The Baseball Digest Archive 11/78

November 1978

I’ve mentioned this more than once, but when you see the cover date on an issue you need to start working backwards. This one has a November date, but it hit the newsstands in October and the content would have been written in August or early September. So, the cover blurb which calls Reggie Smith an MVP candidate comes with some mild risk.

Smith was the cover subject here, but there was not a Smith article in the issue per se. Instead, the magazine’s editor offered his picks for the 1978 awards, and he included this quote. “We’ll run the risk of being called a nincompoop in November.” Was he a nincompoop? You decide. He went 2 for 6, correctly picking Jim Rice for AL MVP & Ron Guidry for AL Cy Young. In the end Dave Parker won the NL MVP, not Reggie Smith, and the magazine predicted an NL Cy Young for Vida Blue instead of the eventual winner Gaylord Perry.

1978 had a crop of rookies who went on to stardom. The AL Rookie of the Year award went to Lou Whitaker, who did not even make the Baseball Digest all-rookie team. That wasn’t as big of a whiff as it appears to be, however. The magazine’s pick for ROY and all-rookie second baseman was Paul Molitor, who also had a superb rookie year. As for the National League, it’s understandable that they missed on the actual winner. Bob Horner was the #1 overall draft pick in ‘78 and went straight to the majors, so he only had a couple of months worth of games on his plate when Baseball Digest chose Ozzie Smith as their ROY instead.

Speaking of Horner’s journey directly to the big leagues, this issue includes an article on David Clyde, a pitcher who was the victim of negligence by the Texas Rangers. A classic Texas fireballer, the Rangers drafted him #1 overall out of high school and immediately placed him in the majors. He essentially went directly from his prom to a major league mound. Needless to say he was not ready and he never amounted to much. He attempted a new start in Cleveland, and 1978 was in fact his best season, but even that was nothing special, with an ERA above 4 and a walk/strikeout ratio of 60/83. He was out of the league after 1979. You would have to think or hope that he would have had a more productive career had Texas given him a more traditional minor league development process.

1978 was certainly a long time ago. As evidence there is an article titled “The Electronic Age Comes To the Majors.” What is this strange new quasi-futuristic technology that has been introduced to the game? Radar guns! It’s hard to imagine that a piece of equipment that is so standard once seemed to be that groundbreaking.

The article on trick pitches profiled 5 pitchers speaking of their signature pitches - Phil Niekro and his knuckleball, Burt Hooton and his knuckle curve, Tug McGraw and his screwball, Bruce Sutter and his forkball, and Gaylord Perry and his, let’s just call it a hard slider.

The Gil Hodges article contained one of my favorite anecdotes about the man. His former players have long spoken about how much they both respected and feared him at the same time. Here, Tom Seaver spoke about an incident in which Ken Boswell was hit by pitch, but the umpire ruled that the ball had hit the bat instead. Hodges came from the dugout to argue, grasping Boswell’s arm the whole time. When he let go, he showed the ump that arm. While he was arguing he had cut off the circulation to Boswell’s arm, revealing the imprint of the ball where it had struck the player. Boswell was awarded first base.

There are lots of other pieces this month worth noting. 1978 was the rookie season for both Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell, who would go on to be the game’s longest lasting double play combo. Frank Tanana was one of the most exciting young pitchers in the game earlier in the decade, but the elbow injury discussed in this article robbed him of his explosive fastball. He carved out a nice career for himself as a soft-tossing crafty lefty. The famous quote about his career arc is that he threw in the 90’s in the 70’s & threw in the 70’s in the 90’s.

Bob Buhl was a pitcher like many others. He had a solid 15 year career with a few big years; your classic #2 or #3 type. Most pitchers with his profile are relatively forgettable, but his name his lived on. Why? Because he was one of the most notoriously inept hitters in the sports history. As the article here states, he went hitless in 42 consecutive starts, which spanned a total of 3 seasons. It’s nice to be remembered, but for this?

The article on the most underrated players in the game ranked 10 players from each league in order. The choices here were Ken Singleton from the AL & Garry Maddox from the NL. If memory serves correctly, both did receive a lot of recognition back then, so I’m not sure if either qualifies as truly underrated.

Finally, I should mention something I had not previously brought up. The letters to the editor section was often a perfect encapsulation of much things have changed, and I’m not just talking about baseball. One letter asked the editors to settle a bet over whether or not Jim Palmer had ever pitched a no-hitter. Another one asked how many career hits Joe DiMaggio had. Queries of this type were fairly common. Nowadays we all walk around with little computers in our pockets that allow us to find the answer to any question with just a few keystrokes. Back then if a fan had a question, they would need to write a letter to a magazine, hope that the powers that be would find that question interesting enough to answer, and wait months for that answer. We still don’t have flying cars or jet packs, but at least we have easy access to basic information.

Programming Note

I had intended to include my recap of Saturday night’s Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony in today’s newsletter, until I realized that doing so would stretch out today’s post to a Robert Caro type length - or make it as long to read as it did to sit through the actual ceremony. Instead, I’ll send out that recap separately as a bonus tomorrow morning. Which means that as a special treat subscribers will get 4 editions of Tending The Herd this week. Yay?

The Libs Own The WNBA

The game ended late enough last night that I only have enough time to put together rudimentary thoughts, but in a classic WNBA Finals, the New York Liberty defeated the Minnesota Lynx 3 games to 2 to win the first title in franchise history. Fittingly enough, the decisive game went to overtime.

I have to go all the way back to 1986 since a team that I root for has won a championship. That’s let’s see, carry the 4, oh my lord, 38 years. So this feels good. I do not intend to wait another 38 years for the next one.

I do have to be honest though, as happy as I was last night, the WNBA & the Liberty were not formed until I was 31 years old. It’s simply not possible for me to have those same fully ingrained, diehard fan since childhood, this is part of my personality feelings for the Liberty as I have had for the other New York team that played last night. I’ll also have more to say about the 2024 Mets later on this week, but despite the disappointment of the loss they gave a gallant effort and lost to a better team. They have nothing to hang their heads over.

One Final Visit With Our Favorite Staten Island Vampires

Tonight the 6th and final season of What We Do In the Shadows begins with 3 consecutive episodes on FX. Anytime a beloved show starts its homestretch it comes with sadness that it’s ending as well as gratitude that we had the time with these crazy characters that we did. Over the course of those 6 years WWDITS has been one of the most consistently LOL television shows in recent memory.

The show has found a unique secret to success, beyond the inherent hilarity. It’s a challenge for TV shows to balance narrative momentum with the tendency to lean towards inertia. Characters are going to evolve over time, but you don’t want them to evolve too much. Multiple times over the course of the show the season has ended with an essential return to status quo. But it never felt cheap; those resets back to square one logically fit in with with what we know about the universe of this show.

So, it’s time to treasure these final 10 episodes. The last batch of Guillermo’s side eyes at the camera. The last batch of Nadia’s meltdowns. The last batch of time we get to spend with Laszlo. There is nothing quite like Matt Berry’s line readings. He can make the most mundane statement sound exceptionally pompous. If there were a Hall Of Fame for television characters, Laszlo Cravensworth would be an easy call. Everyone repeat after me - Bat!

Non-Peak TV - Mrs. Columbo

I like to spend a lot of time in these parts discussing great television shows. There’s also a huge inventory of content out there which is, shall we say, not quite up to par. I’m going to largely focus on that period in the late 70’s/early 80’s in which I didn’t do the greatest job of properly curating my viewing selections. To be somewhat fair, this was a time when you didn’t have a TV remote unless your name was Rockefeller. If you wanted to change the channel, you had to walk all the way across the room. Who has time for that? So, if I was watching show A, I had little choice but to stick around and watch whichever show followed, regardless of quality or lack thereof.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of shows that fall into this category come from the Fred Silverman era of NBC. It was not only third in ratings by a healthy margin, but the network ran some of the most notorious creative failures as well. That’s not an ideal combo. SNL ran a sketch at the time speculating that Silverman was intentionally sabotaging NBC as if he were some sort of stealth agent still working for ABC.

Mrs. Columbo was a show that I’m fairly certain I never watched a single episode of, but it is emblematic of the NBC schedule at the time. I could have easily chosen David Cassidy: Man Undercover instead, but Mrs. Columbo stands out because it was a particularly misbegotten idea. On the surface, it made a bit of sense. Columbo was ending its successful initial run, and over the course of the series he often made reference to an unseen Mrs. Columbo. Why not keep the machine running by creating a spin-off with this character?

Introducing Kate Mulgrew as Mrs. Columbo, a newspaper reporter who also investigates crimes. You can see the problem right off the bat. Kate Mulgrew was all of 24 years old when this show premiered in 1979. There was no indication that this was a period piece, so the thought of her being married to Peter Falk comes with a whole lot of WTF to it. Columbo himself never appeared in the series, so the two never shared an uncomfortable on screen moment together, but that extreme age difference meant that even if the show was any good it was never going to be able to overcome that hurdle.

It appears that all involved realized this would be a problem; for a time the show was retitled Kate Loves a Mystery. And things worked out OK for Kate Mulgrew. She has had a long and productive career; making history as the first female Starfleet Captain in Star Trek: Voyager along with her long run as Red in Orange Is the New Black. This show is a minor footnote at best, but it still makes one say “what WERE you thinking?”

Closing Laughs

Thanks as always for tuning in to this Bat Channel. See you all again tomorrow with my Hall Of Fame wrapup. Have a super day.