Ball in the family
If any one artifact could symbolize the futility of the Washington Senators/ Texas Rangers that ended in this year's World Series, it is a ball from a game 52 years ago.
Also:
Top of the first: It takes time for a baseball team to develop roots.
Counsell may need to get out of town
Is small ball making a small comeback?
TOP OF THE FIRST
A family takes photos at Sloan Park in Mesa after the Cubs won the World Series in 2016.
Trying to become the most popular MLB team in town
“It’s a Cubs town. The Diamondbacks live here, but it’s a Cubs town.” — then Giants manager Dusty Baker explaining the lay of the land in the Cactus League in 2001.
Former Diamondbacks backup radio play-by-play announcer Jeff Munn said it best at the beginning of a game from Los Angeles many years ago: “For fans of a certain age who grew up in the Valley, Dodger Stadium will always be a special place.”
Dodgers Stadium mostly lived in our imaginations.
We seldom saw the place. It was almost 500 miles away. In seasons when the Dodgers missed the postseason, their ballpark might only appear on our TV screens a couple of times (though for a short time in the 70s, KPHO Channel 5, the station that was not affiliated with any network, aired Dodgers Sunday afternoon).
The voice of Vin Scully on KTAR (620-AM) took us there. He provided the soundtrack of my summers from the time I got a radio (at age 13) and a bunch of other baseball fans growing up in Arizona.
Occasionally I would listen to Angels games with Dick Enberg and Don Drysdale. I was a National League fan, and the Angels games were carried on an FM station. The radio I had in my room was AM only. So it was mostly Vinny and the Dodgers.
As the 1980s rolled on, cable TV found its way into more homes. For baseball fans, there were the two super-stations. WGN from Chicago, which showed almost every Cubs game, and WTBS, which showed almost every Braves game. (Some cable systems also carried WOR, the Mets channel.)
The Cubs were a much better fit than the Braves for our market.
We have a lot of Chicagoland ex-patriots here, and the Cubs began holding spring training in Mesa in 1952. They left for one spring, in 1966, to try Long Beach, then came back to Arizona, this time to Scottsdale. They returned to Mesa in 1979 and have been there ever since.
I remember covering a Big League (Little League’s 16-18-year-old division, since shuttered) state tournament at the Cubs’ then-spring home, Hohokam Park. There was a rain delay, and we all took cover in what was then an open-air press box.
Several of the players took turns sitting where Cubs announcer Harry Caray sat for spring games and doing their best impressions of him.
For that cohort, it was Caray who provided the soundtrack of their youth.
So along with the transient nature of the Valley of the Sun — where we say every time three people move in, two move out — the fact that many longtime residents here grew up with strong ties to other teams makes it a tough market for an MLB team. When the Dodgers and Cubs visit Chase Field, it’s almost like a home game for them. Same for the Giants. They were the first team to make Phoenix their spring home, and they based their Class AAA team here for decades.
When the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, firecrackers went off for at least a half hour in my neighborhood. I decided to go out to Sloan Park, the Cubs’ spring home in nearby Mesa. I watched as dozens of people drove to the stadium. Mostly, they just stood in the parking lot for a few minutes and then left. Occasionally someone would take pictures of someone in their group under a Cubs sign. Meanwhile, cars drove and honked.
What got me thinking about all this was the retirement of Greg Schulte, who has been the Diamondbacks’ radio voice since their inception. The team was honoring him one Sunday afternoon late in the season, and someone mentioned how a whole generation remembered Schulte as providing the soundtrack for their summers.
Now the torch will passed on, possibly to Chris Garagiola, grandson of Hall of Fame broadcaster Joe Garagiola. Chris Garagiola has been working on D-backs radio for the past two seasons.
For fans who grew up here after 1998, Schulte has been their Vin Scully, their Harry Caray.
And that’s the thing with baseball. It’s about continuity, habit, history.
People need roots with the home team for it to truly become the home team.
And that takes time.
The debacle in Washington made news around the nation.
HEART OF THE ORDER
Safe at home
The Texas Rangers have finally won the Commissioner’s Trophy. Joe Grzenda Jr. owns a tangible reminder of a painful moment in the franchise’s history that shows just how the club has come.
More than half a century later, Joe Grzenda Jr. still has the ball that his father wanted to throw —expected to throw — to Horace Clarke. It was the ball that his father hoped to throw as a ceremonial first pitch if and when Major League Baseball ever returned to Washington.
“It’s about 35 feet away from me in the safe,’’ said Grzenda, who retired from the pharmaceutical industry a couple of years ago.
The ball is an artifact from what has to be the lowest point of the newly crowned World Series champion Texas Rangers’ existence in their 63-season quest to win it all — their last game as the Washington Senators.
On Sept. 30, 1971, Joe Grzenda was wrapping up his 17th — and most successful — season of pro baseball.
A left-handed reliever, he bounced between the majors and minors with six organizations over the past decade. But in 1971, he compiled a 5-2 record with a 1.92 ERA and five saves for the Washington Senators.
Now in the final game of the season and what everyone knew would be the Senators’ last in Washington before moving to Texas, Grzenda had called on at the start of the ninth inning to protect a 7-5 lead against the New York Yankees — and to protect the players in both bullpens.
Grzenda induced Felipe Alou and Bobby Murcer to hit grounders back to him, and Grzenda threw to first both times to complete the play.
He was about to face Clarke for the final out of the game.
Not unexpected
Grzenda had been instructed to stall a bit once he got the second out. That would give the players and coaches enough time to get out before the fans flooded the field.
That was expected fan behavior for certain kinds of momentous events in that era. Mets fans tore up the field when the team won the 1969 World Series. Phillies fans tore up the field and the stands after the final game at Connie Mack Stadium in 1970.
When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record and Chris Chambliss hit a walk-off homer to win the American League pennant in 1976, they had to navigate through fans to circle the bases.
Later that fall, the Pirates won the World Series in Baltimore and set off a celebratory riot — a first of its kind — in Pittsburgh.
Grzenda kicked some dirt as Clarke stood in the batter’s box taking practice swings.
“I looked around, and it was over,” he told the Washington Post in 2005. “They came over the fence, and there was actually dust flying. There were hundreds that came over the fence. It looked like a herd of cattle coming in those old movies when they stampede.”
Fans attempted to pull up anything they could. At one point, Grzenda saw a young man running straight for him. Grzenda thought of throwing the ball at him but held onto it.
The Washington Senators finished with a 9-0 forfeit.
Joe Grzenda Jr., who was 11, cried all the way home in the car.
“Washington was special,” he told me.
He was a favorite of Manager Ted Williams, who kept players’ kids off the field before games but made an exception for young Joe.
“I’d go to the game with my dad in the afternoon, and come home late at night’’ he recalled. “Baseball was my whole life.”
Children of divorce
You have a feel a bit sorry for the Texas Rangers. The Rangers are children of divorce who began life in a home that was broken twice.
After the 1960 season, the original American League Washington Senators announced they were leaving for the Twin Cities of Minnesota and became the Minnesota Twins.
The Twin Cities almost landed the Senators in 1957, but the incentives weren’t enough for owner Calvin Griffth. The New York Giants were strongly considering a move to “The Land of a Thousand Lakes,” but Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, talked Giants owner Horace Stoneham into moving to California.
Griffth had also considered San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Louisville.
Pause for a moment to appreciate the absurdity of that. MLB added teams for the first time in 60 years and moved into two markets . . . that already had MLB teams.
Then along came the Continental League, the first outside challenge to the American and National Leagues since the Federal League before World War I. (The Pacific Coast League had tried to become a major league after World War II, but the PCL was part of the National Agreement and thus a member of the Organized Baseball family.)
The upstart league wanted to put teams in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, New York, Toronto, and three other cities, and the league planned to begin play in 1961. League founder William Shea folded the league in August 1960 after getting vague promises from the owner to add up eight teams, including a National League team for New York, with priority being given to cities without MLB teams.
On Oct. 26, the American League owners agreed to add two new teams for the 1961 season. When it became obvious that Minnesota would get one of the two new teams, Griffith said he would rather move his team on the provision that Washington get an expansion team.
So the American League owners voted to expand to Los Angeles and to Washington.
Pause for a moment to appreciate the absurdity of that. MLB added teams for the first time in 60 years and moved into two markets . . . that already had MLB teams.
The net effect, of course, was to bring Minnesota into the MLB fold.
Bad team, man
The Senators had generally been woeful. They managed to win three pennants (1924, 1925, and 1933) and one World Series (1924). The club had not finished more than two games above .500 since 1945.
But they finished a respectable fifth place in 1960, and they had established stars such as Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison, Jim Lemon, and Camilo Pascual.
The new Senators lost at least 100 games a season for the next four seasons.
There was a saying that used to be taught in elementary schools, “George Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in the heart of countrymen.”
The joke in Washington, D.C., went, “Washington is first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
The joke was updated to: “Washington is first in war, first in peace, and still last in the American League.”
Rubbing it in
In 1965, the new Senators finally showed some promise. They went 70-92 and climbed into eighth place. But it was likely of little comfort.
That season, the old Senators, now the Twins, won 102 games, cruised to the American League pennant, and took the Dodgers to seven games in the World Series.
One saving grace for Senators fans in 1965: They acquired the player who would become the team’s greatest star, Frank Howard.
Howard, who passed away at age 87 on the day of Game 3 of this year’s World Series, was the 1960 National League Rookie of the Year. In 1962, he hit .296 with 31 homers and 119 RBIs. But Howard had a down year in 1964 and after the season, the Dodgers shipped him along with Ken McMullen, Phil Ortega, and Pete Richert to the Washington Senators for John Kennedy, Claude Osteen, and cash.
In eight seasons with the new club, Howard, a 6-foot-7 255-pounder who was an All-America basketball player at Ohio State, hit 246 homers, including the last home run for the Senators and the first home run for the Rangers.
“Howard was more often than not the only exciting thing the club had going for it,” Washington Post beat writer George Minot Jr. wrote.
Ownership, new stadium
Griffith certainly had his shortcomings as an owner. A statue of Griffith in Minnesota was taken down a couple of years ago when racist remarks he made resurfaced. He was also tight-fisted, though some of that was by necessity. He had no income outside of the baseball team; he didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but he knew something about baseball.
The first owners of Senators 2.0 had even less money to spend and knew little about running a baseball team. Pete Quesada was a former Army Air Force general and head of the Federal Aviation Administration. He had married into the Pulitzer family and had some money from that. He led a group of 10 owners.
After one season, the Senators left rickety Griffith Stadium for what became RFK Memorial Stadium in 1962. First known as D.C. Stadium, it ushered in the era of cookie-cutter, multipurpose stadiums, and thus does not evoke many fond memories today.
But when it was new, the perception was different.
“The huge white stadium with its flowing exterior lines arrived in town — like the world's largest birthday present — when I was 13,” Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell wrote in 2007.
Put it this way: They didn’t build those things across the country because people thought they stunk. Everybody loved them, and every city wanted one . . . for about 15 or 20 years.
Quesada was out after three seasons. After looking for some deep pockets. Washington found Robert Short, who had made his fortune in trucking. Short was the former owner of the Minneapolis Lakers of the NBA. He had moved the team out to California.
Coming up Short
Short made one good decision with the Senators. He hired Ted Williams as manager for the 1969 season.
Williams’ first season was a high for the club in stay in Washington, going 86-76. a .531 winning percentage. They drew 918,106 fans, a record for this version of the Senators.
But whatever magic Williams had as a manager disappeared after one season and attendance slumped.
Short charged the highest ticket prices in the American League.
Just 40 miles away, the Baltimore Orioles emerged as the most dominant team in the American League during that era. They won the World Series in 1966 and 1970 and represented the American League in the Fall Classic in 1969 and 1970.
Short borrowed money and left the team in debt. Short was facing bankruptcy. He wanted to sell or move the team. Comedian Bob Hope offered $7.5 million for Short’s share of the team. But Short wanted enough money to pay off the debt he’d run up.
“Short’s woes appear largely of his own making,” The Sporting News wrote in an editorial. “If he’s as sharp as he was once reported to be, his Washington difficulties shouldn’t pose too much of a challenge.”
Yeah, there’s not a lot of sympathy for team owners who run their clubs into the ground. But there is one group that sees things from an inept owner’s perspective — the other owners.
The American League owners voted 10-2 to let the team move to Arlington, Texas.
Arlington’s appeal
So what was so great about the City of Arlington, situated between Dallas and Fort Worth? It was an unproven market with a ballpark that was a definite downgrade from RFK Stadium.
Well, the city offered a lifeline to Short in the form of $7.5 million over 10 years in broadcast rights. That was a lot of money for the time. In fact, in the late 1970s, Mayor Tom Vandergriff served as a color commentator to save the city some money.
Arlington Stadium, originally a minor league park called Turnpike Stadium that had been expanded, was one of the three worst parks used in MLB after World War II. The worst was Seattle’s Sick’s Stadium, used in 1969 by the Pilots, and the second worst was Houston’s Colt Stadium, used by the Colt .45s from 1962-64 while they waited for the Astrodome to be built.
But Arlington Stadium was not a temporary home. The Rangers played there through 1993. It was expanded from 20,000 seats when the Rangers got there to more than 40,000 by the time the Rangers finished their stay. With the finished product, most of the seats were outfield bleachers.
The field at Arlington Stadium was below ground level. Which made it extra hot in the summer. And it had no roof to protect fans from the sun. Before ESPN started Sunday Night Baseball broadcasts, the only MLB team that generally played night games on Sundays was the Rangers.
Until the 1980s when a wall was constructed behind right field, a strong wind blew into the ballpark, robbing hitters, particularly lefties of their power.
Baseball in Arlington offered a distinctly Texas flavor.
The Rangers didn’t play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” for the seventh-inning stretch. They played “Cotton-eyed Joe.” An outline of the state of Texas was part of the scoreboard. And the Rangers made history as the first MLB team to offer nachos at their games.
Fan base expands
The first Rangers team lost 100 games in a season that was shortened by the first players’ strike and slugged .290. And they lost 100 games again the next season.
Short sold the team to Brad Corbett, who had made his fortune in PVC pipes.
In 1974, with Billy Martin managing, the Rangers contended for the American League West title. and drew over 1 million fans for the first time, which was then considered a good mark. Except for the strike-shortened 1981 season, the Rangers’ attendance didn’t dip below 1 million until the 2020 COVID-shortened season.
Though they contended several times, the Rangers did not make playoffs until 1996 and they didn’t win a postseason series until 2010.
Meanwhile . . .
Grzenda took the ball from that game in 1971 and put it in a manilla envelope with a note: “Last baseball ever thrown as a Washington Senator, Baseball Club. Sept. 30, 1971, Murcer grounded out to me.”
The Senators/Rangers traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals, where he played for one season. He pitched two more seasons in the minors before retiring and moving back to his native Pennsylvania.
Politicians and big-time journalists complained about the absence of baseball in the capital city. But the sport moved on. And for Washingtonians, they could drive to Baltimore.
Washington didn’t seem to make anyone’s final list any time expansion talk became serious.
Then the end of the 2002 season, with baseball having narrowly avoided another crippling strike, MLB owners voted 28-2 to eliminate two franchises, the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins. After some legal wrangling, it was decided to keep the Twins intact and for the league to buy the Expos, who were having stadium issues.
Northern Virginia and Washington both made efforts to land the Expos. And in late September of 2004, it was decided Washington would get the team.
During a newspaper interview with the Grzenda’s about that final game in 1971, Joe Jr. suggested that his father could throw the baseball for the ceremonial first pitch for the home opener.
It didn’t quite happen that way. President George W. Bush, who had been part owner and CEO of the Rangers, threw the ceremonial pitch with the ball. But Joe was there.
Bush was quite gracious and autographed the baseball, Joe Jr. said,
What will become of the ball?
Joe Grzenda died a few months before the Nats won the World Series in 2019.
Joe Jr. said some of the fun of watching went out of the game when his dad passed away.
“He’d always tell all these stories about the coaches,’’ he said. “It was kind of like having a history book next to you.”
Though he was glad to see the Rangers finally win a World Series, Joe Jr. doesn’t watch or follow major league baseball much these days.
Joe Jr. finds the play somewhat sloppy and prefers NCAA Division I baseball.
“I catch the Phillies sometimes,’’ he says. “I like Bryce Harper.”
What will Joe Jr. do with the ball?
“I was hoping my father would sell it or something,’’ he said. “I didn’t want the responsibility.”
Maybe the ball will go to Cooperstown. Or perhaps to Birmingham Barons Hall of Fame.
Joe Grzenda struck out 189 batters in 1958 — and met his wife Ruth there.
“They have an exhibit dedicated to him,’’ Joe Jr. said. “He’s big down there.”
SHORT HOPS
Counsell could commute
Craig Counsell was in the running for managerial jobs with the Mets and Guardians. And of course, he could have stayed with the Brewers.
Then came the surprise. He was hired by the Cubs, who didn’t have an opening. That is until they landed Counsell and then fired David Ross.
The Cubs reportedly offered him a five-year $40 million deal, a record for a manager. So I’m sure that was the main selling point.
But there was another potential advantage. Counsell is a Wisconsin boy. He grew up in Whitefish Bay and still lives there. With the Cubs’ job, he could commute. He could get from WhitefishBay to Wrigley Field in a little less than two hours.
If memory serves me, Gene Mauch commuted from Rancho Mirage to Anaheim, which took about the same time, when he managed the Angels.
The commuting thing might not be such a great idea for Counsell, though. After the news was announced, a sign at a Little League field named after Counsell was vandalized with “ASS” painted over Counsell’s name.
Should we bring back pitchers hitting?
The MLB average for OPS in 2023 was .734. The OPS of designated hitters for 12 teams was below that.
Should they rename the position as designanted below-average hitter?
When the pitcher batted this season, the Yankees (5.000 OPS), Rays (2.000), Red Sox (1.000, White Sox (1.000, and Nationals (1.000) each had a team OPS that was not only higher than the league average for designated hitters, it was also higher than the team OPS leader for designated hitters (the Angels with .995).
OK, admittedly, it was a small sample size. One or two at-bats per team.
One other point: The Angels’ DH for most of the season started 23 games as a pitcher.
The sacrifice bunt is back . . . not really
With the new MLB rules in place, the bunt made a small comeback. Really small. Teams averaged .009 sacrifice hits per game in 2023, up from .008 in 2022, and above 2020’s .007. Those were the lowest averages per team since 1894, which is as far back as Baseball-Reference.com figures in that category go back.
They are the only seasons, so far, played with a universal DH.
The stolen base is back . . . really
Teams averaged 0.72 stolen bases per game in 2023, the highest average since 1997 when teams averaged .073 per game. That is up from 0.52 in 2022.
I think this will go up a bit next season. I think it will change the skill set teams look for in catchers, and it will pave the way for another rule change.
Look for more teams to search for speed on the base paths. To defend against that, you will need more catchers who are adept at throwing out runners.
That will likely less emphasis on framing pitches, which would make an automated balls and strike system easier to introduce.