The Baseball Digest Archive 10/78
October 1978
This was only the second most famous magazine cover that featured Clint Hurdle in 1978. It was during that year’s spring training in which a Sports Illustrated cover named him “This Year’s Phenom.” Alas, stardom was not in the cards for Hurdle, nor was it to be for the man with whom he shared this Baseball Digest cover, Rich Gale.
The magazine attempted to be trendy this month, with the declaration that 1978 was a wild and crazy year. No arrows through the head, but the opening article ran through a few of the unusual events that took place in the 1978 season. For example, this was the year in which Padres owner Ray Kroc took to the public address microphone so that he could apologize to the fans for the team’s poor play.
There were some prescient elements in the article about international baseball. The subheading read “In the coming years, baseball’s ties to Japan and Latin America will continue to grow.” Reading this article now is interesting. I didn’t notice any evidence that any of the people quoted held the belief that Japanese star players would begin to emigrate to the US leagues, but there were indications that the quality of play in Japan was rapidly improving. The later article about Latin stars was a bit depressing. It began with an anecdote about a man asking Tony Oliva for an autograph, mistaking him for Rod Carew. Oliva took it in stride, saying “we do sort of look alike,” but another quote of his later on is the stronger one. “Sometimes it seems they take the Latin players for granted.” That was the chief focus of the article, the lack of recognition that many of the top Latin American players were getting.
The article on the top relief performances as of 1978 really demonstrates how relief usage has changed in the years since. The age of the one inning closer was still years away; the workloads of some of these guys seems just as unimaginable as the routine 300 inning totals that starting pitches used to accumulate. Look no further than Mike Marshall’s 1974 season. Few starting pitchers throw that many innings nowadays; never mind a relief pitcher.
Finally, I want to mention Freddie Patek. He might have been the man who best symbolized the Kansas City Royals of the 1970’s. Standing only 5’5”, his diminutive size turned him into somewhat of a folk hero. The 1978 season would be the third consecutive season in which Kansas City won the AL West, but in each of those seasons they lost to the Yankees. One of the most memorable images during that run was of Patek following the conclusion of the 1977 ALCS. At one point in the decisive game he had gotten spiked at second base, and he turned out to be the man who made the final out of the series. As the Yankees celebrated on the field the TV camera cut to Patek sitting alone in the dugout, clearly devastated and the tear in his sock from that spiking seemed like a metaphor for the series result. The Royals would finally break through and win the pennant in 1980, but Patek was not on the team anymore. He missed out on the 1980 joy, never mind Kansas City’s ultimate triumph in the 1985 World Series.
Ballot Breakdown - Steve Garvey
I spoke at length on Steve Garvey when I put together my rankings of top non-Hall of Famers at each position, so I’m not saying anything here that I haven’t previously said. In his peak he seemed to be the textbook definition of a HOF player. He was a chief run producer for a perennial playoff contender, he won an MVP award, as well as MVP’s in both the NLCS & the All-Star Game. He won 4 consecutive Gold Glove awards. He was a perennial all star, and not insignificantly, was one of the most recognizable athletes in the nation.
On the flip side his reputation diminished with each advance in statistical analysis. It wasn’t even all due to the sabermetric revolution either. Even at the time many noted that he wasn’t all that good of a defensive first baseman; the Gold Gloves were a reflection of the fact that he had high fielding percentages, largely due to the fact that you can’t make an error on a ball that you don’t get to in the first place. Then, he rarely drew walks, so even though he routinely hit around .300, his on base percentages were generally in the .330-.350 range, which is nothing special. In addition, for all of his reputation as a power hitter, he never once finished a season with a slugging percentage over .500. Finally, once analysts could retroactively assign WAR totals to his career, his poor defense and baserunning brought those numbers down.
And yet, I’m not prepared to complete trash his HOF credentials. Is it fair to punish him for doing exactly what was expected from a player with his profile? In other words, if drawing walks was rewarded when he was playing, could he have? Also, in his time few people discussed launch angle, and he famously tended to swing down on the ball. In an era more cognizant of launch angle, would he have changed his approach to hitting? It admittedly takes a lot of projection to presuppose that he could have been a different type of player in a different era. In general I am a fan of looking at advanced statistics to evaluate a player, so I acknowledge that I am contradicting myself when I say that I don’t entirely write off the argument for Steve Garvey as a potential Hall of Famer. Whether he is worthy of one of my 3 votes were I to serve on this committee is still TBD.
On a related note the 2025 BBWAA ballot will be released today, so there will be additional names to debate over in the coming weeks.
The Rescue Of Inside the NBA
This was pleasant news; WBD settled its lawsuit against the NBA and one of the results is that Inside the NBA will move over to ESPN/ABC beginning next season. The arrangement will be similar to what ESPN has with The Pat McAfee Show; ESPN will license the show but it will still be produced by the current crew. At the same time, there was some concern that with the expiration of the WBD deal that the league would pull the plug on the NBA TV cable channel, but that network will survive as well.
There are still many unanswered questions. The big one concerns the reasons why ESPN’s NBA studio show lags well behind Inside the NBA. With the large number of commercial breaks, ESPN’s halftime show only lasts for a couple of minutes. Then, once the game ends the network quickly switches to SportsCenter. Will ESPN carve out enough time for the Inside the NBA team to shine? Remember, what makes that show so special is the fact that TNT grants it enough time for the core quartet to do deep dives into topics both serious and frivolous. And will they force the Stephen A. Smith square peg into that round hole? Those answers will come in time, for now we can take comfort in the fact that Ernie, Charles, Kenny, and Shaq will remain together next season and beyond.
An Old School Evening On The Internets
I promise I’m not going to continue to shill for Bluesky, but Friday night served as another reminder of what was lost when Elon turned Twitter into his white supremacist sandbox. It used to be so much fun to collectively watch a sporting event on Twitter; my timeline would be filled with dozens of “OMG” & “wow!” posts from a vast array of people. It happened for the first time on Bluesky during the Mike Tyson/Jake Paul fight. I had no interest in the event myself - perhaps I would have if he were fighting RAND Paul instead - but to see so many people offer their thoughts as it was going on gave me a good “nature is healing” feeling.
Of course, most of those thoughts were negative. Some complained about how much of a fiasco the “fight” turned out to be. Who saw that coming? Others were screaming about the technical issues with the Netflix stream. That could be the bigger problem. High demand overwhelmed Netflix’s servers; they only have a few weeks to get things in order before the Christmas Day NFL games. Friday’s issues were embarrassing, similar problems with the NFL games would be a full-blown fiasco.
Reviewing Olympic Sports
Table Tennis - Going as far back as the days of the Nixon era Ping Pong Diplomacy, anyone paying attention to the sport can easily recognize that high level table tennis isn’t even in the same universe as the game that all of us have played in basements and cafeterias. It’s a hard sport to watch; the fast action on such a small playing surface creates a sensory overload. And when there is a doubles match? There are way too many moving parts. So, I watch very little of the Olympic action. If I have time I will check in on a gold medal match, but that’s about it for me.
Taekwondo - For the most part I am not a big fan of combat sports. See the Tyson/Paul fight referenced above. I just don’t find two people beating the crap out of each other very entertaining. If I had to choose one sport from that realm to watch, however, it could very well be taekwondo. Part of it is due to the lack of ambiguity in the scoring. Land a punch or a kick to the opponent’s target area and you earn a certain number of points. What is and what is not a legal scoring blow is considerably more obvious than it is in the majority of the other combat sports. And despite what I said about my discomfort in seeing people whale on someone, I have to admit that I get a visceral reaction from a well-timed kick to the head. I hope that doesn’t make me a bad person. They ARE wearing protective head gear, so I can convince myself that no one gets badly hurt.
Taekwondo still lies in the bottom half of Olympic sports that I have interest in; it’s another one that if I watch it at all it’s limited to a gold medal match. It’s still a better option than boxing or judo for me.
Bela Karolyi
Famed gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi died over the weekend. He and his wife Marta are arguably the two people most responsible for laying the groundwork that has made the American women’s gymnastics team the dynasty that it is. That comes with a legacy that can charitably be described as complicated.
He gained his initial fame as the Romanian gymnastics coach, more specifically with his success in helping mold Nadia Comaneci into a legend. After defecting to the United States the Karolyis established a training camp and their first star pupil Mary Lou Retton would go on to win all-around gold in the 1984 Olympics. Before too long he was the national coach and generations of great American gymnasts were either directly or indirectly trained under the watch of the Karolyis.
That success blinded a lot of us to what was going on outside of the spotlight. Having come from an Eastern Bloc sports system there was naturally a lot of authoritarianism behind their methods. He presented himself publicly as a sort of big teddy bear, but eventually whispers grew that they went beyond finding a way to push an athlete beyond their limits; there was considerable emotional abuse involved. The story of his pushing Kerri Strug into making her final vault in the 1996 Olympics despite a severe ankle injury, along with the famous photo in which he carried her to the medal podium, plays much differently in hindsight. Add that to the fact that they never adequately explained how much awareness they had over Larry Nassar’s horrors, and it raises the question of how much he and his wife deserve to be celebrated.
The Little Girls In Pretty Boxes book and documentary both make it clear that he was a tyrant; the few quotes I have seen from some of his prominent pupils following news of his death in which they struggle to find the right words to describe him show that he has left lasting emotional scars. Like I said, his legacy is complicated. The success is obvious, but at what cost? Karolyi was 82.
50 Years Ago - The Towering Inferno
The Towering Inferno was arguably the classiest of all of those disaster movies from the 1970’s, and not simply because the majority of the cast donned tuxedos and evening gowns throughout the movie. It doesn’t have the level of cheese that a lot of the other movies did, but real life tragedies have cast this movie aside in the public eye. A movie whose plot revolves around a group of people trapped in the upper floors of a skyscraper on fire stopped feeling like escapist entertainment years ago.
It had the requisite elements of an Irwin Allen production, with an all-star cast of actors facing great peril. It was set during the opening night party at the world’s tallest building. Unbeknownst to them, during construction Corners Were Cut. A fire ignites on one of the lower floors, eventually expanding into the titular inferno.
The three leads were Steve McQueen as the head firefighter, Paul Newman as the building’s architect, and William Holden as the builder. The rest of the cast was filled with the standard array of prominent contemporary actors (Faye Dunaway) along with Hollywood royalty from the past (Jennifer Jones.) More notably, the cast also included Fred Astaire as a conman attempting to swindle Jones’s wealthy widow. Fun fact: Astaire was one of the greatest entertainers of the 20th century. He received a grand total of 1 Oscar nomination in his career - for this.
I haven’t watched this movie in decades, but from the clips I’ve seen it looks like the special effects hold up pretty well. And without getting too spoilery, for the most part the characters that wound up getting killed were the ones that you could say had it coming. Lesson: Don’t Cut Corners. And the solution that the firefighters finally came up with to extinguish the blaze sounded a bit absurd, but at least it resulted in a spectacular action sequence.
The era of the disaster movie would continue in the ensuing years - there were still multiple Airport sequels to come, and there were also plenty of disaster types that had not been exploited yet. Movies about tidal waves, meteor strikes, and yes, killer bee invasions were on the horizon. But I would say that The Towering Inferno was the last of the disaster flicks that could be classified as a prestige project.
Closing Laughs
Monday, Monday. Have a great day everyone, and I’ll see you all again on Wednesday, Wednesday.
