They’re not saying “Gooooose”—they’re booing. Yes, baseball fans are booing Hall of Fame reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage for his crazy broadside on sports talk radio last week against the game he loves. He ripped ballplayers and management in what can only be considered a rearguard action in baseball’s culture wars pitting the new wave guys like Bryce Harper and Manny Machado against the old school crew. But none of this is new for Gossage. He’s tread all the same ground before, which is of course why Talleyrand famously said of the Goose that he “has learned nothing and has forgotten nothing.”
Gossage thinks the new breed of general manager who takes analytics seriously is destroying baseball. “The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it,” Gossage told ESPN. “I’ll tell you what has happened, these guys played rotisserie baseball at Harvard or wherever the f— they went and they thought they figured the f—ing game out. They don’t know s—.”
Yep, the Goose sure doesn’t like Harvard, or eggheads generally—which we already knew. Here’s an audio recording of another loony profanity-riddled Goose riff from the 1982 season when he went after the New York press for their “negativity.” “No wonder you’re f—ing carrying a pad of paper around,” Gossage said to the city’s collective baseball media. “You ain’t worth a f—ing s— to do anything else, m—er f—rs.”
The intellectuals, i.e., people who carry writing utensils, are bad enough, but from Goose’s perspective the real problem is the guys who play the game but don’t play it the right way.
Take Toronto Blue Jays star Jose Bautista, for instance. Goose says he ” is a f–king disgrace to the game.” Why? Because he flipped his bat after homering in game 5 of the ALDS last year against Texas. “He’s embarrassing to all the Latin players,” said Gossage, “whoever played before him.”
I guess Gossage forgot about the Latin player who pioneered the bat flip, Willie Montañez. Presumably, Montañez never homered against Gossage, because there’s little doubt that Willie’s stylish home run trot (here, imitated by the San Diego Chicken) would’ve really ticked off Gossage, who likely would have been keen to stick a fastball in Willie’s ear.
Goose was rightly proud of his fastball. In 1979 he got into a fight in the showers with Yankees teammate Cliff Johnson after Reggie Jackson asked Johnson how he hit Gossage when they faced each other in the National League. He didn’t, said the Goose, and it was on. Gossage tore a ligament in the thumb of his pitching hand. Question for the Goose: Is injuring yourself in a fight with a teammate after you boasted that you own him is playing the game the right way?
Yes, the Goose won a World Series with Mr. October in 1978, but today says he doesn’t like showboats and hot dogs. “There’s not enough mustard in the city to cover [Jose] Reyes,” Gossage once said of the Rockies shortstop when he was with the Mets. “I don’t want this sport to turn into football where they dance after every play,” said Gossage. “I can’t stand that – the dancing, the laughing – there’s no place for that in the game.”
Ok, that’s quite enough, GG. No laughing in baseball? Are you kidding? Sure, it’s a job, but you never had fun? You never laughed with those Yankees clubs? I thought Nettles was supposed to be a funny guy. He sure got a rise out of George Brett with the pine-tar incident. Sparky Lyle, the guy you wound up replacing as the stopper in the Bronx, used to sit on birthday cakes. That wasn’t fun?
Heck yeah, Gossage had fun. “Playing with the Yankees was never a dull moment, with all the characters we had on that 1978 team and all the personalities,” Gossage recalled a few years ago. “It started at the top with George (Steinbrenner), and there was Reggie (Jackson) and Billy (Martin)…so many strong personalities on that team. It was a veteran team, and it was an amazing team —the greatest I ever had the privilege of playing for—and what was most amazing about that team was that they could forget about all the distractions when they went between the lines; they could separate what happened in the clubhouse from what happened on the field. That’s just the kind of team Mr. Steinbrenner had put together.”
Goose really does revere the game’s old-time greats. It seems his favorite day of the year has long been Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium. “Oh my god, sitting in that clubhouse and watching these guys was amazing,” Gossage said when the Yankees honored him with a plaque out in Monument Park. “I thought these guys were fictitious cartoon characters who didn’t exist, so meeting them was amazing. To see Maris, and Joe DiMaggio and Moose Skowron and Hank Bauer and Tony Kubek and everyone…I couldn’t imagine trying to get guys like them out. It was an amazing experience.”
And Goose really does love baseball, but so do some of the younger players he’s ripping, like Bryce Harper. The 2015 National League MVP is a pretty easy target with his haircut and outspoken opinions. “Baseball’s tired,” Harper says in the latest issue of ESPN. But he’s loved baseball since he was a little boy, just like Gossage did, I’m sure. And he’s right when he says baseball is a “tired sport, because you can’t express yourself.” As Harper explains, he’s not saying that baseball is boring. What he means is that if you do express yourself in baseball, you run into baseball’s unwritten rule book. Flip your bat after a home run or even just take too long running around the bases and the pitcher throws at you next time at the plate, or beans one of your teammates.
That’s what happened last year when, according to Nationals’ reliever Jonathan Papelbon, Orioles’ third-baseman Manny Machado admired his home run too much. So next time Machado was at the plate, Papelbon drilled him with a pitch. After the game, Harper told reporters that baseball’s code was “tired,” which further riled up the volatile Papelbon, who responded a few days later by choking Harper in the dugout.
I’d like to know if Goose thinks this is how baseball should be played. If he thinks that publicly assaulting ballplayers is a logical and time-tested way to elicit, say, better at-bats. It didn’t work when Billy went after Reggie, and Goose had a front row seat for that circus. No, I think Harper has it right—baseball’s code, those unwritten rules that rationalize beanballs and brawls, is tired.
And I’d like to think that Gossage would eventually agree with him. After all, Harper might turn out to be the DiMaggio or Mantle of his generation. Who knows what kind of numbers he might amass given his 2015 campaign, a historic year? And what if a career like that were to get derailed by a beanball shattering his eye socket and destroying his confidence and his sight (which is what happened to the almost legendary Tony Conigliaro), or breaking a hand that never entirely recovers? Nope, I bet the Goose loves the game too much to risk something like that. Baseball’s code is dangerous to the health of the players and therefore the game itself. The 23 year-old outfielder with the new-wave haircut and the old-school work ethic has it right.
