With nearly a third of the schedule already over, baseball is rushing toward the long grind. It’s these three months, June, July, and August, where seasons are built or squandered, with September a berserkers’ challenge to what’s been earned here. Fans and scribes are right to romanticize the summer game, its easy, paradoxically timeless pace. But there are no Lotos-eaters in baseball, no forgetfulness since there is a reckoning for every mid-summer at-bat and inning, which will be accounted for and tallied—you’ll see, when the light turns melancholy and the leaves turn gold.
The weekend’s big series appears to be the Cardinals-Giants matchup in St. Louis. Giants fans won’t let anyone forget it’s an even-numbered year, which, on their telling, means that this San Francisco club—like the 2010, 2012, and 2014 versions—is once again destined for Valhalla come October, or November. The Cards are in the odd position of looking up in the National League Central Division standings and seeing the Cubs ahead by 10 games, and the Pirates a game-and-a-half up on them. This looks like the most competitive division in baseball this season, though the Nationals-Mets might be the season’s best rivalry, with the league’s top two pitching staffs facing off for the next four months.
There’s big baseball news on the college front, too, with the NCAA Division I baseball regionals this weekend. Sixty-four of the country’s top programs will play in 16 4-team brackets. The 16 winners will pair off next week in eight “super regionals” with the eight winners heading to Omaha, Nebraska the week after to compete for the College World Series. All seven SEC teams in the tournament will be hosting regionals, but the ACC is sending most schools to the regionals this year, with 10 of the conference’s 14 members playing this weekend. Some observers have wondered if the numbers mean that the center of college baseball gravity has shifted eastward—no California school is hosting a regional—with the SEC and ACC winning five of the last seven championships. Virginia, from the ACC, won last year, and SEC power Florida is the number one team in the nation. But Western programs from Arizona to California are still powerhouses, and who knows, but maybe this is underdog Utah’s big year?
Yankees outfielder Carlos Beltran has a nice piece at The Players’ Tribune describing the impact that the Pirates’ hall of fame right-fielder, the late Roberto Clemente, has on Puerto Rican ballplayers as well as other islanders, “How We Play Baseball in Puerto Rico.”
I can indeed attest to the nearly sacred nature of Clemente’s reputation in Puerto Rican life. It was the year before Clemente died in 1972, when the plane he chartered to aid victims of the Managua earthquake, and a family member told me and my brothers that Clemente was across the street in a Santurce park hitting fly balls to kids in the neighborhood. We grabbed our gloves and ran downstairs eagerly, having entirely forgotten it was April Fools’ Day. You just don’t use the great Clemente as an instrument of deceit, as our relative did, thereby earning a long exile from family favor. Clemente’s biographer David Maraniss has a podcast with Buster Olney at ESPN discussing whether MLB should retire Clemente’s number 21 as it did with Jackie Robinson’s 42.
The best piece of baseball writing of the week is actually a book review by Michael R. Stevens at Books and Culture, where he discusses three titles. One is on the Pine Tar Game, that 1983 classic during which a George Brett homerun in the upper-right-field deck in the Bronx was recalled after Yankees’ manager Billy Martin pointed out to the umpires that Brett’s pine tar illegally encroached on the barrel part of the bat, though I’m pretty sure that’s not how Billy explained it. Stevens at the time, like me, was in love with the Yankees, even that not very good ’83 club, though it did include a young Don Mattingly. I’ll never forget the image of Brett rushing furiously out of the dugout when his dinger was disallowed, and how his Yankees counterpart Graig Netttles jumped up and down, clapping his hands like a little boy at a birthday party right when the magician pulls the rabbit out of his hat.
Another book Stevens reviews is the memoir of a former Tigers farmhand, George Gmelch, who played in the same system with future Detroit skipper Jim Leyland, among others. It was the 1960s, and between the social upheaval, Vietnam, the student protest movement, and the civil rights movement Gmelch, was redirected toward other pursuits—and his carefree attitude didn’t help a slugger who was susceptible to slumps. Had he been with the Yankees, a teammate of the young Joe Pepitone, for instance, he might have fit their charismatic style. Or were he born a decade or so later, he might have been an eccentric confederate of the late Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. As it turns out, he turned to academia and became an anthropologist, whose early research in Ireland followed the Tinkers, Irish nomads.
The third book is Bob Gibson’s account of the first game of the 1968 World Series, in which Gibson shut out the Tigers 4-0 and struck out 17 batters. “What I learned about Bob Gibson,” Stevens writes:
Gibson has kind words for outfielder Lou Brock and his catcher Tim McCarver, but he is especially moving remembering Curt Flood, his closest friend on the Cards.
“When I spoke at his funeral in 1997,” writes Gibson, “I pointed out that he was one of the few people I knew whom I could never be mad at. Not even for an instant. And that’s in spite of him being my roommate for a long time.”
Flood was a terrific player. “He arrived at the ’68 Series as the only .300 hitter on either team,” Gibson notes. And he also won his fifth of six straight Gold Gloves that year. And yet, as Stevens notes, it is for his hold-out “against the old reserve clause and his wrenching battle in baseball exile to press for player rights and free agency that [Flood] is best known and remembered today.”
Stevens quotes Gibson at length here:
As Stevens explains, the two former teammates “drifted apart after Flood sank deeper into depression and alcoholism,” but “there was a brief and meaningful reconciliation when Flood was dying of throat cancer. Gibson’s final reflection is on the manliness and dignity beneath the damage: “Curt’s story was tragic, in the personal sense, but it was also essential on a level that makes him both historic and heroic. It set the narrative for a punishing process that had to occur in the interest of progress. Somebody had to take the brunt of it. Somebody, in effect, had to martyr himself, and Curt was the guy. He fully understood the ramifications of what he was doing.”
