The Baseball Digest Archives

March 1979

This is the sort of issue of Baseball Digest that I get a real kick out of revisiting. The issue that offers predictions of who will be the top rookies of the upcoming season is tailor made for second guessing. Let’s take a look at their preseason all-rookie team.

Now, I spent so much time going through my baseball card collection as a kid that I have deep memories of some pretty obscure 1970’s ballplayers. That comes in handy whilst playing Immaculate Grid. But I drew some serious blanks here. I remember Harry Chappas quite well; he drew a lot of attention over the fact that he was even shorter than Freddie Patek. And Rich Murray is Eddie’s brother. I could not tell you the first thing about either of the pitchers listed here; if I ever had any brain cells that contained Bobby Sprowl facts they are long gone.

The eventual winners of the 1979 ROY Award (Rick Sutcliffe in the NL, a tie between John Castino & Alfredo Griffin in the AL) are not even mentioned in the article, although all 3 appear in the team by team scouting reports. Even there, Castino is only the #3 Twins prospect & Sutcliffe #4 for the Dodgers. To be fair, 2 of the players ahead of him are Pedro Guerrero and Mike Scioscia. Among the players listed as their team’s #1 prospects: Dickie Thon, Rickey Henderson, Ron Oester, Jeffrey Leonard, and more than a dozen prospects who barely earned cups of coffee in the major leagues.

The Yankees won their second consecutive World Series the previous season, and the chart that accompanied the article about the toughest pitchers to hit in 1978 offers a good reason why. The two major league pitchers with the lowest batting average against were the Yanks ace starter Ron Guidry and their closer Goose Gossage. That’ll help you win a lot of games. I cropped the photo so that it also reveals the easiest pitcher to hit - Mike Bruhert of the Mets. That’ll help you lose a lot of games.

Another major event from the 1978 season was Pete Rose’s 44 game hitting streak, which fell short of Joe DiMaggio’s record, but matched a streak that Wee Willie Keller achieved way back in 1897. OK, that was obviously a looooong time ago, but here’s a little perspective. Keeler’s career ended in 1910, or 69 years before this article was published. The modern equivalent would be an article written about a player who had played as recently as 1955. That’s still a long time ago, but it doesn’t feel quite so ancient.

Or how about this - look at the article about the 1954 Cleveland Indians, who won a then-AL record 111 games, yet fell short of winning the World Series. Larry Doby was quoted in the article as saying that no team will ever win that many games again. Well, 2 AL clubs did eventually surpass that total - the 1998 Yankees and the 2001 Mariners. The Yankees closed the deal, the Mariners lost in the ALCS. Those ‘98 Yankees are further removed from today than the ‘54 Indians were for someone reading this magazine when it was published in Spring 1979.

I’ll end with this - Baseball Digest would often fill out pages with little anecdotes or vignettes. This story is one that I’ve heard discussed in the past. It’s a funny one, but once again time marches on. I suspect that the names of Bobby Bragan and Birdie Tebbetts hold little resonance for baseball fans younger than I am.

SNL Recap

I’ll give the writers of SNL a bit of credit. With Dua Lipa as host, they could have lazily written each sketch centered around the premise of how attractive she is. They avoided that for the most part. Not that the episode was good, but at least it wasn’t phoned in. I’m not even sure if this week’s show qualifies as being mid; is there a level below mid? Lipa gave it a good effort, but an unmemorable one. There was nothing disastrous, but nothing that people will talk about around the water cooler. In a few years she will return as musical guest and everyone will think, “oh yeah, she also hosted once.”

In addition to one splashy surprise cameo, there was little sharing of the spoils this week. Punkie wasn’t seen until the first post-Update sketch, and even there she only had a couple of lines. That still beats New Chloe, who only appeared in the closing goodbyes. And Sarah’s only contribution was in a pre-filmed piece, hidden under heavy prosthetics.

This week was so meh that I have difficulty choosing a Top Sketch Of the Week, so I’ll award it to the aforementioned piece in admiration for the craft. The Anomalous Man was a take on the Elephant Man. Set in Victorian England, Lipa portrayed a woman who wishes to meet the reclusive playwright of a show that she had just seen. That would be the titular character, a deformed man portrayed by Sarah. It plodded along, but I did like the payoff.

This was one of those episodes that makes me realize that I’m on the other side of a generation gap. I didn’t immediately recognize that it was Troye Sivan who had introduced Lipa’s first song. Chloe impersonated JoJo Siwa on Update. I know who Siwa is and I know the basics of her career arc, but the specifics of the impersonation largely went over my head. This wasn’t entirely a generational issue, but being that I have not yet seen Challengers, I couldn’t fully grasp the references to the movie that were in the Sonny Angels sketch.

I’m sure that a lot of viewers were going into the episode awaiting the obligatory Kristi Noem jokes. Heidi briefly appeared as Noem in the monologue - they went with the host answering questions from audience members format, but Lipa quickly cut off Noem before she could ask her question. Later on the show went with Marcello on Update as Noem’s new dog, Cricket #7. He bravely asserted that he was well behaved and therefore in no danger, while quietly expressing his fear for his life.

Most of the sketches in the episode’s first half hour were fairly short, which generally means that Update will run longer than normal, and that was the case here. There were 3 different correspondent pieces this week; in addition to Cricket & JoJo Siwa pieces that I already mentioned, Jost introduced A Man Who Did Too Much Press. A harried looking Jerry Seinfeld came to the desk to further promote his new Pop Tarts movie. He didn’t make much reference to his grouchy old man interview (I’m still debating if I want to dive into that; the whole “you can’t do comedy anymore” discourse is so tiresome) the premise was that he has done so much promotion for so many different outlets that it’s wearing him out. In fact, while he was doing the Update piece his cell phone rang with a request for him to do yet another interview with Univision.

The penne alla vodka sketch can almost serve as a metaphor for this season. It depicts various large group events - a wedding, a funeral, a retirement party - stating that a key component of each is a big ass aluminum tray of penne alla vodka. As described, no one hates it, but it’s fine and it gets the job done. That could almost sound like a mission statement for SNL circa 2024. This show has been an important part of my life for almost the entirety of its run, so I am often very defensive over the old “it hasn’t been funny in years” talking point. Even I must admit, however, that this isn’t exactly the show’s Golden Age. It’s fine. It gets the job done.

So, I don’t have much to say about the majority of the sketches in this week’s show. I suspect that I will have forgotten about most of them within a couple of weeks. That also makes choosing the Employee Of the Week a bit difficult. I often take Kenan for granted, so he earns it this week. Fat Daddy, the substitute Ob-Gyn is a character right in Kenan’s wheelhouse, and he even made something from his appearance as the father of one of the protesting Columbia students in the cold open.

When a singer hosts the bar is set a little bit lower; not quite as low as it is when an athlete hosts, but it still holds that you can’t expect someone such as Dua Lipa who has relatively little acting experience to acquit herself as well as next week’s host should. By that token, she did what was expected of her. She was rarely asked to do any heavy lifting, and I didn’t notice too much of a reliance on cue cards. Next week figures to be different. Maya Rudolph returns for her third turn as host with Vampire Weekend as musical guest. It’s usually a good bet to expect a number of returning alumni to pop in.

50 Years Ago - Good Old Boys

I would suspect that most people younger than I am think of Randy Newman as the composer of beloved songs from Disney & Pixar movies. What they might not realize is that that makes up only a small portion of his body of work. At heart he is a major league s**t stirrer, and there may be no better example of that than his 1974 album Good Old Boys.

One of the most acclaimed albums in his discography, in a lot of ways one’s appreciation of the record is dependent on if you can get past the opening track. Newman discusses the origin story of the album in his liner notes and in the lyrics of the lead track. He was watching an episode of the Dick Cavett Show in which former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox was a guest. Newman felt that Cavett and fellow guest Jim Brown were “ganging up” on Maddox and were belittling him in an elitist manner. That inspired him to write an entire album about the American South.

Here’s where it’s a bit uncomfortable. Of all the people in the world to choose to defend, Lester Maddox? The only reason why he hasn’t gone down in history as the most notorious segregationist of his era is because George Wallace existed. Newman could have chosen a better person to stick up for. In addition, the n-word is prominently featured in the chorus of the album’s first song, Rednecks.

Randy Newman originally conceived the record as a concept album telling the story of a southern man named Johnny Cutler, but it eventually evolved to instead focus on various aspects of southern life and culture. For example, the one cover song on the album was a snippet of a tune co-written by Huey Long, which led into a Newman original about the Kingfish. Because Newman can be a bit impudent, at times he celebrates his characters, at other times he mocks.

Good Old Boys contains what I believe to be the single greatest song that Newman has ever written, Louisiana 1927. Written about a devastating flood, which was helped in no small part by an intentional destruction of a levee so that the flood waters would flow towards poorer regions of the city along with a poor response from Calvin Coolidge, it gained greater resonance following Hurricane Katrina. Substitute Coolidge with George Bush, and history was repeating itself.

The album contains several other highlights from the Newman catalogue as well - “Marie,” “Birmingham,” “Mr. President (Have Mercy On the Working Man)”. Even Rednecks is a very catchy number; I just wish that it were more lyrically acceptable.

Missed It By That Much

If you love close finishes, this was the weekend for you. These two took place roughly within 24 hours of each other.

3 horses crossed the finish line together at the Kentucky Derby, and the next day NASCAR saw its closest finish in history at Kansas City. 2 sports, 2 photo finishes. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Closing Laughs

Note to self: NEVER get on Kendrick Lamar’s bad side. Have an enjoyable day everyone, and thanks as always for reading my rambling. See you on Wednesday.