’s heart and its dark, often riotous humor reside. They include:
Chris, a muscular, handsome, cleft-chinned athlete and “skilled street fighter from a family of violent men” with a history of alcohol and drug problems and a predilection for dressing up in women’s lingerie and heels. He’s the team’s catcher.
Johnny, a sweet-natured, romantic recovering addict and active high-stakes gambler who works at an advertising agency, falls hard for strippers and call girls and who spends much of his time, when he’s not playing baseball, riding motorcycles and working out with his cousin, the ex-Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction guitarist and current host of CBS’s “Rock Star,” Dave Navarro. True to his eclectic nature, he’s a solid utility infielder.
Clay, an ex-rocker who grabbed hold of, and then let slip, the brass ring with an almost-huge ’80s metal band called Junkyard, ended up living in a broken-down Lincoln Continental for a while, cleaned up (for a while) and played a solid third base for the Pirates. For a while.
Masashi, a Japanese exchange student ostensibly studying acting and English in L.A. but whose primary activities appear to be drinking Budweiser, having sex, going to hardcore rock shows, having sex, thinking about sex, and having more sex. He had a non-speaking role in “The Last Samurai.” He pitches.
Dino, another ex-member of another semilegendary punk band, the Hangmen; Don, a parolee who, his teammates eventually learn, once killed a guy, and who thus gets to play pretty much any position he wants; Mike, pitcher and manager, recovering addict, a founder of the late, lamented band Lifter, and the fellow who started it all, in a sense, with his query about playing catch; the West Virginian thespian Jacob, at second base; Jordan, a middle-aged, married, clean-cut baseball fanatic who claims to have invented a very slow pitch, “like an optical illusion,” that’s essentially unhittable — he’s mistaken about that last part … and so on.
The really bad news Griffith Park Pirates, indeed. (They settle on the name Pirates in the most logical and democratic manner possible: The Pittsburgh Pirates are the one major league team that no one on the G.P. Pirates hates.)
Albert introduces his friends and teammates in a voice so conversational and engaging that by the time the entire team is assembled and playing — occasionally losing; occasionally, increasingly, winning — we’ve come to know them and like them in the same way that some people, as Hemingway himself once put it, go broke: gradually, and then suddenly. None of them are paragons: Dino has a frightening temper; Jordan and Mike are prima donnas; Clay proves a tough guy to trust. But when they’re on the field, or smoking cigarettes in the dugout together when it’s their turn to bat, these guys aren’t a bunch of misfits at all. They’re a team.
A bit more than midway through the book, the Pirates are scheduled to play a winter game in L.A.’s El Sereno Park, but days of rain have turned the field to quicksand. A player on the other team says he knows of another field a few miles off that might be in better shape, and everyone piles into their cars to check it out.
“As I pulled behind the caravan of player’s cars,” Albert writes, “I wondered when exactly I had joined the human race. You can pass off alienation as a style choice, but at heart, we’re social creatures. The reason I’d loved the warmth of narcotics so much was because it made a seemingly inevitable loneliness seem tolerable. I’d stayed in rehab for a year and a half because it was a small world that I felt a part of … While drugs weren’t really an option anymore, isolation was. As I headed over the hill that morning with my friends, I felt grateful to have somewhere to go — and people to go there with.”
In almost any other book, that sentiment might feel either too wan to bear recalling, or too trite to bear voicing. Here, it’s an instance of what makes so much of this improbable tale so satisfying: a small, throwaway moment that most of us would likely take for granted, but that “Wrecking Crew” turns into a quiet, hard-won and moving celebration.
There’s not much reason to doubt that baseball manager Ozzie Guillen admires Fidel Castro. He said so five years ago in an interview with Men’s Journal. When asked to name the toughest man he knew, Guillen replied, “Fidel Castro. He’s a bull—- dictator and everybody’s against him, and he still survives, has power. Still has a country behind him. Everywhere he goes, they roll out the red carpet. I don’t admire his philosophy; I admire him.’’
No one cared about that macho thought because Guillen was skipper of the Chicago White Sox at the time. As the newly hired manager of the Miami Marlins, Guillen repeated the notion to Time last week–”I respect Fidel Castro,” he said. “You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still there”–and he found himself on the brink of unemployment.
As Miami’s Cuban-American talk radio hosts whipped up a storm of protest, the Marlins denounced Guillen and suspended him for five games. On Tuesday the chastened manager repudiated his statements, said Castro was a bad man, and apologized “on my knees.” With Guillen’s job hanging in the balance, most sportswriters attributed the controversy to his big mouth: He is known for insulting gays and admitting he likes to get drunk often.
But Guillen’s real problem is Cuban Miami, where enforcing the anti-Castro party line is a more popular pastime than baseball, not the least because the Marlins owners arranged to stick the city’s taxpayers with the bill for their new $640 million ballpark in Little Havana while depriving local residents of legal parking spaces. The combination of Guillen’s candor, Miami politics, and the Marlins’ arrogance is what has brought the Cooperstown-bound skipper to the brink of being fired.
The city has never shown much tolerance for people who say nice things about Castro. In 2000, Jim Mullin, editor of the city’s alternative weekly New Times, compiled a chronology of violent intolerance that has few parallels in modern America. In 1975 a Cuban American man was murdered after advocating closer relations with Castro’s Cuba. In 1978, an anti-Castro talk radio host had his legs blown off by a car bomb because he dared criticize his fellow exiles for resorting to violence. In 1983, the Little Havana branch of a Miami bank was bombed because one of its executives had negotiated with the Castro government for the release of 3,600 political prisoners. In 1998, a bomb threat emptied a concert hall during a performance by Compay Segundo, a 91-year-old musician made famous by the movie “The Buena Vista Social Club.” All told, Mullin found more than 40 instances of bomb threats and explosions directed at people who had somehow offended the anti-Castro orthodoxy.
A 1994 Human Rights Watch report on the sorry state of free speech in Miami concluded, the city is “dominated by fiercely anti-Communist forces who are strongly opposed to contrary viewpoints.” The HRW reports linked these forces to “acts of repression ranging from shunning to violence.” The reports found “significant responsibility” by the government at all levels, including “direct harassment by the government and government support of groups linked to anti-free speech behavior.”
That tradition continued this week when two local politicians injected themselves into the controversy by calling for Guillen’s firing. The call was echoed by a vigilante group known as Vigilia Mambisa, which describes itself as “a hard-line, right wing, Anti-Castro, Anti-Communist group of dedicated Cuban-American demonstrators … known for their rapid response to calls for protest aired on Miami Spanish-language stations.” The group is calling for a boycott of the Marlins until Guillen is fired.
The problem is Miamians are already boycotting the Marlins. The team ranked 28th out of 30 major league teams in attendance last year. Dario Moreno, a professor of political science at Florida International University, said, “I don’t think this is a free speech issue. There’s a lot more tolerance than there was 30 years ago.” Moreno noted that south Florida’s three Cuban-American congressional representatives and the state’s Cuban-American senator have not called for Guillen to be fired.
“This has more to do with the Marlins and a community that invested large sums of money in their stadium over the objections of lots of people,” Moreno said. “The promise was that they would bring the community together and give us something to be proud of. It’s not working out very well.”
Moreno says he thinks Guillen may be able to keep his job if the Marlins muzzle Guillen (good luck with that) and reach out to the community. “The baseball fans are willing to let this one go by if he just promises to not talk politics,” Moreno said.
“As a Christian, I accept his apology,” said Alberto Muller, a former newspaper columnist who spent 15 years in a Cuban prison. “But in Miami, not everybody is a Christian.” Muller thinks Guillen will be fired.
A Miami Herald online reader survey found 57 percent of 2,500-plus respondents saying Guillen’s five-game suspension was sufficient punishment. If Guillen only loses his job for expressing admiration for Fidel’s toughness, it will be a sign of civic progress. Not long ago, he might have lost his legs or his life.
A simple and unsettling calculation reveals to me that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my coming to New England and setting up shop as a Red Sox fan. How innocent I was in that distant day: how little I understood the faces etched with pain, the haunted eyes, the lips that writhed in uttering “Yankees.” It did not take long to become afflicted by the same symptoms and, in my time here, certain Yankee-related events have been so traumatic that they are best designated by numerals alone: 1978 and 2003. The ALCS of 2004 (when the Red Sox came from a 0-3 game deficit to vanquish the evil ones) changed the region’s mental landscape — as, of course, did the subsequent World Championship(s). Since then, Yankee hating has become more of a pleasant pastime than a crippling mental and spiritual disorder.
It is in this happier frame of mind that I turn to “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team,” edited by Rob Fleder. Among the two dozen pieces is the funniest consideration of Yankee hating I have ever read. “Take Me Out to the Oedipal Complex” is illustrator and writer Bruce McCall’s confession that, because his father was a Yankee fan, he himself embraced hating the team, leaving little anti-Yankee pamphlets of his own making around the house for his father to stumble upon. It was his own “unique form of patricide” and constituted his identity: “We Yankee-haters, by God, knew who we were. We were losers. We also knew that the devoted Yankee fan, wallowing in his smug prosperity, betrayed a contemptible character flaw. He was not only a front-runner but also a weakling and a sissy and a stranger to the humiliation and failure that toughens the spirit, readying you for more humiliation and failure.”
All-out Yankee attacks are actually few in this book, Frank Deford’s may be summed up succinctly: Y$a$n$k$e$e$s, and Nathaniel Rich’s more forlornly: Mets fan. Charles Pierce, though a Red Sox supporter from birth, writes sympathetically of the proud ethnic divisions in his native Worcester, which — thanks to Joe DiMaggio — put an island of Italian-American Yankee fans in the middle of Massachusetts. Among the other contributors, who range from Jane Leavy to Colum McCann, are Peter Dexter with a mean-spirited, humblebragging consideration of Chuck Knoblauch, and Dick Telander with an appreciative one of Jim Abbott. Economist James Surowiecki provides an excellent assessment of George Steinbrenner’s contribution (marketing genius). Derek Jeter has two big fans in Roy Blout Jr. and Tom Verducci, while Bill James asks the question that may — or may not — have given you sleepless nights: “Did you ever find yourself wondering which season was the greatest ever by a Yankee catcher?” I will reveal the season (1950) and the player (Yogi Berra) because that is only the beginning. James, a driven man, pushes on, with amusing commentary, to rank the 100 best seasons for Yankee catchers.
The catcher who appears most often in high places on that list is also the costar of Harvey Araton’s “Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift.” Guidry, who had played for the Yankees during Berra’s time as a coach and last tenure as manager, has, for over a decade, picked up the ancient backstop every spring at the Tampa airport to drive him to the Yankee training camp. Around that annual journey are spun a number of tales including the story of Berra’s mighty fourteen-year umbrage at a highhanded George Steinbrenner, which was finally resolved in a July 1999 celebration of Berra’s return to Yankee Stadium. The event was elevated by the perfect game pitched that afternoon by David Cone — triumphantly bringing back the memory of Berra’s own role in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. We find here too the introduction of frogs’ legs by the Louisianan Guidry into Berra’s diet and a sense of the deep friendship between two great baseball men.
The title of Tim Wendell’s “Summer of ’68: the Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever” is one that could be used, mutatis mutandis, as we say around the farm, for any number of seasons. Nonetheless, outside the park, 1968 was a doozy, marked by assassinations, riots, an increasingly unpopular war, and a violent Democratic Convention in Chicago. The effects of this were felt inside the park as racial tensions increased and a number of players had to interrupt their time on the field for military training. As for the game itself: it was a season of phenomenal pitching, with the magnificently fearsome Bob Gibson emerging with a preternatural 1.12 ERA (and 1.67 in the World Series). Alas, the season’s hurling greatness changed the game forever: the next year saw the mound lowered by six inches and the designated hitter appear in the American League. The book includes excellent photographs and is strongest when it concentrates on baseball.
The “gentlemen’s agreement” that banned black players from organized profession baseball was struck behind closed doors toward the end of the nineteenth century. In “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball,” Chris Lamb shows that the ban was maintained in great part by its existence never being acknowledged. The book is a chronicle of bad faith, on the part of owners and organizational big bugs, and of a press that remained generally silent on the subject. It is also an absorbing account of how that silence was finally broken. Key to this were a few white sports reporters, a few black ones from the black press, and the (Communist) Daily Worker, a paper that, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was far more influential than most of us can quite take in today. The entrance of the United States into the war against a racist regime made baseball’s own racial hypocrisy increasingly untenable, which fact was increasingly reflected in the formerly circumspect mainstream press. In the largest sense, Lamb shows how pivotal the desegregation of baseball was to that of the nation as a whole.
Mitchell Nathanson claims that “A People’s History of Baseball” “is baseball history from an alternative point of view,” and to that end it visits some of organized professional baseball’s most notorious institutions and episodes, among them segregation; the Reserve Clause; the banning of players from the game without due process; the blind eye turned by club owners to “performance-enhancement drugs” and subsequent scapegoating of a few players; and the battle over who owns baseball statistics. Nathanson’s goal is to reclaim baseball and its story from those who have spun a falsely uplifting version, first among the guilty being Henry Chadwick (a.k.a. the Father of Baseball), who promoted ideologically skewed statistics (in Nathanson’s opinion) and offered baseball as an edifying example of individual sacrifice and teamwork (bad). To offer Chadwick as villain is a real stunner to my way of thinking, but in this case even more so as his success in making statistics integral to baseball made possible what Nathanson considers — most eccentrically — to be the means of restoring the game to both players and fans. That is fantasy baseball: the game that takes the actual game out of baseball.
Bill Buckner’s error in the 1986 World Series – 25 years ago today, a day of infamy for Red Sox fans — is one of the two most famous plays in World Series history. (Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 fall classic is the other.)
Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”
Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.
At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”
Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.
Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)
Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.
The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”
“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”
Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.
But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.
(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)
Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.
When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”
What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.
But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.
On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”
Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.
But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.
Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.
For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.
Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.
Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.
Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.
In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.
Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive — and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.
Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.
Today, Major League Baseball games using QuesTec’s computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.
This is exactly what Southern Methodist University’s researchers did when they examined more than 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008. Their findings say as much about the enduring relationship between sports and bigotry as they do about the synaptic nature of racism in all of American society.
First and foremost, SMU found that home-plate umpires call disproportionately more strikes for pitchers in their same ethnic group. Because most home-plate umpires are white, this has been a big form of racial privilege for white pitchers, who researchers show are, on average, getting disproportionately more of the benefit of the doubt on close calls.
Second, SMU researchers found that “minority pitchers reacted to umpire bias by playing it safe with the pitches they threw in a way that actually harmed their performance and statistics.” Basically, these hurlers adjusted to the white umpires’ artificially narrower strike zone by throwing pitches down the heart of the plate, where they were easier for batters to hit.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the data suggest that racial bias is probably operating at a subconscious level, where the umpire doesn’t even recognize it.
To document this, SMU compared the percentage of strikes called in QuesTec-equipped ballparks versus non-QuesTec parks. Researchers found that umpires’ racial biases diminished when they knew they were being monitored by the computer.
Same thing for high-profile moments. During those important points in games when umpires knew fans were more carefully watching the calls, the racial bias all but vanished. Likewise, the same-race preference was less pronounced at high-attendance games, where umps knew there would be more crowd scrutiny.
Though gleaned from baseball, these findings transcend athletics by providing a larger lesson about conditioned behavior in an institutionally racist society.
Whether the workplace is a baseball diamond, a factory floor or an office, when authority figures realize they are being scrutinized, they are more cognizant of their own biases — and more likely to try to stop them before they unduly influence their behavior. But in lower-profile interludes, when the workplace isn’t scrutinized and decisions are happening on psychological autopilot, pre-programmed biases can take over.
Thus, the inherent problem of today’s pervasive “post-racial” fallacy. By perpetuating the lie that racism doesn’t exist, pretending that bigotry is not a workplace problem anymore, and resisting governmental efforts to halt such prejudice, we create the environment for our ugly subconscious to rule. In doing so, we consequently reduce the potential for much-needed self-correction.
A contrite Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen gestures at a news conference on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky) 
(Credit: AP) 
