Today's links have been retrieved from caches spread around the lovely village of Marionville, Missouri …
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Preston Gomez died on Tuesday:
Gomez compiled a 346-529 record as a manager and was probably remembered most for removing two pitchers from games in which they were throwing no-hitters, San Diego's Clay Kirby in 1970 and Houston's Don Wilson in 1974.
The Padres trailed, 1-0, when Kirby was pulled for a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning at San Diego. A chorus of boos and catcalls greeted the announcement, and one fan was so upset he leaped the rail, ran into the Padres' dugout and was ejected by ushers. San Diego lost the game 3-0.
In the other game, the Astros were trailing Cincinnati by a run when Gomez lifted Wilson in the eighth inning for a pinch-hitter. The Reds had scored twice on a fifth-inning throwing error and won the game, 2-1.
I've never held it against Gomez for trying to win. But I can understand why the fans of those non-contending teams might have been a little frustrated with him. There's a lot more to Gomez's career in baseball than those two busted no-hitters, so don't be shy about RTFA.
• Rich Lederer sure can get
worked up over Bert Blyleven. Really, though, can you blame him?
• And then there's Dale Murphy: two-time MVP, Gold Glove center fielder and all-around good guy. Joe Posnanski
makes the case.
•
According to our friend Joe Sheehan, Jim Rice's election "is about late baby boomer sportswriters a little bit fazed, a little bit daunted, by the objectivist revolution in baseball validating their own youth, their own memories, their own relevance." You may have seen Keith Law's
take on Tim Raines.
Me? I think every player's Hall of Fame case is unique, and you could write a book about how two players start with roughly the same moderate support from the voters, only to have one wind up getting elected and the other fall well short. Actually, Bill James has written
that book. But you could write a dozen more because I've concluded that there's not some Grand Unified Theory that explains it all. There's no theory that will explain
what happened to Luis Aparicio. Everybody's different.
•
Oh, the humanity.
• Well, it took a while. But finally the public handouts to the Yankees
have become a political football.
• Why do players need agents? Consider this note about
Dennis Lamp, from a piece in last week's Sports Illustrated on
the strange, twisted world of contract incentives:
The Blue Jays were obligated to pick up Lamp's $600,000 option for 1987 if the reliever met an appearances clause. He was getting close in September when the Jays shelved him. During one 23-game stretch he didn't even warm up. The Jays claimed Lamp was ineffective; in his grievance -- which he lost -- Lamp pointed to his 2.70 second-half ERA. "It just goes to show, you are just a piece of meat," he said.
Which he
lost? Lamp did have a 2.70 ERA in the second half. That number's a little misleading; as late as Aug. 10, his ERA for the season was still 6.05. But he pitched in five games from Aug. 11 through Sept. 2, and gave up only two runs in 13 innings. I don't know what the incentive clause said, but at that point Lamp had pitched 71 innings in 38 games. Then came the deep freeze. With the Jays in second place but well out of the race after the first week of September, Lamp sat … and he sat, and he sat. For 21 straight games (not 23; it couldn't have been 23), Lamp didn't pitch. Finally, he got a bit of action on the 28th and again on the 29th, both of them big Toronto losses. The next four games (the last four games of the season) were close, and again Lamp didn't pitch.
• Henry Schulman's got an update on the gap separating the Giants and
Manny Ramirez, and it's not a narrow chasm;
it's the Grand Canyon.
• Aside from
our man Corky Simpson, none of the other 27 Hall of Fame voters who spurned
Rickey Henderson have come out of the closet yet. Every year I get questions about this -- Why wasn't Henderson/Ripken/Gwynn/Ryan unanimous? But there's not a simple answer. This year there were 539 ballots cast. You have a group of voters that size and you're going to have a few cranks. In this case, 28 of them. Maybe 15 of them didn't like the way Rickey carried himself. Maybe 12 of them figured if Babe Ruth wasn't a unanimous selection -- and he got almost exactly the same percentage in his first year of eligibility as Henderson -- then nobody should be. And maybe one voter is so far around the bend that he doesn't remember anyone named "Rickey Henderson."
Who knows? And why should we care, really? I would much rather focus on the 417 voters who missed on Tim Raines than the 28 oddballs who left off Rickey Henderson. It's those 417 who really matter.
Rob Neyer
