The Baseball Digest Archive 1/79

January 1979

Issues with the January cover date were generally devoted to wrapping up the recently completed World Series. The Yankees repeated as champions in 1978, winning their second consecutive series against the Dodgers. The issue contained feature articles on each of the 4 games that the Yankees won, and those articles proved once again that as important as star power is, titles are won with the complete roster. Game 3 was the game in which Graig Nettles put on a fielding clinic at third base, and Game 4 took a turn when Reggie Jackson “accidentally” stuck his hip in the way of a Bill Russell throw which opened the floodgates.

Stars were key to games 3 & 4, guys further down the roster were instrumental in winning 5 & 6. Rookie pitcher Jim Beattie threw a complete game in game 5. As for game 6, during this year’s playoffs Molly Knight coined the term PBR, or Playoff Baseball Rando. You know the type, a guy who comes from nowhere to make a crucial contribution in the postseason. Brian Doyle was practically the Platonic Ideal of the PBR. Pressed into service because Willie Randolph was injured, Dodgers pitchers could not get Doyle out. Bucky Dent won the World Series MVP award, and I suppose it’s justifiable being that it continued the narrative of his own magical October. (This was the same year that he hit the home run which inspired his profane nickname heard throughout New England.) But Doyle could have just as easily won it; he hit over .400 in the Series, including 3 hits in the clinching game. How nondescript was Doyle’s career otherwise? He finished his career with a total of 199 regular season at bats.

Brian Doyle’s series also brings out a minor peeve of mine. Time and again we have heard great players accused of not being clutch because of a poor postseason performance, usually from people refusing to understand the concept of a small sample size. Ted Williams hitting poorly the one time he made it into the World Series proves nothing. If that were true, then the logical conclusion to that argument is that Brian Doyle was one of the greatest clutch performers in the game’s history. No one seriously makes that case.

This issue asked the question, who will be the next 300 game winner? As of 1978 there had been a drought; the most recent pitcher to have reached that milestone was Early Wynn in 1963. The article in this issue looked at groups of pitchers and assessed their chances. Gaylord Perry was the leading active winner at the time with 267, but the writer was unsure if the then 40 year old Perry still had enough in him. As it turned out, Perry was in fact the next man to reach 300, in 1982. In a mild surprise, one of the likelier candidates for 300, Jim Palmer, fell short. The writer, Dan Hager, was incorrect on Palmer, but I give him credit for this - he was bullish on Phil Niekro’s chances, even though Niekro was already 39 yet still more than 100 victories away.

I was more amused than I needed to be over the Don Kissinger article. The White Sox hired him as player-manager. That dual position was relatively common decades earlier, but as managing has grown more complex it has been too much to ask one man to do both. What cracked me up were the quotes. In the space of a couple of paragraphs two separate men expressed skepticism yet still said “he’ll do a good job.” Well, which is it? As it turned out Kissinger did not even make it all the way to the end of the 1979 season. The Sox let him go & replaced him with another first time manager. Some guy named La Russa.

The 1978 season saw an unbelievable tragedy with the murder of Lyman Bostock, which led to an article listing other tragic deaths of still active players. The story was horrible enough as it is, but it’s also striking that Bostock was killed while a member of the California Angels. That inspired yet another run of speculation as to whether there was a curse hanging over the franchise, as a shockingly high number of Angels players had died in previous years.

The Thomas Boswell article on bats covered a lot of territory, from some of the superstitions that players have held regarding their lumber, to the great care that some hitters used in choosing specific wood, to some of the more notorious examples of bat-related cheating. The article mentioned the incident in which Graig Nettles’ bat shattered, revealing it to be filled with super balls. I loved this anecdote as well. Nettles mentioned an unnamed minor leaguer had placed a tube of mercury inside of his bat. The theory was that when he swung the centrifugal force would carry the heavy weight of the mercury directly into the hitting spot, therefore generating more power. Nettles said that it didn’t work. The guy couldn’t hit a lick, not even with an illegal bat, and never made it to the majors.

Finally, remember the days when Rolaids awarded a reliever of the year award based on a points system? Two points each for a win and a save, one point subtracted for each loss, and voila, there are the best relievers in each league. It was an overly simplistic formula, and I’m sure that more often than not it failed to correctly identify the best bullpen arm. For what it’s worth, this is what the 1978 leaderboard looked like. I’ll never pass up an opportunity to give a shout-out to Skip Lockwood, even if he was fairly far down on the list.

Ballot Breakdown - Dave Parker

The first 5 full seasons of Dave Parker’s career were absolutely HOF level. In addition to winning the NL MVP in 1978, he finished in the top 10 of the voting 4 times in that 5 year period, and even that is selling him short as he finished third twice. He won 2 batting titles, led the league in slugging percentage twice, and had a few other scattered league leading totals. If you prefer advanced stats, he was near the league lead in WAR in each of those same 4 seasons, leading once, and also led the NL in OPS+ once. He was often prominently mentioned in the Best Player In Baseball conversation.

As great of a hitter as he was, that was only a portion of his value. He was also one of the top defensive right fielders, with an absolute rifle for an arm. In fact, the first image that comes to mind when picturing Parker isn’t of him lashing a double into the gap, it’s of the throws he unleashed in the 1979 All-Star Game. Add that to the fact that he was built like a middle linebacker in a time when it was uncommon to see a baseball player with such a physique, and he was one of the signature stars of his time.

The problem with his HOF case is that he wasn’t the same player after that 5 year peak. A combination of nagging injuries and a cocaine problem contributed to a significant drop in his production at an age when he still should have been mashing. It should also be mentioned that he received inexcusable blowback from his home fans in Pittsburgh who were unhappy with that drop in production. He had to wear a helmet on the field to protect himself from objects that “fans” were throwing at him, including batteries. Batteries! What the hell is wrong with people?

To his credit, he turned his life around and recovered somewhat. He was a big run producer in Cincinnati, and a prototypical respected veteran/mentor in Oakland, but by this point he was largely a one dimensional slugger. His speed was gone, so despite that great arm he was a net negative on defense. To be sure, there was real value to his power production, but after his age 28 season in 1979 he only had one other truly great season.

So the question is, was what he did in his peak enough? History suggests that HOF voters prefer a peak period that lasts longer than Parker’s did, and I tend to agree in this case. In his time, he was a great player, and a memorable one, but there are loads of players for whom I believe the cases are stronger.

Reviewing Olympic Sports

Tennis - Tennis is one of those sports for which one can question how much it actually needs the Olympics. Unlike the majority of Olympic sports the competitors don’t lapse into relative anonymity in the years between Olympiads. For example, the gold medal winner in men’s singles this year was Novak Djokovic. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

The enthusiasm the elite players show comes and goes; it varies depending upon the venue. A larger than usual number of players withdrew before the Paris games. It sounds counterintuitive; you would think the prestige of winning gold at Roland Garros would be a big deal. The problem is that the Olympics take place when the tennis calendar has already moved to the hard court season. Going from clay to grass to hard court and then back to clay takes a huge toll on the body; a significant number of players reasonably concluded that that would be too much of a health risk.

I watch very little Olympic tennis for the same reason that NBC farms the tournament out to its cable channels. There is no way to know how long a match is going to last. It could be a quick straight set victory or it could be a grinding marathon. The fact that the matches are best of 3 sets cuts down on the potential timing - no worries that a session could last into the wee hours of the morning as it frequently happens at the US Open - but I’m much happier to watch say, Wimbledon where I know I’m making a commitment to tennis & tennis alone, rather than finding enough time in my Olympic viewing to get a sense of how the tournament is developing.

Trampoline Gymnastics - How many sickos do you think have seen trampoline on the schedule and had visions of Cinemax? No, competitive trampoline is not that. It is one that I find oddly compelling. I skip the preliminaries and go right to the final. The 8 who qualify each perform one routine that only lasts a minute or two, so it’s completed fairly quickly. And it is pretty astonishing to see how high they bounce into the air and are somehow able to complete a difficult series of midair somersaults. Having said that, I couldn’t name the winners of either gold medal without looking it up, & there is zero chance I will watch it again until the Los Angeles games in 2028. But it’s a good diversion.

Just A Half A Mile From The Railroad Track

News broke out over the weekend that Alice Brock has died. You likely don’t recognize the name, but she holds a significant role in pop culture. She owned a restaurant in Massachusetts. Yes, she was that Alice, and it was that restaurant, the one about which Arlo Guthrie had a story to tell from two Thanksgivings ago. It’s poignant that her passing happened this week, as rock radio stations nationwide carve out 18 minutes every Thanksgiving to give Alice’s Restaurant Massacree a spin. Brock was 83.

50 Years Ago - Little House On the Prairie

Little House ran for a total of 8 seasons (9 if you include the kinda sorta sequel A New Beginning which aired for one season after Michael Landon had left the show) but I could probably count the number of episodes that I watched during that run on two hands. Despite the cliche about the series there wasn’t an outbreak of typhoid in each episode that I have seen. Maybe every other, prairie life in the 19th century wasn’t easy.

The show was of course derived from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of Little House novels, which were in turn inspired by her own upbringing. Landon starred as Pa Ingalls, he and his wife raising three daughters in Minnesota whilst dealing with the inherent hardships that came with farm life in that period of history in that part of the country. Everything from disease outbreaks to Nellie Oleson.

By the time this show premiered in 1974 most of the westerns that had been so prevalent on television had left the airwaves. That niche was largely being filled by a show like The Waltons. Instead of a western series starring a frontier lawman, audiences were drawn to watching a tight-knit family making do with what they had. Little House was a perfect example of that trope, and Michael Landon’s presence didn’t hurt; he had all of that leftover goodwill from Bonanza.

Over its long run, the show also introduced some familiar faces to the landscape. Child actors who went on to bigger things as they moved into adulthood such as Jason Bateman and Shannen Doherty had their first big breaks in Walnut Grove. This also gave Merlin Olsen his opportunity to transition from ferocious NFL defensive lineman to his post-playing image as an avuncular teddy bear type.

It’s fitting that a show which was so heavily steeped in nostalgia has continued to produce so many warm feelings in the decades since it has ended. There have been multiple reunions and it remains a staple in syndication and in streaming. (Hell, with an incoming HHS Secretary who is hostile to vaccines we could well see an old school Little House inspired diphtheria outbreak in our future. That’s not the sort of cosplay we really need.)

Closing Laughs

Barbenheimer was one thing, but I refuse to use the term “Glicked.” First time was cute, there’s no need for a different portmanteau each year. I am not a crank. Have a great day all, and I will see you again on Wednesday.