Pete and Gordo

Original story here.
This is a picture of Gordon Smith. Below it is Pete Smith's baseball card with the Boston Red Sox. From 1964, a season he never pitched in. Pete Smith made his major league debut as the starting pitcher against the Detroit Tigers in front of 2734 fans in Tiger Stadium on September 13, 1962.  

Mgr. Pinky HIggin's Red Sox were in eighth place, 17.5 games behind the eventual pennant winning New York Yankees. Smith was matched up against the Tiger's future hall of fame pitcher, Jim Bunning.

Pete Smith gave up 3 home runs to 3 different Tigers before being pulled in the fourth inning.The three were not chumps: Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Rocky Colavito. Smith's line for the 1962 season was 19 batters faced and era of 19.64. Not unusual for rookies. It was still a thrill

In 1963, after a pretty decent showing in the minors, Smith came back to the Red Sox to start a game on September 15, against the A's in Kansas City, in front of a little less than 7000 fans. He started, pitched 6 innings, gave up 3 earnies, no homeruns and was pinch hit for in the top of the seventh. It was what is by today's standards a quality start. It would be his last. He made 5 more relief appearances as the Red Sox played out the string of another dismal losing season finishing 28 games behind the Yankees again. But ever the silver lining in an otherwise dismal season his last game in the majors was in relief against the Los Angeles Angels. From Wikipedia:

"On September 28, 1963 at Fenway Park, Smith started a triple play against the Angels with the last ball he fielded in the majors. With Charlie Dees running on second base and Lee Thomas on first, Félix Torres tried to advance both runners with a bunt. Unfortunately for Torres, Smith fielded cleanly the ball and threw to 3B Frank Malzone, who tagged Dees out before throwing the ball to SS Eddie Bressoud, covering second to double out Thomas. Bressoud then threw to 2B Félix Mantilla, who covered first and completed the 1-5-6-4 triple play."

So Smith kicked around the Red Sox minor league system for a couple more years, before finally hanging it up after the 1965 season; done at the age of 25.

And this is where I lose track of Smith until he pops up on radar in 2007 as a volunteer coach at Sonoma State. Only this time going by  Gordon, not Pete. (I asked him once how that came about, he told me and I promptly forgot). Sonoma State like most successful college baseball programs relies on experienced volunteers to help out with any number of little chores that most folks don't think about. And finding guys who know what they're doing and are smart enough to know when to chirp-up and when to dummy up is harder than one might think. Charting opponents pitchers/hitters. Getting materials donated for field upkeep, equipment, even somebody to raise and lower the American Flag before and after games, which is what Gordon would like to do. This came after he personally rebuilt the foundation for the 30 foot pole with his own money, and with a little help from a couple of players in the off-season.

February and March are prime baseball months in college baseball; by the calendar it is still winter. Though Sonoma County's image is one of summery days of wineries and vineyards, it is often cold, damp and windy, in the first half of the season. And for a couple of seasons, while friends and family would collect outside the gates, huddled up against the dusk chill of late winter waiting for their players to exit, one could look out on the other side of the park and always see Gordon trudging down beneath the line of redwoods, out behind the left field fence to lower the flag, in his own private ceremony, and fold it into place, to await the next game.

Unlike far too many coaches who run college and high school programs, Sonoma State's Head Coach for the last 26 years, John Goelz, is not particularly overly impressed with himself. He has collected so many awards and honors that he can't even remember them, so its not for lack of accomplishment. Neither does he exude false modesty or project a public persona that is different than his private self. He does not embellish nor shade stories or events to solicit praise or recognition. He is exactly who appears to be in that moment; engaged 100 percent with the person or persons to whom he is talking. Whether it is a 6 year old kid with a whiffle bat, a Division I transfer, parent of a high schooler, or an 87 year old with a heart condition, John Goelz genuinely makes that person feel like he/she is the most important person in that room. 

Much has been written in the last 4 years about Goelz, due mainly to two Division II College World Series appearances. Bob Padecky (the same one who had the notorious run-in with Kenny Stabler's hometown friends 30 plus years ago in Alabama.) has covered Goelz on and off for a number of years and, like Joe Posnanski, never writes to embarrass his subjects, and has the graciousness borne of an earlier era to leave out irrelevant facts or innuendos if they are harmful. He writes mainly about local athletes and their environs as if they were real people, not cartoons nor fodder for the celebrity sniffers. One might think these are merely puff pieces, and only of interest to those who know Padecky's subjects, but they aren't. Padecky has a serious journalist background that goes back more than 30 years when he was a beat writer for the Sacramento Bee covering the Raiders, Giants, Superbowls, and World Series and right on up through his tenure with the NY Times owned Santa Rosa Press Democrat. He is a serious journalist and he writes serious pieces; he just doesn't feel a need to immerse himself and his subjects in the ooze of sports gossip.

I suppose I could give you my own version of the relationships or personal stories of Gordon and John, but there's enough self-serving scribbling going around these days, and Padecky does such a great job of painting a great picture of two of college baseball's greatest friends.  Padecky's article starts here:
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The Sonoma State baseball program received a staggering $1.3 million donation, and coach John Goelz is still getting his mind around that number and Gordon Smith's generosity, almost as if the news came out of nowhere. It didn't. He was told eight months ago. But it passed him by, like a jet. Didn't stick.

Last fall Smith, who had returned to SSU as a volunteer coach after a two-year absence, told Goelz he had cancer, it didn't look good and he would like to make a donation to the program before he died. What do you need, John?

Goelz said lights and a turf field would be great. How much would that cost, Smith asked? About $700,000 for the lights, about $600,000 for the field. Give or take.

“I have enough in savings for that,” Smith said simply, casually.

OK, Goelz said, and let it pass in one ear and out the other. After all, the largest donation Goelz had ever received in his 26 years at SSU was $10,000, courtesy of Chuck Collett and Ralph Emerson. So $1.3 million? Yeah, right. And why not build a dome while we're at it? For years Goelz had been asking the university for financial help to upgrade the facilities and after years of fund-raising he had accumulated only $137,000. Drawings were rendered. Plans were ready. And that's where it stayed. Seemingly forever......(continued)

A Good Joe

One of my favorite writers is a guy raised in Cleveland, who grew up idolizing our very own Duane Kuiper.  Joe Posnanski has covered the Kansas City Royals for 14 years. He writes for Sports Illustrated. He is loved by athletes, other media guys and fans alike. I think he is one of those guys that when he was told "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it". ..he didn't. 

We tend to think of that particular cliche as trite, false and impractical; something practiced only by monks and the Little Sisters of the Poor.  We certainly don't expect  to find someone with a compassionate disposition to be a featured writer for Sports Illustrated. Perhaps the following excerpt from his blog of June 6, 2011 will tell you more about him than any superlatives I can dish out.

What I love about Joe, is that he remembers to remember all the good guys...even when everybody else has forgotten them. Maybe thats why I like him so much. In his June 6 blog he writes about another good guy, Steve Palermo. His writing lets me know that its okay to keep the memories of really old warriors alive. And to write nice things about people; even when they have a dark side. He reminds us of our humanity in almost every paragraph. He is leaving Kansas City. It is hard, even when there are new adventures and wonderful people waiting for him in North Carolina.  Moving is only hard for the sentimental and tradition-bound I think. I've never met Joe, but he is one of those guys I would like to meet before I check out  and try to score tickets for Pete and the Pearly Gates. He's just one of those guys you hope nothing bad ever happens to. If you've ever had a guileless kid brother than you'll know what I'm talking about.  Enough.

On to Joe:
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Just talked to Steve Palermo. Stevie is one of my favorite people in the world -- someone I have spent many hours talking with at ballgames. You undoubtedly know his story. He was a big league umpire -- and one of the best in the business. To this day, people still talk in hushed tones about Steve Palermo's ability to call balls and strikes. He has a million great stories, my favorite being that he was the left field umpire who made the unnecessary but official call that Bucky Dent's home run was fair. Well, Palermo's father Vincent lived and died with the Red Sox and one day he starts screaming at Stevie for calling that home run fair.

"Dad," Steve said. "It was fair by like 30 feet."

To which Vincent Palermo said: "What, you couldn't have called it foul?"

One day in Dallas, Steve Palermo was in a restaurant with some friends after a game, and the bartender yelled that two women were being mugged outside. Steve and others rushed outside to help. In the horrible flurry, Stevie was shot in the back. The bullet hit his spinal cord. He was instantly paralyzed. He was told he would never walk again. He has walked.

I've written about Steve many times. The story I stands out is one I wrote one story a few years ago about how life goes on after the movie fades to black. Steve Palermo's movie faded to black the day he walked when doctors had said he never would. That was the moment of sweeping music and happily ever afters for our hero. But to me Steve's heroics come in living day-to-day, in trying to help people who have been paralyzed, in working with Major League Baseball to guide the sport he loves. It isn't easy. He has a hard time getting around. He feels a lot of pain. He has had to face the imaginary life he never got to live if that awful night in Dallas had never happened.

And he stays positive. He pushes forward. He tries.

I think often about something he told me for that story I wrote -- I look it up and realize that I wrote it more than 10 years ago. Steve was talking about how people constantly ask him if he regrets going out to help the two women in trouble, if some small part of him wishes that he had stayed in his seat in that moment of danger. And what he said haunts me and inspires me still ...

He said: "If I say no, I wouldn't do that again, then what does that mean? It means I made a mistake. I can't admit it was a mistake. ... I went to help people in trouble. How can that be a mistake?"

Symptom

By all accounts, Bob Geren is a nice guy. By all accounts he is a knowledgeable baseball man. He is neither overly-demonstrative, crude, overbearing, obsequious, sarcastic or vulgar. He seems to be the recipient of the prototypical middle management personality. A middle aged guy with hands on experience, loyalty, team player, works within the guidelines given him, and never ever tries to undermine his boss.  Yet today he was fired following three consecutive series sweeps. Thus adding a semi-colon to the run-on sentence this Oakland A's season has become.

And like a semicolon, it only gives temporary pause to a sentence that would otherwise have ended with a period. Geren's firing seems thus far, to be the only event of note in a listless season of  a listless franchise owned by a listless friend and former fraternity brother of the ever-oozy Bud Selig.  Even Geren's baseball card isn't worth a crap. Lew Wolff, in his seemingly never-ending attempt to morph into a real-life Rachel Phelps is the guy who tarps over entire sections of the multi-level cement casket on Interstate 880 built by the original Crypt Keeper, Al Davis. He claimed it will help him sell season tickets. Of course. Reduce capacity to accommodate increased demand. String Theory.

Its been 5 years counting this season and A's season ticket sales are an embarrassment to Major League Baseball. But that's what the luxury tax will do.  Enable second and third rate owners with net personal cash flow, as their number one priority to run a franchise into the ground in the vainglorious hope that his pal, the commissioner will somehow enable said third-rate owner to invalidate an existing contract with the San Francisco Giants so he can carpetbag his way out of town .

The A's Bay Area standing, under Wolf'f's stewardship, is as low as at anytime during Jackass Finley's reign of self-serving attention whoring. Days whose low points were marked by his efforts to sell Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson for a carton of adult diapers.

And so the A's have apparently bottomed out with Lew Wolff, who like Frank and Jamie McCourt, is/were close personal friends of Bud Selig, along with Jeff Loiria in Miami, Jerry Reinsdorf in Chicago, the Wilpon's in New Yoirk, and David Glass in Kansas City, who paid 1/3 less than a competitor for the franchise by the way. 

It is no accident that those franchises are amongst the worst and least trusted by fans in MLB.  But a dissertation on the Selig embarrassment will wait for another day. For today is the day, his pal Lew Wolff and his sycophantic stooge GM Billy Beane sacked Bob Geren.  A PR move like any other sacking of a field-manager; whose sole purpose is to deflect attention away from those at the top of the food chain; the owner and upper management.  All field managers are human shields for incompetent owners and upper management. They know that going in. Most will tolerate it. A few won't. (Dusty Baker, Earl Weaver, come to mind).

The A's still scout young talent reasonably well, but overall they are horrible on the field, and have been horrible for a long time, and they will continue to be horrible for as long as the shopping mall Grinch holds onto the franchise in an effort to leverage a real-estate deal that gives him even more free millions to pocket. Its not that he doesn't already reap millions from jet-set hostelries like the Fairmonts,  Four-Seasons and a dozen other luxury hotels.

Now of course ownership is going to point at the players when the next manager fails too. The players are only as good as they are. There are no really good players in Oakland, young starting pitching aside. No manager or media shill can make them to be anything other than what they are. A collection of MLB Scout camp left-overs, a couple of over the hill celebrity players and some young arms. Thats it. Yet Lew Wolff will make millions this year even if nobody shows up and they play to empty houses every night and every day for the rest of the season, because that's what revenue-sharing does. It enables the marginally crooked, the disingenuous, the incompetents, and the overarching greed of civilian owners to continue to plunder the public and ticket buying fans.

Geren is just the symptom. He is being replaced by yet another organizational yes-man, knowledgeable baseball dude, and nice guy, former Giants backup catcher and fired Diamondback manager Bob Melvin. Like Geren he's pretty good at looking stoic in the dugout and post-game pressers, when his untalented and under performing collection of ballplayers get the snot beat out of them on a regular basis.  And he will no-doubt be fired soon enough from his "Interim Manager" status, so I'm going to spend zero-time providing background on him. Elsewhere in the interwebs if you really care to know about him, is where you will find "information" on Bob Melvin

What the hell ever.  At least, pre-Selig and the anti-social CBA designed to protect big agents and their few superstars,  and the cable-company monopoly, when a team flopped and people stayed away in droves, and the team lost sponsors, the owner paid a price and eventually sold off the club because he lost his ass. To wit: Finley, Stoneham, and Lurie.

But like the rest of the welfare bums on Wall Street and K-Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, they have legislated for themselves a printing press that prints money.  And its called television and cable and the general public's apathy toward what really causes a bad team to be bad. And just when I think I will be bothered by any of it, I say to myself:

"San Francisco Giants World Series Champions".  It has a great ring to it.

Another Good Joe

Its not often that a middle reliever gets written about in Pinch Sulzberger's old grey lady, the New York Times. No. The NY Times has been dying a slow circulatory death the last few years, mainly by either boring or infuriating most of middle America with its smugness and condescending tone towards anyone who didn't graduate from Harvard or Princeton and who is not on a first name basis with the Obamas, Bushs, Sharpton or Clintons.  This also tends to be the same demographic that makes up baseball's fan base. So most baseball followers tend not to spend a lot of time perusing the bird-cage liner known as the NY Times. 

Somewhere along the line somebody at the NYT decided that it might be a nice idea to host a sports blog on their site. I don't know  if that is a good idea or not. Its certainly not innovative as most any person who can run a keyboard can run a blog, including this one.  But like most old institutions with a condescending eye towards suggesting how the rest of us should live, they tend to focus more on personal interest stories with a social message.  I guess thats alright. I suppose. But I don't spend a lot of time writing about the baseball opinions of Al Sharpton or Anthony Weiner either. For good reason. I don't know anything about it. What's more, I don't care to know.

But thats a general rule. And for rules there are exceptions. Hey, its why they play the game on the field and not on paper. So when the link to Jeremy Afeldt popped up, I suspected, it was going to be one of those touchy-feely stories that some folks with a lot of inner guilt like to write about in order to impress their friends with their compassionate insight. And thats about what I got with the first few lines. Yet another story about the Giants fan in the parking lot who got his brains beat in by a couple of gangbangers and all the kumbyas about diverse communities coming together to condemn violence and the conditions that breed violence and all the same slogans that we've all been listening to since 1964.  I don't know, I just get kinda bugged after about the 38th celebrity jumping on a risk-free cause just to generate some free publicity; but this was not the case.

As most folks who follow the Giants know, Jeremy Afeldt is not only a supporter of charities, and friend to the friendless, he is a very very intellectually curious and intense man who happens to be a major league baseball player.  He has some interesting insights that do not necessarily meet the entertainment-political standards of correctness:

"Love has become ‘feminized,’ ” he wrote recently on his blog, jeremyaffeldt.wordpress.com. “When you talk about love, a lot of people will say you’re soft. But love is what saves people. Loving them. If you ask me, that’s pretty strong stuff.”

Affeldt, 32, works with several organizations, focusing on producing clean water, feeding the hungry, housing orphans and ending human trafficking and slavery. He is ambitious in his goals, and tries to address them with urgency. He is a Christian, he said, but his motivation goes beyond faith."..................

"He asked the team if he could meet Stow, who is in a medically induced coma. Affeldt met with family members, then held Stow’s hand and prayed. He was hoping that Bryan would, on some level, at some point, know it,” Baer said. “And when Jeremy started speaking to him, his eyes opened — halfway, or three-quarters — and that was just amazing. It was almost like a power beyond us.”

Not politically correct. Just correct. Yet another good man.

Song

Tonight Vogelsong goes up against Dusty Baker's Reds. Bake was the Giants skipper when Vogelsong made it to the bigs for the first time in 2000 as a 22 year old. Bake's teams always seem to score lots of runs. It will be interesting 

"Voggy is not going anywhere," Bochy said. "He's going to pitch every fifth day. We might have to get a little creative here. We're just starting to talk about it now." "It was a long road for him but he never gave up," Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. "He kept grinding to get back to the major leagues. That's one of the best stories I've seen since I've been in the game."

Thus spake Bruce Bochy. Tough to argue with Vogelsong's line this year. Its the best of the best on the Giants staff.

	GP	GS	CG	SHO	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	W	L	SV	HLD	BLSV	WHIP	ERA
2011 Regular Season	10	8	1	1	53.2	42	11	10	3	14	42	4	1	0	0	0	1.04	1.68

The worriers and skeptics are prone to point to his low strikeout to innings ratio coupled with prior seasons. Let me take on the second concern first: I think he is a guy who has always had good stuff, and lousy command and got stuck playing on a bunch of lousy teams. Now he has command, the same stuff, the right opportunity with the right team in the right stadium and a bunch of other things that have gone right for him.

Like we are wont to say when guys careers fall off a cliff; it's never one thing. And we can use that same line here with Vogelsong (like Torres last year--an older player having a breakout year) Its probably not just one thing, but rather a number of little things that have conflated together to enable our guy here to have what so far, has been the best season of his life. It happens.

The first thing is a little more complex; his lack of strikeouts per inning (though his k/bb ratio is an excellent 3.00) For comparison, Lincecum is 3.66, Cain is 2.625, Sanchez is 1.8, Bumgarner is 2.26. Zito by contrast is .75 in his few innings before hitting the d/l.  So aside from Lincecum, he has the best k/bb ratio for starters on the team. And this is what the pre-eminent baseball thinker and statistician Bill James has to say about this misconception that more strikeouts per inning is better than fewer strikeouts per inning:

"3) We know this because, when you take a group of pitchers with a given rate of Strikeouts Minus Walks and split that group into high strikeout/high walk pitchers and low strikeout/low walk pitchers, the low strikeout/low walk pitchers are clearly and significantly better. 

Now he lays out all the data over at his billjamesonline.net website which is linked here. But its basically a mathematical expression of what coaches and baseball folks have known for a long time; give us a guy with a good k/bb ratio and a lower k/9 total and we'll give you a more consistent starting staff, defense, reduced pitch counts and everything positive that goes along with getting guys back into the dugout faster than the guys who are burning up their pitchcounts with a lot of 6 pitch at bats instead of 2 or 3 pitch at bats.

In the meantime, though Vogelsong's epic bounce back has been overshadowed by the plethora of disasters to strike the Giants in the injury department this season, he is one of the primary causes of them not residing in the bottom tier of the NL West but rather after today's mastery in the gloom of Colorado at ATT, back in first place, 5.5 games in front of their nemesis. 

And that's good news for Giants fans everywhere.