A rookie pitcher took umbrage at an umpire’s strike zone as he fell behind in the count to the Cardinals’ Rogers Hornsby. The hall-of-famer cracked a home run on the next pitch. As Hornsby rounded the bases, the umpire took a few steps toward the man on the mound: “Young man, Mr. Hornsby here will let you know when you throw a strike.”
Ken Burns takes a break from recounting Hornsby’s statistical brilliance — the three seasons he batted over .400, the two MVP awards, the second-highest lifetime batting average, etc. — to tell us a story about an umpire’s wit. This is the charm of Burns’s 1994 documentary series Baseball. The viewer is regaled for more than 18 hours with not only box scores and controversy but also the quips of those who populated the game. But a funny thing happens midway through the last two-hour episode, which covers the game from the ‘70s to the ‘90s: The wit disappears. It happened right as we stopped referring to teams as ball clubs and started calling them “organizations” and brands.
Burns’s documentary served as welcome relief in the absence of Major League Baseball, which delayed the start of the season because of the pandemic. The game returned on July 23, but its wit may be gone forever. The humorists have been replaced by technocrats, the call-it-like-he-sees-it manager by public-relations professionals, sports writers by people who went to journalism school.
To look back at Baseball, or George Will’s Men at Work (1990), or Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulf’s Baseball Anecdotes (1989), is to encounter not only men made immortal through athletic prowess but those — the middle relievers, light-hitting infielders, and placeholder managers — who live on thanks to the power of their tongues. Carl Erskine (career ERA 4.00) once said, “I’ve had pretty good success with Stan [Musial] by throwing him my best pitch and backing up third.” Red Sox pitcher Frank Sullivan (career record 97-100), famous for surrendering a walk-off home run to Musial in the 1955 All-Star Game, was once asked how he pitched Mickey Mantle: “With tears in my eyes.” Asked if he put foreign substances on the baseball, ‘80s reliever George Frazier said, “Everything I use is from the good old USA,” a quip that made MLB officials forgive his cheating and fans forget that he is the only pitcher in history to lose three games in one World Series.
You won’t encounter these types of stories on ESPN these days. Sports pages are littered with cliches about “110%,” “what’s best for the team,” and “trying to impact the national conversation.” Every spring training, managers look out at the over-the-hill guy on a megadeal and tell reporters, “He’s never looked better mechanically.” All of the PR speak makes one pine for 1959, when Yankees manager Casey Stengel gazed out at has-been ace Bob Turley and marveled to reporters, “Look at him. He don’t smoke, he don’t drink, he don’t chase women, and he don’t win.”
Stengel won nine World Series in his career, seven as a manager. No one has topped that record. The winning could not eclipse his trademark humor, which led one Yankees executive to lament, “We have hired a clown,” when Stengel joined the club. Stengel may have won the battle in delivering all those pennants and commissioner’s trophies, but the suits won the war, first by firing Stengel after the Yankees’ Game 7 World Series loss in 1960 and then by capturing the soul of baseball.
Baseball was always big business, but the modern game has gone fully corporate, with a bureaucracy committed to protecting investments rather than winning ballgames. Baseball used to be ruled by the one-two punch of the owner and manager. That era gone by also featured the player-manager, part of a bottom-up, apprenticeship system that allowed students of the game to rise. What was once a regular arrangement disappeared with Pete Rose in the 1980s.
Baseball, like every other workplace, is now ruled by credentialism and human resource officials. The lifers have been overtaken by those fresh from Yale, the manager supplanted by the general manager, the general manager by the president of baseball operations. There are layers upon layers of miscellaneous departments filled with data experts, communications experts, and diversity experts, people who speak the language of the modern press corps, which ranges from hyperearnest to technocratic.
We once saw witty ballplayers because our sports writers cared about telling a good story, so much so that it’s an open question whether many of the jokes from early sports write-ups were ever told. Did Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Frenchy Bordagaray really say, “That’s more than I expectorated,” after finding out he would be fined for spitting on an umpire? Does it matter if the reader laughed? A wit could walk among the league’s 1,800 ballplayers in 2020, but if every question from our journalism school-trained sports writers is about Black Lives Matter or President Trump, then we’ll never know he exists.
The old-style fabulism is preferable to a news cycle in which sports writers police the Twitter feeds of players to see if they made offensive jokes when they were in middle school. With the advent of free agency, players won their freedom to chase big paydays, but the eight-figure contracts came at a price: Athletes now have more to lose if they do not toe the company line. If millionaire ballplayers can be stifled by social media mobs and agenda-driven journalists, what chance does the everyday person have?
Of course, the ballplayers of yesteryear were not immune from reporters seeking to impart social relevance into their coverage. Yogi Berra once agreed to sit down for an interview with a reporter who thought baseball could benefit from a dose of Freudian psychoanalysis.
“I’m going to mention a name, and Yogi’s just going to say the first thing that comes to mind,” the announcer said. “Mickey Mantle.”
“What about him?”
Here’s hoping there’s another Berra out there just itching to break out.
Bill McMorris is a senior editor at the Washington Free Beacon.
