The old ballplayer with the brush mustache let his poker face slip for a moment and smiled at the image. “Me. On the Mets’ bench.”
He had just experienced as odd a two-hour span as any athlete ever has. After an absence of nearly 16 years, he had returned to Shea Stadium, the scene of one of the most notorious moments in baseball history, one that he starred in. And not a soul — not a player, not a reporter, not a fan — had given him a hard time about it. Here he was, transported back to the scene of a disaster of his making, in an America in which we can’t tell who’s yelling louder about how much to blame everybody else is, Ann Coulter or Pete Rose. Yet all but a handful of the 47,000 people at Shea Stadium never even let on that they knew he was there.
On some cosmic level, perhaps, he had earned the benign neglect of history. For one thing, he’d acknowledged his mistake, from the beginning. “You saw it,” he’d said at the time. “Not good.” Now, with the exact measure of understatement he’d used that grim October night long ago, he described his return to Shea. “It was nice,” he said simply, and that was all he needed to say.
Perhaps that stoic willingness to shoulder responsibility is why, on a cool Friday night in July, as he sat in the stands at Shea Stadium in New York, the most intrusive anybody got with him was to wander over and ask, “You’re Bill Buckner, aren’t you?”
Buckner was so blasi about it that he claimed he wasn’t certain if it was the first time he’d been back. It was at Shea Stadium, of course, that in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, a ground ball hit by Mookie Wilson of the Mets skittered between his legs and past first base and into baseball history, concluding as nightmarish an inning as could be recalled by even the fans of that Freddy Krueger of franchises, the Boston Red Sox. Buckner could have made excuses — he shouldn’t even have been out there hobbling around the infield on his bad ankles, the inning should have been long over, they should’ve already been celebrating the championship — but it was still Buckner’s error, and he lived up to it.
If Bill Buckner has a poker face, Pete Rose’s is a perpetual Munchian scream of woeful denial, and Ann Coulter’s is that of a swaggering pirate, complete with eyepatch. I confess I had never thought of Buckner and Rose as subjects for contrast, let alone Buckner, Rose and Coulter. But as I watched Buckner laugh with old baseball pals, as I remembered the younger Buckner whose Boston teammates used to tell me projected a kind of infectious calm, I got to thinking about how the three of them join together to vividly paint the opposite ends of some deep American spectrum about assuming responsibility.
Rose is about to complete Year 13 of his nonstop insistence that he didn’t do it — bet on the baseball team he was managing — even if he signed a document saying he did. In that time he’s blamed a dead commissioner of baseball, a fired commissioner of baseball, the current commissioner of baseball. He’s dragged reporters and players into his ever-enlarging sinkhole. He’s made fuzzy-cheeked minor leaguers liable for reprimand by falsely claiming they had asked him to coach them. He’s claimed that his letters seeking reinstatement have been returned unopened and that the only phone numbers his lawyers have been given to call have been disconnected ones.
His most newly minted rationalization, if you haven’t heard it, is that 1989, the year of his banishment for having allegedly wagered on the games of the team he managed, is so long ago that murderers convicted that year have already gotten out of prison. He appears to have figured out why he didn’t get very far with his earlier argument: that even if he had bet on the Reds, all of the evidence suggests he never bet against them, so that made it ok. Of course, a manager betting on his own team every day might, on some relative scale, be ok; a manager betting only periodically must necessarily be suspected of using his better pitchers in the games on which he’d wagered, and not in those he didn’t – a kind of passive-aggressive game-fixing.
But I tend to think Rose is a lot closer to understanding what he did, and why people hold it against him, than is Ann Coulter. Since Sept. 11 she has been a veritable out-of-control firehose of venom, whipping around crazily, streaming invective wherever she happens to point. I wouldn’t be so disturbed if I sensed there was a glimmer of irony in this new book of hers, some quick wink of Buckner-like acknowledgment that “Slander” might be read not as a title, but as a description of the contents.
Alas, no. It will never occur to Coulter that in the vast crowd of us who appeared on television news in 1998, and focused entirely on the itinerary of President Clinton’s genitalia, she was up near the front. It’s a big crowd, and some of us tried to disperse it. But we’re all there — I’m including myself — and as we head to purgatory for our sins, if not hell, we should all solemnly acknowledge that in fact there most obviously was something else to which we should have been paying attention, and didn’t.
Last September I went back and checked the logs of my old MSNBC show and discovered to my surprise that in the two months before we changed the meaning of the parent company’s acronym to “Nothing But Clinton,” my most frequent guests were James Dunegan, a craggy bespectacled man who talked endlessly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threat of anthrax being delivered to Broadway, and Dr. Richard Haas, then of the Brookings Institution, who warned constantly of terrorism and the Middle East and the threats to, and in, this country.
Then one day Mr. Dunegan and Dr. Haas were swept away, never to appear again. Instead we got Terry Jeffrey and Bob Barr and Christopher Hitchens, and our lower-grade sister shows got Newt Gingrich and Barbara Olson and Ann Coulter. That I escaped Coulter was merely a throwaway favor from my masters. They had been hinting she’d have to be a guest sooner rather than later. Then she went over-the-top: Despite an eye infection, she could not keep herself off television. I begged my bosses not to make me interview a guest who was literally wearing a huge, distracting eyepatch. Thus my imagery of her as a pirate: For a week she continued to flail away at the wrong evil while looking like a refugee from some camped-up version of “Treasure Island.” But not on my show.
Mistake me not here: Ann Coulter didn’t cause Sept. 11. Not in a billion years would I accuse her, or any of the others (not even Barr), of that. But with hindsight one has to ask why the prospect of a country unprepared for terrorism wasn’t a sexy enough topic for her and the others to use to pound Clinton and the Democrats. Certainly they got with the program after Sept. 11, blaming Clinton for being soft on Osama bin Laden and terror. The Clinton folks struck back, and for a while it was compelling television controversy and worthwhile political debate, a hot TV commodity that at least contained some crumb of public good. Why wasn’t that interesting before Sept. 11?
Last fall when Coulter reacted to the death of her friend Barbara Olson on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon with pronouncements that might have made the Crusaders blanch, I defended her. I lost friends on two planes, and two more at Cantor Fitzgerald, and I argued that on top of her personal grief, she was operating from some extremely human wish to undo the horror. Perhaps, I said, deep inside her there was some vague connection of the dots between her share of the responsibility for the transformation of “News” into “Nothing But Clinton,” and our unpreparedness for the attack. Perhaps she was getting ready to reckon with her own small but significant role in distracting the country from what should have mattered in 1998. No one rallied to my line of thinking. Slander certainly chased away anybody who was considering doing so.
Thus stand this odd trio of my creation: Pete Rose, his hair ever more absurdly tinted and his self-defense ever more absurdly obscure; Ann Coulter, bellowing without pause so she can’t hear even her own conscience if it somehow elects to whisper “j’accuse” at her; and Bill Buckner, leaning on a batting cage at Shea Stadium, for a time still literally stuck within that hundred-foot radius of where it all happened, smiling at the irony and receiving back what he emits, a gentle Zen-like acceptance.
While Buckner’s error is the most obvious and the most easily proven, with the most obvious consequences, it is also — more important — the least protested. Rose and Coulter could learn something from him.
But they probably won’t.
The players of an unidentified Major League Baseball team have voted against authorizing their union to set a strike deadline for its negotiations with the owners, sources close to the Players’ Association speaking on condition of anonymity said Sunday.
The votes, conducted on a team-by-team basis as union executive director Donald Fehr has visited each team, constitute only the first stage of an actual strike, and have traditionally been considered a mere formality. After the union is authorized to set a deadline, a second player vote is required to officially authorize a strike.
In baseball’s eight previous labor disputes, there has never been a negative vote reported by any team in either stage.
The sources refused to identify the team, its league or its division, and would confirm only that it was a “small-market franchise.” Of baseball’s poorer relations, the Oakland A’s announced their vote to authorize the setting of a deadline July 18, and Pittsburgh Pirates’ player representative Kevin Young said he and his teammates voted to authorize it last Friday.
For more than two weeks, executive director Fehr has been traveling the country, briefing teams and conducting votes. But the number of teams revealing their votes has seemed to many observers to be unusually slow this year. Nearly all the reporting on the strike-vote process to date has consisted of conflicting reports about whether Sept. 16 is the union’s preferred deadline.
The lack of solidarity as a potential labor crisis looms is reportedly not limited to the players. The Arlington Heights Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper, reported July 25 that a “mid-market” owner had attacked commissioner Bud Selig for having told “thirty different (owners) thirty different things.” The Herald’s anonymous source said the owners were not unanimous about the looming strike, and charged that Selig’s prohibition against owners talking to the media about the labor situation was briefly lifted, and then reinstated, to cover up discord.
“We’re supposed to be unified?” the source asked. “That’s laughable. Lift the gag order again, and you’ll see how unified.”
Editor’s note: Salon welcomes its newest columnist, Keith Olbermann. Apart from what is widely known about Olbermann — his work at ESPN, Fox, MSNBC, hosting the World Series, winning a Murrow Award for covering Sept. 11 for ABC Radio — he would like readers to know about his hidden past. He began writing columns for sports memorabilia magazines at age 12, edited one of them at age 16 and was senior editor of Baseball Magazine at 19. He spent a summer as a baseball columnist for Sports Illustrated, has reviewed sports magazines for Contentville, covered the Oscars for the Los Angeles Times, ruminated on Monica Lewinsky for Time and written almost as regularly as he has broadcast, and for far more employers. He walked away from his “Big Show” at MSNBC after one too many days of covering Monica, famously saying, “And I thought sports was shallow.” He believes in the Gold Standard, continues to root for the Washington Senators baseball team even though they moved away in 1971 and expects Judge Crater to turn up any day now.
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By Keith Olbermann
July 25, 2002 | That this country truly has never experienced a time of memorial like the one coming in September was underscored this week by Major League Baseball players, who showed they believe nobody will be thinking about last year’s attacks as the anniversary approaches, and by the producers of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” who evidently believe everybody should be thinking of them, even while they’re watching the bare breasts of Kristen Davis. Baseball is trying to tell us nothing changed Sept. 11; “Sex and the City” is saying that everything’s changed, and those of us who like our entertainment to entertain us are trapped with little in between.
As baseball players march obliviously and self-righteously toward a strike that could bankrupt several franchises and eliminate 20 percent of the jobs in their industry, they are, from all evidence, wrestling only with exactly when to threaten to walk out. Sources disagree on the logic patterns, and even the process of selection. But they are uniform in reporting that the players are terrified of the public reaction should they actually be out on strike on Sept. 11.
The players are not, however, terrified of the public reaction should they be playing on Sept. 11 while preparing to strike just a few days later.
The distinction is as cagey, and as farsighted, as Tony Perkins playing the loony Jim Piersall in “Fear Strikes Out.” The Red Sox want to move Piersall from the outfield to shortstop, and he wants no part of it. So, with great satisfaction, and to his blissful relief, he simply hides his infielder’s glove.
That baseball fans — even those labor-savvy enough to recognize the old management ploy the cognoscenti call a “forced strike” — are spoiling for a fight should’ve been evident to any player who attended, or watched, the All-Star Game fiasco in Milwaukee two weeks ago. Possibly only in Milwaukee would the missiles that cascaded upon the field after the players gave up on this vanity license plate of a sports exhibition have been as relatively harmless as plastic beer bottles.
Presuming the strike deadline is imminent, anybody want to guess what the fans in St. Petersburg will be throwing at Nomar Garciaparra when his Boston Red Sox play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Sept. 11? Garciaparra recently announced that he’d hate to see the season interrupted or abandoned (Hello, Central? Send over a few dozen metaphors about that tied All-Star Game!). But he has a kid brother just starting out in the minor leagues, in the bowels of the Seattle Mariners’ organization, and he has to do this for little Michael and all the others to follow.
Michael Garciaparra got a $2 million signing bonus from the Mariners. He’s 19.
Nomar Garciaparra’s salary this year is $9 million.
John L. Lewis and Cesar Chavez would be proud.
I’m veering here into the merits of the strike and the justifiability of the salaries, and neither is the point. Humility is the point. Remembrance is the point. Solemnity is the point. Sept. 17 is the point.
What the baseball players have forgotten in targeting Sept. 16 as a probable strike deadline, at least according to some news accounts, is that last year, Sept. 17 was the day the baseball season resumed. In the ensuing weeks, the game did more for the country than it had in generations. Last Sept. 17, baseball actually played a part, however small, in binding a nation’s wounds.
I can summon effortlessly from my memory an image of an NYPD officer standing outside the New York Stock Exchange that morning. There was still so much smoke downtown that until I got within a few feet of him, I couldn’t tell whether he was wearing glasses. I was there covering the aftermath for a Los Angeles radio station, but the officer wanted to talk baseball. I finally interrupted him and gestured at the stockbrokers walking up the center of the street as if to a concentration camp. “You don’t understand,” the cop replied. “I can get through this because I know that tonight at 7 o’clock I can put my feet up and watch the Mets and pretend they matter.”
This Sept. 17 could very easily be the first full day of a strike, the first full day of empty stadiums and re-embittered fans. To paraphrase Abba Eban: Major League Baseball never fails to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Incidentally, the material costs of a strike starting Sept. 16 and wiping out the entire post-season have been kept under wraps, but they are fairly easy to calculate. Collectively, major league players make about $12,035,714 per day. Their share of the post-season kitty is another $40 million. They could be out a total of $208 million.
As for the owners, Sal Galatioto of Lehman Brothers is perhaps the leading sports financial analyst in the country. He crunched the data he had — all the nontelevision stuff — for me. During our theoretical strike, the owners would lose $238 million in the regular season, and another $180 million in the post-season. The TV income, he didn’t know.
Somebody else did — somebody who had a copy of the contract between baseball and Fox. It turns out that just over 90 percent of that deal is for the post-season, so if there’s no World Series, baseball owes Fox a rebate or refund of $300 million.
Put them all together and they spell a management loss of $718 million. But that’s a minimum figure, and the reason for the possibility of an even higher one is perhaps the most fascinating element of the entire post-attacks entertainment economy. Fox got included in the deal a damages clause for lost advertising revenue. So if a strike wipes out the post-season, and Fox makes, say, a dollar for commercial time during some terrible rerun, instead of the $10 they could’ve gotten for the patriotism festival that is the World Series, they can submit a claim to an arbitrator, and baseball could be forced to pay the network as much as $230 million more, bringing the total loss to close to $1 billion.
With our luck, those reruns will be of this season’s so-far disappointing “Sex and the City,” which is over there at the other end of the Appropriate Taste spectrum. When it comes to Sept. 11, where baseball apparently took Mayor Giuliani’s admonition to “go on with your (greedy) lives” too literally, the maestros of the Sarah Jessica Parker vehicle apparently ignored it, and are still stuck in the “the entire world has changed forever” mode.
If the last 10 months have shown us anything, it’s that Americans are ready to bite whatever bullets come our way. But in between painful moments of real life, we’d like our entertainment to actually be, well, entertaining, thank you — escapist if at all possible. What a relief it was, then, to see “Sex and the City” premiere last Sunday on HBO: the ultimate escapist show that flourishes because of charm and brilliant execution.
But the new 9/11-ready “Sex and the City” could not have been more heavy-handed in its desire to be “relevant” and “meaningful” had it stuck a Dan Rather newscast in the middle of the program. Depth was sought by designating New York City itself as Carrie’s first love. Gotham’s economic revitalization was encouraged by having the characters jettison the first mother of the bunch, Miranda, into a waiting taxi while the rest of them headed downtown for their compulsive shopping. And patriotism was introduced by forcing the three gals to chase sailors during Fleet Week, and even have Charlotte flash one of them.
What? Did nobody think of having Samantha swim out to troop ships?
The “Sex and the City” effort to make entertainment sensitive to the slightly new world around us is clearly more earnest and more commendable than the ballplayers’ return to “Me first, and screw you if you think you’re even second.” Nonetheless, as a born-and-bred New Yorker who still can’t listen to tapes of the radio reporting I did from here last year, my thanks, my applause for your intent, and these final four words to the show’s producers:
More Sex, less City.
Remember the scene in the movie “Chinatown” where the coroner says to Jack Nicholson, “The water commissioner drowns in the middle of a drought! Only in L.A.!” That’s baseball 2002. Only this messed-up ex-national pastime could manage to take its premier fan event, the first genuinely exciting All-Star Game in years, played in perfect weather, in a domed stadium, in the commissioner’s hometown, and have to abandon it after just two “extra innings,” without an outcome.
Like “Chinatown,” or any other film or work of fiction, sports requires the suspension of disbelief. A baseball game, at its essence, means nothing. You have to convince spectators that it’s important, and you do this by determining, if at all possible, a winner and a loser.
But at Tuesday night’s 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, baseball’s moguls failed to do this simplest, most essential of things, because they ran out of fresh pitchers. The managers had already used every player in uniform for the game, and they feared that as the game continued, they were putting the pitchers then in service at some kind of risk. With the consent of the seemingly hexed commissioner Bud Selig, the game was declared a 7-7 tie.
The American League’s Freddy Garcia, of the Seattle Mariners, and the National League’s Vicente Padilla, of the Philadelphia Phillies, had each thrown two innings. Any more work, baseball’s geniuses agreed, could have jeopardized the health of their arms, or their next scheduled regular season appearances for their teams.
So why weren’t there more pitchers available to relieve Garcia and Padilla? Because at some time in the last decade, what was originally conceived, and what has forever after been billed, as “the fans’ game,” has become “the players’ game.” The pitchers present had all been used up (only Garcia and Padilla pitched more than one inning each) because you couldn’t very well ask a player to travel all the way to an All-Star Game and not actually play in it, could you? And you couldn’t run the risk of his appearance jeopardizing his arm or delaying his next regular season start, could you?
Hogwash.
As recently as 1997, seven healthy players, including six pitchers, didn’t get to play. The pitchers were held in reserve specifically for the most delightful of all prospective problems: The game might be so competitive that it would be tied at the end of the regulation nine, and require extra innings. In 1967, when the game lasted 15 innings, Jim “Catfish” Hunter pitched the final five innings for the American League, and when it finally ended, there were still three pitchers left in the American League bullpen just in case it had gone longer.
This used to be standard practice. As late as 1988, a starting pitcher, Dwight Gooden, pitched the first three innings. In 1986, both starters, Gooden and Roger Clemens, pitched three. Going back to the event’s earliest days, in 1942 the American League used only two pitchers while seven others looked on from the sidelines. In 1937, fully 10 of the American League’s 22 All-Stars didn’t play at all.
The irony of the ignoble end to the 2002 game lies in the decision, made just days before, to name the award for its most valuable player in memory of the late Ted Williams. While the fiasco over preserving his body raged, baseball abandoned an All-Star Game to preserve the bodies of Freddie Garcia and Vicente Padilla.
It was Williams, of course, who played so hard in All-Star games that he fractured his elbow while running into a fence in the 1950 contest — and stayed in the game. The injury required surgery that cost him most of the rest of the season, and its aftereffects lingered for the rest of his career.
Even if the means of playing this game must be adjusted from Williams’ day to today’s era of fragile, hard-to-insure, pampered millionaires, a contingency plan could’ve easily been in place. A small group of three or four pitchers per league could have been selected as “emergency alternates.” If baseball’s owners balked at the added expense, these men could have been selected for the National League squad from the host team, the Milwaukee Brewers, and from one of the American League teams located most closely to Milwaukee, the Chicago White Sox or the Minnesota Twins.
The deepest meaning of the All-Star fiasco is contained, as ever, in history. In 1890, in a time of tumultuous labor wars, with three different leagues operating, and fans staying away in droves, the World Series between Brooklyn and Louisville was so poorly attended that the contest was cancelled after each team had won three games. It, like this year’s All-Star game, was abandoned.
Not only would the 1890 World Series be the last staged for 13 years, but one of the three leagues went out of business weeks later, and a second folded a year after that. It is an awful omen, for as a symbol for baseball’s current labor situation, its steroid scandal, its constant assault on its fans, there could be no more potent analogy than an abandoned All-Star game. This was, literally, the proverbial no-win situation.
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Even those things baseball touches only peripherally seem to wither into discord and irrationality. Reverend David Benke was one of dozens of religious leaders who attended the interfaith prayer service at Yankee Stadium in New York last September, just 12 days after the attacks on the World Trade Center. His bosses at the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church have now decided that in so doing, he committed heresy, displayed a lack of integrity, violated two of the 10 commandments and “dragged” his faith to the “level of Islam,” because he worshiped alongside “pagans.”
I was at Yankee Stadium on that poignant afternoon. Though my own brother-in-law is a Lutheran minister, I am suspicious of all organized religions. Yet my heart was warmed by, and my eyes swam with tears at, the unity, the tolerance, the respect that these decent men and women of all faiths expressed. Their words and their very presence underscored that what happened in this country on Sept. 11 was anything but a religious conflict. What they did helped to heal me, and heal my city. For that, the Lutheran Church has branded Reverend Benke a heretic. In fact, the heresy, the shame, the lack of integrity, is in their souls, not in his.
It is hard to contemplate having to choose which of these organizations — Major League Baseball, or the Lutherans’ Missouri Synod — has become more disconnected with its purpose, and its faithful. Either one is bad enough.
