Terry Francona 1990 Upper Deck

Before Terry Francona was the most beloved Red Sox manager of all time (he led them to the 2004 and 2007 World Series Championship, if you forgot and was a whisker from going back to the Fall Classic in 2008), he was a major league baseball player. 

I know it’s difficult to think of Francona as anything but the guy who sat at the end of the dugout in a Red Sox sweatshirt, but he was a well-regarded college player. He won the Golden Spikes in 1980 (which is the college version of MVP), won the MVP of the 1980 College World Series (that his University of Arizona team won) and was a first-round pick of the Montreal Expos. Add in that his father Tito (this is where he got that nickname, if you didn’t know) played in the Major Leagues for 15 years, and it appeared that Francona the younger was poised to be a star. 

Terry rocketed through the Montreal minor leagues and made his debut the year after he was drafted. He played in 34 games and started the season in the minors again, before coming up to stay in the second half of 1982.  

Francona didn’t have much of a position, he played a little outfield but in Montreal, they had two young, Hall of Famers in Andre Dawson and Tim Raines along with a bunch of other guys in rightfield. At first base was Al Oliver and in 1984 Francona got the opportunity to start, but he didn’t do much to establish himself as a star. The following year, he moved around a bit more and after the 1986 season, he was granted his release. 

From there he bounced around like a baseball vagabond: with stops in the North Side of Chicago in 1986, Cincinnati the following year, Cleveland the year after before winding up his career in Suds City in 1989. 

One of the things that people often say about baseball is that it’s a humbling game, and they’re right. If, at the beginning of the 1980s, you were to tell Francona that he’d end up bouncing around the Midwest hoping to latch onto a job; he’d have said you were nuts. He had the pedigree and not only that, but at every level he played at, not only was he successful; but he was among the most successful. 

I’m not sure how rapid failure, or in Francona’s case, rapid mediocrity can screw with your brain, but it must make you crazy. How can you hit like Ted Williams at multiple levels, but be stuck behind Warren fucking Cromartie at the ultimate level? Was Warren Cromartie that much better than you? Did he work harder than you? What was his secret?

I once read an interview with an athlete (I can’t recall who, and honestly it doesn’t matter) where the interviewer talked about how great it must be to a professional athlete. “You play a kid’s game and you get showered with money and praise and adulation! It must be wonderful!” And the athlete said that for stars, that kind of life is wonderful; but the majority of professional athletes aren’t stars. They’re constantly stressed out of their minds that someone is going to take their job or that their manager has a bug up their ass about them or that they’re going to lose their athleticism. Not only that but their General Manager is always looking to replace them with someone younger and cheaper. And the media is highlighting their latest screw up and that asshole in the stands is yelling at them. They live in constant fear and doubt.

It sounds like an incredibly stressful situation and I’m kinda shocked that an athlete hasn’t broken and pulled a “Last Boy Scout” yet. 

For Francona he had to live with this paranoia just like everyone else, but he also had to live with the stain of being a disappointment. That’s a lot of baggage to foist on to one person. And I think that’s why he was such a good manager. He understood what it was like to be a star and he understood what it was like to be a scrub. He got that the fear of losing this professional life, this money, this lottery ticket all of this weighed heavily on 99% of his players. He was able to coax greatness out of them because he understood them in a way that few had. 

Ted Williams was an incredible baseball player, but he was a shitty manager. In the late 60s, he managed the Washington Senators and when they moved west to Dallas, he managed the Texas Rangers for a little bit too. The one thing that Williams could never understand is why his players couldn't hit like him.

Ted Williams was probably the greatest pure hitter that ever lived. And while he studied the hell out of hitting, he had a truly unique innate ability to marry the transfer of his weight and otherworldly hand-eye-coordination to smash a spherical object thrown at great speed with another rounded object, hitting that first object very, very far. It's not easy. Every hit is a complex calculation that your brain conducts where it determines the speed of what's being thrown at you with the ability to guess where this thing is going to be in .004 seconds. Even for major league hitters, hitting isn't easy. Shit, in his greatest season ever, Williams failed 59.4% of the time.

But his inability to understand that his charges are doing their best routinely flummoxed him. 

Not so for Francona. He understood that the game of baseball is hard, that hitting a baseball is even harder still. Not only that, but he was able to express this understanding of the game's frustration. And I think that’s also why he was Michael Jordan’s first manager when MJ rode the busses in the mid 90s and called Birmingham home for a summer. Francona sorta understood what it was like to be a star (maybe not a Michael Jordan star) and he grew up in major league locker rooms, so he also wasn’t star struck either. 

Was Terry Francona perfect? No. Probably not. But for a sport like baseball with its litany of imperfect people, he does just fine. 

Kirk Gibson 1988 Topps Traded

On June 8, 2016, I received the above card in my mailbox. That same day I wrote this on Facebook:

Look who showed up with the mail today, the patron saint of Michigan: Kirk Gibson. Aside from hitting one of the most notable home runs ever, since retirement Gibson has defined himself as baseball's answer to Mike Ditka. 

So you'll hear a lot from Gibby about "playing the game right", "unwritten rules" and bullshit like that. Even though a 14-year-old Byron Magrane woke up just in time to see that dinger--and it was pretty epic--if I knew that he'd be around this long yelling at kids to get off his lawn, I'd have just as soon as seen Eck strike him out. 

Thank you BCB for sending over one of baseball’s most annoying hard asses.

Before we get into the post, you know what's bananas? That Kirk Gibson Topps Traded card, looks almost like his regular card. Only the uniform is different. Uncanny!

(Maybe not exactly the same, but pretty close!)

Even when I was a kid, I didn’t really like Kirk Gibson very much. He always struck me as a man who wasn’t very pleasant, took things way too seriously and was probably just kind of a mean guy to be around. Not only that, but I was pretty sure that Kirk Gibson probably wouldn’t have liked me too much either.

Gibson was the type of player that sports writers loved and they always used words like “gamer” or “hustler” or “intense” when they wrote these loving stories about him. Like Gibson was some sort of hulked up avatar for themselves. Like if they were athletes, they would be Kirk Gibson: clutch, tough, not afraid to call out a teammate for being lazy, stuff like that. Kirk Gibson was a real man.

Though I could be just projecting. Who knows. 

Kirk Gibson looked like the type of guy who lived in the woods. The only time he came out to pleasant society is when it was time to hit some cowhide with a hunk of wood real far. He had a permanent scowl to go along with his perpetual five o’clock shadow and longish hair. His hair wasn’t long because he was a hippie, it was long because it appeared that he hadn’t had the wherewithal to find a barber. So he cut his shaggy mane with a pair of rusty scissors so that the damn stuff didn’t get in his eyes when he tried to mash homers at the most opportune times.

If Kirk Gibson was a state, he’d be Michigan. It wasn’t just the fact that he went to the University of Michigan (what the hell did he major in there? Did he just hang around the anthropology department as proof of the ‘Missing Link’?) and played for the Tigers. As a kid, when I heard Michigan I didn’t think of Motown or Detroit, those were civilized areas of another place. I thought of Gibson. I thought of woods. Hunting and fishing. I’m not sure why, but I did.

So when Gibson left the Tigers for the Dodgers, that was a real shock to me. Kirk Gibson is going Hollywood? Oh, this is going to end really poorly for the Dodgers. Why would they make such a dumb move? They just picked up Jay Howell and Mike Davis and Alfredo Griffin. I had a weird sense of who really was a good baseball played back when I was a kid. BTW, weird meaning bad. They have Orel Hershiser and Steve Sax and Mike Scioscsca. Why do they need Kirk Gibson?

Like Andre Dawson, Gibson was also a victim of ownership-based collusion in the mid 80s. Unlike the Hawk, an arbitrator decided the Gibson and some other players were automatically free agents due to owners being jerks and trying to destroy free agency. The contracts they signed were voided. He went to L.A. and immediately became their team leader.  The Dodgers imported veteran reliever Jesse Orosco from the Mets. He thought that it would be a funny idea to put eye black in Gibson’s hat. It’s kind of a lame prank, mostly because baseball players have lame senses of humor, but Gibson went fucking crazy.

He said that the Dodgers sucked, they were a bunch of clowns, this is why they were in fourth place the year before, they weren’t professional and more. He pretty much had a hissy fit and normally most people would be like, “Man, this asshole is wound a little tight.” But this is sports and people loved this. They thought that this was the greatest thing in the world. People were lauding Gibson from coast to coast, saying that baseball needed more people like him and other things that sportswriters write when an athlete rips another athlete.

Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda love this too. He thought it was great because he can be the cool guy and Gibson could be the hard-ass. That worked well for Lasorda. 

(Hello Katarina Witt!) 

The thing is, it worked. The Dodgers won the west, beat the heavily favored Mets in the playoffs and then shocked the mighty Athletics in the World Series. As I wrote above, he hit one of the most dramatic and famous homeruns of Dennis Eckersley in the ninth inning of Game One. I know that these things tend to get blown out of proportion, but this was a huge homer.

Eckersley was on another level that year and he was mowing down people left and right, he had 45 saves, a 2.35 ERA (which seems high, to be honest), he struck out 70 guys and walked five. All year. He wasn’t THE Dennis Eckersley yet (he’d get better in subsequent years) but he was pretty damn close. The fact that Gibson took him deep, just like he did to another Hall of Famer Rich Gossage in the 1984 World Series albeit in a less dramatic fashion, says something about Gibson.

I recall where I was when he hit that homerun. I was home, asleep with the TV on when I woke up after Mike Davis walked. Then Gibson came up as I was rubbing sleep from eyes. This seemed big and I wanted to watch it. Gibson wasn’t even supposed to play that night, and in fact, it was his only at bat of the Series – Gibson got hurt a lot. I was a big time A’s fan back then and I couldn’t believe it when Gibson hit that dinger.

The great thing about that moment is that no one believed it could happen. You can see cars pulling out of Dodger Stadium in the background, just beyond the bleachers, as Gibson is rounding the bases.

Gibson won the National League Most Valuable Player that year, though the award should have gone to Mets outfielder Daryl Strawberry. If only Strawberry pulled a shit fit at the beginning of Spring Training that year, perhaps he’d have that award on his mantle today. Interesting trivia: Kirk Gibson is still the only MVP who never played in an All-Star Game. Not one. Ever. It wasn’t because he wasn’t invited, he made sure everyone knew that he wasn’t playing. He was using the three days off to go home and rest.

Gibson was never the same player as he was in 1988. Injuries took his toll, aside from playing 132 with the Royals and 116 in a second go-around with the Tigers, he never played more than a 100 games in a season again. He bounced from the aforementioned Royals to the Pirates back to the Tigers and then called it quits. He managed a couple of years in Arizona, winning the Manager of the Year in his second season, but I don’t remember him being very good. Maybe he was too much of a hard-ass, maybe the players didn’t give a shit what he had done, maybe he just couldn’t manage a pitching staff. I don’t know. But as of this writing, he’s been unemployed for three seasons and I’ve never heard a rumor of him being considered for a job.

Whether that’s because that’s his decision or the baseball world’s, is unknown.

Andre Dawson 1986 Topps

On June 4, 2016, I received the above card from the Baseball Card Bandit. That day, I wrote this on Facebook:

After about a week of hiding, the Baseball Card Bandit reappears with Hall of Famer and subject of an awkward rhyme: Awesome Andre Dawson. (Awesome and Dawson don't rhyme.)

Anyway, what the BBC doesn't know is that I witnessed Dawson's 400th homer in person as a young college lad. The Hawk and I are connected via round numbers.

For a long time, I’m not so sure if it’s true now, the mantra for every comic book writer was something to the effect of, this issue could be someone’s first issue, so you have to explain everything. This is why if you binge read a collection of comics from the 60s, 70s or 80s, it seems incredibly repetitive. Plots are retold, powers and secret identities are re-explained and things don’t seem to really get going until page 5 or 6. They didn’t want to lose readers.

The same mantra should have been uttered by baseball card photographers during those times too. Andre Dawson was an incredibly exciting player who happened to play in baseball Siberia: Montreal. It was dark, dreary and growing up an American League city, I didn’t get to see them play that much because the Expos were rarely on Saturday’s Game of the Week*.

** The wasn’t exactly true. Since there once was a high population of French Canadians that settled in my town, Amesbury’s cable company (this was before there were three or four national cable providers, most towns had their own little mom and pop operation so channels varied widely from town-to-town) had a Montreal station as part of its basic package. The entire channel was in French and not only did they show those terrible old Marvel Comics cartoons from the 1960s dubbed in French, but they also ran Canadiens games and once in a while, Expos games. I would never watch the games though, for some reason seeing the quality of the broadcast combined with the French language, freaked me out. I’d change the channel immediately. Other than that, I do remember in 1987 when the Expos were on NBC’s Saturday Game of the Week. Tim Raines was making his return to the Expos lineup after being held out of games for a month. Back then, if you were a free agent and didn’t sign with your team by mid-January (I think), you weren’t allowed to negotiate with your team until May 1. Which is a fucking insane rule, but with owner collusion (they all decided not to sign free agents) and this rule, Raines wasn’t able to rejoin the Expos until the beginning of May. The day he returned, he destroyed Mets pitching going 4-4 and hitting a grand slam in the top of the tenth inning. He was awesome.

Damn, that was a long detour. Anyway, the point was this baseball card sucks. It’s Dawson, without a hat in a blue practice jersey in front of a blue wall. He looks like a regular dude just sitting around. When I first pulled this card from a pack, I hated it. It’s boring and I never heard of him before, which meant that Andre Dawson must not have been very good. I was incredibly wrong. Dawson didn’t suck, he was actually incredibly good. I just didn’t get it then.

Like Raines, Dawson was part of that 1986-87 free agent class of players who were found by a court to be unlawfully colluded against. Aside from Raines, Red Sox catcher Rich Gedman was in the May 1 situation, and it seemed as if he never bounced back from not having a spring training that year. He was terrible in 1987, worse in 88 and was relegated to a backup for the rest of his career. As a two-time All Star in 1985 and 86, this was an ignominious way to end his career. But unlike Gedman and Raines, Dawson didn’t wait until May 1 to return to the Expos. Unlike fellow free agent, Jack Morris, he didn’t crawl back to his old club and accepted whatever pittance they gave him.

Dawson believed in himself and knew that he was getting screwed, so he did what he felt was best: he went to the Chicago Cubs and basically said, “I need to get off of the turf in Montreal (it completely destroyed his knees) and I want to play for the Cubs. Here is a blank contract, fill it in for what you think I’m worth and then we’ll renegotiate.” The Cubs were over a barrel here, on one hand the team felt that they had to be loyal to the rest of the owners but on the other hand, they were terrible and Dawson was practically giving himself to them. They settled on a $500,000 contract plus bonuses if he played well.

Dawson played out of his mind in 1987.  He led the National League in home runs with 49 and runs batted in with 137 (this is when people gave a shit about RBIs). Writers were so impressed that despite finishing in dead last place, Andre Dawson won the National League’s Most Valuable Player. And he only made $700,000. The following offseason, the Cubs signed him to a much better contract and all was right with the world. Aside from the homers, the one thing that I remember most about Dawson is when he got drilled in the face by Padres pitcher Eric Show. Sports Illustrated captured the picture and put it on that week's cover:

From what I remember Eric Show was a bit of a prick.  He hit Dawson on purpose because the Hawk had hit three homers in five at bats against San Diego. Seems like a good reason to break a guy's cheek bone. But according to Wikipedia, Show was busted using meth a few years later. So, there may have been a reasons for this. 

After his seasons in Chicago, he went to the Red Sox where he played on some truly terrible teams before ending up going home to his native Florida and playing out the string as a Marlin. By the time he played for those two organizations, he was in his late 30s. Age and injuries robbed these fans of seeing the vibrancy of a young Andre Dawson, instead he plodded along occasionally hitting a homer, trying to fight the inevitable one at bat at a time.

Andre Dawson had a fantastic career, he slugged over 400 homers, stole over 300 bases, and had a career OPS+ of 119. He ended up getting the call to the Hall of Fame in 2010 and he’s widely considered one of the all-time great outfielders. But there are always the questions of what if that plague him. What if he didn’t play in Montreal? What if he didn’t play 81 games on the turf of Olympic Stadium?

When he was younger, Andre Dawson was amazing. He could run, he could hit for power and average, he had a plus arm and was a tremendous defender. By playing in Montreal and especially on the “turf” (which seemed to be green-painted concrete) Dawson’s knees were brutalized. He was always hurt, or when he was “healthy” he spent hours icing his knees and legs to make sure that he was ready to go the next day.

Imagine if Dawson played his entire career in a big baseball mecca like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles? More people would know the Hawk and dopey kids in Amesbury, Massachusetts wouldn’t look at his baseball card and immediately assume that he stunk based only on a terrible photo.