The Baseball Digest Archive

October 1984

Even though the issue we’re discussing today has an October cover date, it’s worth keeping in mind exactly when it would have been put together. It hit newsstands in early September, meaning that any articles would have been written at least a month before that. In other words, even though Ryne Sandberg was an easy choice for NL MVP that year, it wasn’t yet fully obvious when this issue was published. So, good call on that, Baseball Digest.

As you can see from the table of contents, this issue contains one of my favorite article templates along with one of my cringiest. This month included yet another regularly scheduled article advocating Hall of Fame consideration for a Veterans Committee candidate. By now it’s pretty clear that Baseball Digest had some pull in the process, or at the very least committee members took this lobbying very seriously. Enos Slaughter was in fact elected several months after the publication of this issue. In the time I’ve been perusing old issues this is one of several times in which a player who was the center of one of these articles made it in in the following election cycle. The “baseball was better back then” article was predictably tiresome. It offered a litany of reasons - players are complacent, not enough good hitters, poor defensive play, shoddy umpiring. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This issue also included separate features on two young AL first baseman whose stars were on the rise, but whose paths would also soon diverge. 1984 was Don Mattingly’s breakout season; he would go on to finish the year with a batting title and then follow it up with an MVP in 1985. Willie Upshaw showed signs of stardom, but he quickly declined. 1984 was his last productive season, and he would be out of the league by 1989.

The article on World Series strategic gambles was interesting; the main impetus for the piece was that 3 years earlier Bob Lemon’s decision to remove Tommy John for a pinch hitter in Game 6 of the 1981 World Series did not pan out. (Pulling a starting pitcher early in a postseason game? It was still a rarity back then.) The article looked at some other daring moves from the past; some of which worked out (The Tigers moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop in 1968) and some which did not (Babe Ruth attempting to steal second base with 2 out in the 9th in 1926 Game 7.)

I’ll close with the article about left handed pitchers, which did not take the tack which you might expect. Instead of making the observation that lefties are quirky or colorful, this one focused on the fact that several successful southpaws have been relatively undersized. The writer of the article had no idea that Randy Johnson was on the horizon.

Random Olympic Thoughts

I picked a good week to take off, because if I had written about the Opening Ceremony my review would have run so long that it would have taken as long to read as the actual ceremony did. Instead, I’ll briefly summarize. I appreciated that the organizers tried things a little differently this time; some elements worked better than others. The Parade of Nations is a traditional highlight; there are few things quite like the roar of the crowd as each country’s delegation enters the stadium. My thoughts would usually progress like this : “This is so emotional! This is so moving! All the feels! Oh lord, they’re only up to the letter ‘k?’” The boat parade broke things up better, so it didn’t seem to last forever.

In doing so, however, we lost the individual thrills produced by each nation as well as the fun facts that accompanied each country. And NBC could have done a better job of identifying the flag bearers. One touch that I liked: the quartet of legends who accompanied the torch as it rode in a boat towards its final location - Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, Carl Lewis, & Nadia Comaneci. Talk about a GOAT boat.

Making an Olympic team is a major accomplishment under any circumstances; to be fortunate enough to do so in a year in which your home country is the host is something else. The cherry on top of that sundae is if you are also the singular star of the Games. That is the case with French swimmer Leon Marchand. 4 gold medals, including both medleys as well as victories in such disparate strokes as the butterfly and breaststroke. He entered the Olympics with high expectations and fulfilled them all. His events really showed how detrimental the lack of crowds were in the COVID Olympics. To hear the French crowds chant “Leon! Leon! Leon!” each time his head rose above the surface during the breaststroke was powerful indeed.

I probably missed major moments in a sport that I don’t pay much attention to, so with that caveat here are my 2 top highlights from the first week. Both events featured last minute maneuvers that grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. The end of the women’s rugby bronze medal match featured a game ending play that looks like it was pulled out of an episode of Friday Night Lights. (Note: NBC has disabled direct embeds of Olympic highlights, but the YouTube links should work.)

The 4x400 mixed relay in track & field featured a United States team that broke the world record in the heats on Friday. In Saturday’s final, the US had a sizable lead with the Netherlands in 4th place with about 150 meters to go. At that point Femke Bol kicked into another gear and chased down the US to win gold. It was sweet redemption for Bol; in this same event at last year’s world championship she was anchoring the Dutch squad & was only a few steps away from leading her team to gold until she inexplicably tripped & fell just shy of the finish line. One of the most eagerly anticipated events on the track schedule is the women’s 400m hurdles matchup between Bol & American world record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Bol made a huge statement with her leg in the relay. Game on.

One of the bigger stories from the first week surrounded the much-anticipated duel in the pool between Team USA and Team Australia for world swimming supremacy. Over the first few days of the swim meet, the US racked up a huge pile of silver & bronze, totaling more medals than the Aussies, but Australia held the lead in gold. American results started to improve as the days passed, and in a perfectly scripted moment, each nation had 7 golds going into the final swimming event on the schedule, the women’s medley relay. The US woman won the race in a runaway (a swimaway?) to clinch the unofficial title of World’s Greatest Swimming Nation.

There’s so much more to discuss, which I hope to have space for over the next several days. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky have both further embellished their GOAT credentials. Or Noah Lyles. Or Pommel Horse Guy.

SNL News

Figure it will be another month or so until the official announcement of who will make up the cast for milestone season #50 of SNL, but a few snippets of news came out last week. First off, Maya Rudolph will return to make recurring appearances as Kamala Harris. I’m a little torn over this. Let me be clear that this is nothing against Rudolph. She is one of the most beloved performers in show business, and rightfully so. She perfected the depiction of Harris as a meme queen, and now that she is the nominee Harris has regained that specific mojo in real life. It still makes me uncomfortable when ringers steal focus away from cast members. The cast is large enough as it is that it’s a real Hunger Games battle to stake a claim on screen time. Are you trying to tell me that Ego Nwodim wouldn’t make for a great Harris in her own right?

Two current cast members have just announced their departures, neither of whom was a surprise. Punkie Johnson is leaving after 4 seasons. She had her moments, but just wasn’t able to make a big splash. There have been too many episodes in which she was barely seen. She usually did a great job in pre-taped videos, and she had a perfectly charming Update appearance once in which she revealed her inability to remember people’s names, no matter how famous they were. I look at Johnson’s tenure the same way I did Melissa Villasenor’s - the show was never able to figure out how to best utilize either’s talents.

Molly Kearney is also leaving after 2 seasons as a featured player. They carved out a niche for portraying loud, exuberant characters but couldn’t quite break out of that narrow niche. Some may note that these two departures are an LBGTQ woman of color & the show’s first openly nonbinary cast member, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Bowen Yang is arguably the #1 star in the current cast, after all. I think it’s just a matter of circumstance that these two particular cast members fell into the “oh yeah, this person is also on the show” category.

There will be more casting news to come between now and next month’s season premiere, and we are also likely to learn which tropical diseases Colin Jost caught while he was covering Olympic surfing in Tahiti.

The Oscar Mulligan - 1989

Oscar Winner: Driving Miss Daisy

Other Nominees: Born On the Fourth Of July, Dead Poets Society, Field Of Dreams, My Left Foot

This was one of those Oscar races that almost tempts me to travel to the home of the winner and personally repossess the trophy. DMD was a decent enough movie, but it has that soft, self-satisfied liberalism that inspires voters to pat themselves on their backs. Look at these adorable old people from a couple of generations ago and how they learned to get along. If they can live together side by side on their piano keyboard, why can’t we?

Unfortunately, the true deserving winner from that year wasn’t even nominated. As part of this exercise I’ve been limiting the choices to the actual nominees, but for 1989 I need to acknowledge Do The Right Thing. It’s possible that it was the single greatest movie of the entire decade. That’s hard to say with certainty, but I will not hesitate to call it the most important movie of the decade. The scene in which Mookie calls out Pino for his constant use of the “n” word even though all of his favorite athletes and entertainers are back is still sadly relevant today.

So what deserved to win? My Left Foot was a well made biopic, mostly remembered because it was the first clear evidence of Daniel Day-Lewis’s historical greatness. In The Color Of Money & Rain Man Tom Cruise had already proved that he could hold his own with great actors, but he clarified his genuine talent even further with Born On the Fourth Of July. Unfortunately I have too much Oliver Stone fatigue to award that one. As for Field Of Dreams, I know so many people love it, but there are too many elements of the movie that drive me batty. The James Earl Jones speech about how great & pure baseball was in the past is iconic, but to me it doesn’t land being that it’s spoken by a man who would not have been able to play the game in that allegedly utopian era. And Kevin Costner’s laidback cadence is a poor fit for the material. The moment where he sees the ghost of his father is supposed to be an emotional gut punch, but he almost sounds bored when he says “oh my God.”

That leaves us with Dead Poets Society by default. The “teacher inspires his students by refusing the color inside the lines” trope is well worn, but this is one of the better examples of the form. A movie gets bonus points for lines or scenes that have a lasting impact, and this movie has helped “carpe diem” and “O captain, my captain” remain in the vernacular, even among people who might not be students of Latin or of poetry. When Robin Williams played to his sentimental side he could be exhausting - see Patch Adams - but he found the ideal tone in this role. Bonus points for impressive showcases for young Ethan Hawks and Robert Sean Leonard.

Closing Laughs

Did you miss me? Did you even notice that I was gone for a week? Don’t answer that. Welcome back everyone, and I will see you all again on Wednesday.