The Baseball Digest Archives

June 1976

The feature story in this month’s issue discusses the premiere center fielders of the era. That makes it a bit fascinating that the editors chose Rick Manning of all people for the cover photo. Not just because even at the time he was nowhere near as big of a star as some of the others who were discussed in the article, but also because a player from the Cleveland Indians is not one who would generally spur a surge in newsstand sales. It’s to Baseball Digest’s credit that they didn’t go the easy way and automatically default to New York & Los Angeles players as cover subjects. The magazine thrived for decades, so that obviously was not a poor business decision. (Speaking of Rick Manning, try googling Rick Manning/Dennis Eckersley. The 1970’s never fail to deliver.)

This is a pretty impressive list of young center fielders. Because my memories of Dusty Baker and Al Oliver were of them playing corner outfield positions, I had forgotten that both of them had spent more time in center in their younger days. And in a fortunate bit of timing seeing Johnny Grubb’s name placed him back in my mind just in time for me to use him as an Immaculate Grid answer a couple of days later. It’s probably a stretch to call this a Golden Age of center fielders, being that none of the players listed above went on to become Hall Of Famers, but there was some outstanding talent to be seen here. Apologies to my fellow Mets fans. Their starting center fielder at the time, Del Unser, was not quite good enough to make the list.

Will there ever be another .400 hitter in the majors? 1976 was 35 years removed from Ted Williams reaching that achievement, and even that seemed like an awfully long time ago. In 1976 this sounded like a reasonable question; we’ve long since passed the point where it’s safe to say that barring a radical change to the way the game is played that Teddy Ballgame will remain the final .400 hitter.

The MVP follow-up season article discussed the tendency of MVP award winners to regress the following season. That makes intuitive sense, an MVP winner by definition theoretically has the best year of anyone else in the game; it would stand to reason that from there the only place to go is down. The 1975 winners were Fred Lynn, who had another terrific year in ‘76 but nowhere near the level of his ‘75 season, and Joe Morgan, who followed up his ‘75 with an arguably even better year in ‘76 along with a second consecutive MVP trophy. The article mentioned that his RBI numbers could go up even further in that season, being that he would be hitting #3 in the order all season. That is absolutely what happened.

Sports writers at the time loved to bring up the so-called California Angels curse. They tried to attribute every misfortune the team suffered - from injuries to promising young stars, to promising prospects that did not pan out, to, yes, players that died tragically young - to some sort of franchise wide jinx. I would guess that the Angels did not suffer calamity any more frequently than other teams, but once the story grew legs any bad thing that ever happened to an Angel was chalked up to the curse. That only grew a few years later when Lyman Bostock was murdered in 1978; I don’t remember if this was still a talking point when Donnie Moore committed suicide in 1989. Better to end this paragraph on a lighter note; check out the photo of Bobby Valentine. (His fate was part of the curse; he suffered a career-altering ankle injury when his spikes were caught on the outfield fence while attempting to make a catch.)

The magazine surveyed a group of notable retired pitchers (Jim Brosnan, Don Drysdale, Carl Erskine, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, Robin Roberts, Johnny Sain, Warren Spahn, Early Wynn) and asked for their selections of the top young pitchers in the game. The consensus picks were John Montefusco in the NL & Frank Tanana in the AL. In hindsight one of those was a better choice than the other. Finally, in that Bernie Carbo article the phrase “making of a legend” is doing a lot of work. He did hit a crucial game-tying pinch hit 3 run home run in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series that made Carlton Fish’s later heroics possible. Does that make one a legend? You decide.

SNL Status Report

The final trio of this season’s SNL episodes begins next week, so this is as good a time as any to play our favorite game - Who Will Be Back Next Year? Remember, next season is #50; it would make sense that any cast member who is in position to make the decision for themselves and not have their fate in Lorne’s hands likely has every incentive to want to be part of such a milestone. Or to put it another way; Kenan is eventually going to leave the show. I can’t imagine that this year would be the one. What about everyone else?

First things first - the featured players. Nowadays they go through a two year apprenticeship before they are promoted to the main cast, regardless of how big of a splash they make. Marcello Hernandez has clearly become a focal point for the show, so he is safe. I’ll say the same for Devon Walker. He did not make much of an impression in his first season, but he has become a valuable utility player this year. I’m less confident in the futures of Molly Kearney and Michael Longfellow. Neither have fully devolved into Luke Null levels of obsolescence, but both have had too many episodes in which they are barely seen beyond the closing goodbyes. My guess is that neither will return. Chloe Trost has a promising future. She has had her share of rookie dues paying - having to settle for being the fourth most vital person in a sketch. But there is always a place for a talented singer in the cast and the show frequently seizes the opportunity to tap into that skill of hers.

If the show has a current #1 star in the hierarchy, other than Kenan of course, it is Bowen Yang. He will clearly return. Andrew Dismukes and Chloe Fineman are both in that sweet spot of tenure; on the show long enough to have established themselves, but not quite long enough that you get the sense that they are starting to get wanderlust. Sarah Sherman has shown a lot of growth this year. She has carved out a special niche that showcases her signature weirdness, but this year she has increasingly expanded her stage time into characters that are not necessarily tailored specifically for Sarah Squirm eccentricity.

The most valuable members of the cast tend to be the show anchors, particularly if they are also talented impressionists. You know, a Phil Hartman type. Someone who can be the centerpiece of a sketch and can just as easily tap into acting skills to create a side character that helps flesh out a sketch. That describes James Austin Johnson to a T. Ego Nwodim falls into this category as well.

I get the feeling that Mikey Day is preparing his exit strategy. It might be a little tricky being that he is the show’s current Joe Biden, but on the other hand it’s not as if his Biden impression is so iconic that it’s irreplaceable. Believe it or not this is already his 8th season. I’m not sure what to think about Heidi Gardner. Ideally she should be as much of an anchor as JAJ & Ego, but too often she is a victim of the overstuffed cast. It might be time for her to fly out of her cage. Punkie Johnson’s stage time varies widely from episode to episode. She is in the same place that Melissa Villasenor was; the show doesn’t quite know what to do with her.

Finally, there is Che & Jost. Seth Meyers recently celebrated his 10th anniversary as host of Late Night, which also means that Colin Jost has been the Update co-anchor for 10 years, with Michael Che there almost as long. It’s time for some new blood in those chairs, and their eventual departure will almost certainly be a package deal. I can’t imagine that one would leave and one would stay. However, Update is such an important portion of the show. Would Lorne want to make such a big decision at the same time that he’s focusing on the preparation for the 50th year celebration? My heart tells me it’s time to move on, but my head tells me that Lorne will make it worth their while to come back for one more year.

So, this is one man’s educated guess:

Definitely returning: Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson, Chloe Trost, Devon Walker, Bowen Yang

Probably leaving, either voluntarily or involuntarily: Mikey Day, Punkie Johnson, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow

50/50: Michael Che, Heidi Gardner, Colin Jost

TV Of the 21st Century - Arrow

This isn’t specific praise of the show Arrow as much as general praise for the entire Arrowverse series of shows that were made from DC Comics properties. (I would probably choose Supergirl as the very best of these shows. Melissa Benoist’s work was legitimately Emmy-worthy. And I truly believe that of all of the actors that have portrayed Lex Luthor over the years, Jon Cryer was the very best.)

As I have said in the past, in my comic book collecting days I was a DC loyalist. Marvel of course dominated the movies, but DC had the better track record when it came to TV series. It seems fitting that Green Arrow was the character that ignited the spark in DC’s TV universe. Just like the MCU, DC built things up from a character outside of the pantheon level of their character base. Iron Man is higher up in the Marvel hierarchy than Green Arrow is in the DC one - or at the very least he had always been more well-known outside of comics fandom - but otherwise I believe the parallel holds. They took a character that was well known, but not too well known, and built everything out from that nucleus.

As a long time comic fan, I always got special enjoyment in seeing characters from that deep well of IP that were not previously seen a thousand times in all sorts of other visual media. This wasn’t the first TV appearance for Green Arrow himself - a pre-This Is Us Justin Hartley portrayed him for years on Smallville - but over the years many other characters from DC’s deep bench made their initial live action appearances in one Arrowverse show or another, beginning with Deathstroke early on in Arrow’s run.

Comic book properties can be tricky to pull off. The two most obvious hurdles are the fact that things such as character names or names of objects (see, Mother Box) may read well on the printed page but sound very awkward when actors read them out loud, and that costumes and/or physiques of female heroes are very implausible in real life. It’s also true that to prevent scaring off new readers the publishers frequently reboot the entire universes. To take Green Arrow as an example, the knowledge that I have of the character’s history may not have necessarily matched his then-current back story when the TV show premiered.

His classic origin story is that he was millionaire playboy Oliver Queen, whose yacht was seized by criminals after which he wound up stranded on a remote island. He taught himself archery skills in order to survive, and after finally being rescued he used those skills to become a masked crimefighter. In the TV series his time on the island lasted 5 years, but despite the story he told to the public, he was not alone on the island. Instead, there was a convoluted back tale of a secret organization training super soldiers. The first 5 seasons of the series frequently flashed back to the time on island and drew parallels between the way his ordeals on the island forced him to mature out of being a superficial socialite along with his contemporary growth as a costumed vigilante.

Even though the show drew from decades worth of comic book stories, it was not fully beholden to comic canon. One crucial element of the Green Arrow story was the long-standing relationship between Green Arrow & Black Canary. Black Canary was a character in the series, but series creators soon recognized the chemistry between Oliver & computer hacker Felicity Smoak was too good to ignore and made those two the love story that ran throughout the show’s run. Also, in the comics Oliver was one of the very first of the classic DC characters that was given a distinct personality. He was an outspoken liberal who was too often annoyingly self-righteous, while also being aggressively chauvinistic. Those elements of his personality were severely toned down in the series.

All told, Arrow ran for a total of 8 seasons. although it was showing its age towards the end. In particular, it was starting to get a bit too bleak at times. Arrow was the centerpiece of the Arrowverse’s adapatation of the classic Crisis On Infinite Earths series. I enjoyed it, but without going too deeply into the weeds or giving any spoilers, I questioned some of the creative decisions that were made, while acknowledging the fact that in the comic series the two major character deaths were Supergirl & The Flash, which would have been impossible to duplicate being that they each headlined their own shows.

The upcoming season of Superman & Lois will be its last, which will bring the Arrowverse to a close. I won’t pretend that it matches the MCU as an overall achievement - the special effects were generally impressive, but the budgets were limited, so they couldn’t pull out all the stops very often. And the various shows relied too often on the Big Bad storytelling format; introducing one major villain who would dominate the entire season. Most of these shows ran full 22 episode seasons; that’s a lot of time to focus on only 1 bad guy week after week. But overall, the series really appealed to the inner geek inside of me.

Originally aired on: Arrow was on The CW, along with most of the affiliated series; some of the more recent ones aired on Max.

Currently steaming on: Same as above. Arrow is on Netflix; later series are on Max.

2 Updates

In the first part of my WNBA primer last week I mentioned that this could very well be the final season of Candace Parker’s career. Well, we didn’t even get that. Yesterday she mentioned that her foot injury is not healing well enough for her to continue her career, and she is retiring immediately. She leaves the game as a prime GOAT candidate, and as one of the avatars of the “can literally play any position” skill set that many of the league’s best players have. She is also proving herself to be just as talented with a microphone in her hand. Parker has been one of the most enjoyable players to watch.

In MLB, the ostrich approach to the uniforms has not worked, and finally something will be done to address this fiasco. Although it appears that the concern over the transparent pants was overblown, the miniscule lettering on the backs of the jerseys is unacceptable and all I can think of when I see the deep sweat stains on the unis is that it’s only April. I shudder to think of what the threads will look like once the humid weather kicks in. There will be new, improved uniforms by the beginning of the 2025 season.

Closing Laughs

Thanks as always for carving out a portion of your day to read my musings. See you all again on Wednesday.