Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Cool, Comfortable and (Tom) Terrific

In these hot and humid dog days of summer, the well-dressed gentleman wants to stay cool and comfortable, yet remain fashionable. So take Tom Seaver's tip, and get you some short-sleeved dress shirts made of Dacron-infused Perma-Prest ("the remarkable new stretch fabric") from Sears — and maybe some oar-wide op-art ties to go with 'em!

Joe Pepitone's Thing

A big tip o' the Monsanto Toupeé to fellow author and baseball obsessive Maxwell Kates, who dug up this amazing 1972 file photo of Joe Pepitone (taken on my sixth birthday!) and posted it on the Big Hair & Plastic Grass Facebook page.

As some of you know by now, Joe Pepitone is one of my favorite baseball characters — his autobiography, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, totally blew my 12 year-old mind when I first read it, and its Ball Four meets Goodfellas meets Penthouse Forum content still makes for a fantastically entertaining read today.

It was in that book that I first heard about Joe's short-lived cocktail lounge, the superbly-named Joe Pepitone's Thing. Located on Division Street, in the heart of Chicago's swingin' singles bar district, the place didn't last long — the Cubs weren't exactly happy about their priapic first baseman's open embrace of Windy City nightlife, and widespread suspicions that the business venture was backed with mob money didn't help things much.

But if I had a time machine, Joe Pepitone's Thing would be one of the first stops I'd make. I can just picture walking into the place, and pushing my way into the smoky darkness past the drunken day-traders and flirtatious flight attendants, to find Pepi holding court at the bar in some fashionable knit leisure wear, a gold medallion, and that ever-present hairpiece...

Aside from a photo from Pepi's book, and matchbook I once saw on an auction site, this pic is the only evidence I've ever seen of the bar's existence. While I'm not much of a memorabilia collector, I would honestly give my right muttonchop for something, anything from Joe Pepitone's Thing — matchbook, ashtray, beer glass, souvenir coke spoon, etc. If any of you riders out there on the Big Hair & Plastic Grass groove line can hook a brother up, please get in touch!

Happy Bird Day!

I know it should be easy as falling off a dugout bench, but writing about Mark Fidrych is difficult for me.

No other player better embodies the joy that baseball (and life) brings me, and no other player had as much to do with my falling in love with the game in the first place — unless you count certain members of the Bad News Bears, who hit the big screen the same spring that "The Bird" took flight in the big leagues.

Fidrych's 1976 season was indeed magical — 19-9, a league-leading 2.34 ERA and 24complete games, AL Rookie of the Year and runner-up in the AL Cy Young voting, and the guy didn't even get his first start until the middle of May — and its magic rubbed off on the rest of the sport. We had no way of knowing that the magic would evaporate so quickly...

There is so much one can write about, from his mound-manicuring and ball-chatting antics, to the guileless, child-like pleasure he took in every game, to his unfulfilled promise, to his horrific and untimely death. But today, on what would have been The Bird's 57th birthday, I find that I'm just not up to the task; I have no wish to dwell in the sadness, and I feel like there's no way to really sum up what he meant to me without somehow diminishing the magic. He just was — and I was lucky enough to be a baseball fan the year the Bird flew so close to the sun.

I would, however, highly recommend this touching blog post which Josh Wilker of Cardboard Gods hipped me to, which was written by photographer Joe McNally shortly after Fidrych's passing in 2009. You may need to keep a coupla tissues handy, though...

But I would also like to say this: At a time when concepts like empathy and understanding are openly mocked by politicians and the media, when complex truths are shunted aside in favor of soundbites, and this country seems more catastrophically divided than ever, it's worth remembering the radiant joy that Mark Fidrych brought to our troubled and confused nation during its Bicentennial year — and that he did it by being open-hearted, genuine, and completely true to himself. There's a valuable lesson in there somewhere.

Rest in Peace, Maahk. You were friggin' awesome; I'm sad that you're gone, but I'm damn grateful that you were born.

 

The Saver

Check out this really cool ABC News profile on a pre-moustache Sparky Lyle from 1972. Aside from its archival value, the clip is interesting for a couple of reasons: For one, there's the story's "The Yankees are good again" angle; in truth, the Yankees were a much better team in 1970, finishing 2nd in the AL East with a 93-69 record, though they still wound up 15 games behind the impressive Orioles. They would would only finish 4th in the strike-shortened '72 season with a 79-76 record, but they were at least "in the hunt" for a playoff berth until late September; and since, at this point, it had been eight years — a veritable eon for Yankee fans — since the franchise had even made it to the post-season (and ten since they'd won a World Series), the re-emergence of the Yanks as "winners" was newsworthy in itself.

The other thing that's interesting is that the term "Closer" isn't uttered anywhere in the piece, though that was clearly Sparky's role. Instead, he is referred to several times as "The Saver," because he's the one getting the "saves". The Save was a fairly new statistic in baseball at that time; invented by baseball writer Jerome Holtzman in 1960 as a way to measure a reliever's effectiveness, it didn't become an "official" stat until 1969. Sparky racked up a league-leading 35 of them in 1972, but the way he went about it was far different than today's pampered, "only bring me in if there's a save opportunity" closers. It wasn't uncommon for Sparky to pitch three or even more innngs to close out a game and get the save; in 59 appearances in 1972, he threw 107.2 innings. Hell, in one 1972 game, a 18-10 extra innings victory over the White Sox on June 3, Sparky pitched FIVE scoreless innings, keeping his team in the game until they exploded for eight runs in the 13th off of Bart Johnson. No save there for Sparky — he got the win.

The Save — and what qualifies as such — has gone through multiple headache-inducing permutations since 1969, none of which are worth going into here. Suffice to say that both the stat and the relievers who rack them up are much different animals now than they were in the 70s. And suffice to say that I miss the days when a fireman would battle his way to the end of a tough game, rather than just waltzing in at the top of the 9th with the bases empty and a three-run lead. Salut, Sparky!

Out Of Left Field

While doing the research for Big Hair & Plastic Grass, I combed through hundreds of books and periodicals from the era, but one book somehow eluded me — Bob Adelman and Susan Hall's Out Of Left Field: Willie Stargell and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Long out of print, I recently found a used hardcover copy of the 1976 first edition via Amazon; and while there isn't much in there that would have appreciably changed the content of my book, it is a really fascinating read, and one I highly recommend to fans of the era, if you can find it.

Adelman and Hall had the sort of access to Stargell and the Pirates that you would never imagine today, especially considering that they were working on an "unauthorized" book. They followed the team for the entire '73 season, a tumultuous and frustrating campaign that saw the Bucs struggling to adjust to the sudden loss of their leader, Roberto Clemente, and to the equally sudden meltdown of former ace Steve Blass. Manager Bill Virdon was eventually fired with a month left to go in the season, but all new/old manager Danny Murtaugh could coax out of the team was a .500 September and a disappointing third-place finish behind the Mets and the Cardinals.

Out of Left Field paints a surprisingly intimate portrait of this lost season, with many of the players (Stargell, Richie Zisk, Manny Sanguillen, Richie Hebner, Al Oliver, Dock Ellis) offering surprisingly frank assessments of their lives and their team that go well beyond the usual clichés and platitudes. While Adelman and Hall offer little in the way of historical context, and many of their photos are frustratingly un-captioned — and if my lack of SABR-style number-crunching in BH&PG pissed you off, you're really gonna hate this book — they do a great job of getting out of the way and let the players tell their story.

The book includes groupie tales and other snapshots of life on the road, as well as an ongoing discussion of racism, both in the game and within the context of the team. Most interesting to me is the assertion from several players that racism played a role in the team's attempted move of Sanguillen — a highly respected catcher — to right field in the wake of Clemente's death. The black and Latin players interviewed, for the most part, seem to think that the move was motivated by the front office's desire to add more white players to the lineup: therefore, instead of putting the speedy Gene Clines in right field, Pirates management put Sangy out there and brought (the white) Milt May in to catch, because white Pittsburgh fans aren't down with a mostly-minority lineup. Management, of course, denies that this is remotely the case... but eventually, Sangy's ineptitude in right (and his potent bat) will help him reclaim his rightful position behind the plate. Even so, Clines will lose the right field position to a young Polish slugger named Richie Zisk...

Of course, Bob Adelman's photos tell a story all their own. The book contains over a hundred beautiful black and white shots of the players on and off the field, and I've scanned a few of my favorites:

Here's pitcher Nelson Briles, who led the team's starters that year with 14 victories and a 2.85 ERA — and who talks in the book about pursuing a full-time entertainment career once his playing days are over — working on a song in the clubhouse.

Here's Al Oliver and his wife, lookin' fly and preparing for a night on the town.

Here's Dock Ellis, lookin' cool as he heckles an umpire from the dugout.

Here's Pops himself, gettin' down with some funky friends during a party at his house.

And my personal favorite: A fantastic Dock-in-curlers shot that I'd never seen before...

Somewhat controversial in its day — "Passages about some team-mates might make Ball Four read like a nursery rhyme," commented the New York Times at the time — Out of Left Field isn't so shocking now, but it is a beautifully-observed time capsule from a complex era. It would be lovely to see it come back into print again.

Let's 'Fro Mets!!! (Part 2)

As a fan, student and historian of 70s baseball, I always dig it on the rare occasions when I see the afro hairdo returning to the diamond. Earlier this year, it was Coco Crisp sporting a voluminous 'fro; now, Mets reliever Manny Acosta is getting into the afro-licious act.

I caught Manny's impressive new 'do last week while watching game highlights on the MLB Network; Manny's impressive 'fro got some well-deserved camera time, but studio analysts/blowhards Mitch Williams and Larry Bowa were so appalled by it, they could barely muster a comment beyond a combined grumble and snort. Alas, the only photographic evidence that I've been able to find online of it is this screen-grab from the Meet the Mess website; they don't seem to think much of it, either, saying that "Manny should be embarrassed either by that ERA [5.40] or that 1970's hairdo."

Me, I think it's awesome — not the ERA, of course, but the 'fro is something that would surely make Nino Espinosa and Billy Baldwin proud. The several-sizes-too-large jersey, on the other hand...

Short Takes

God Bless Bill Veeck. No baseball owner before or after him has ever brought as much love, passion and innovation to the game. And even when he got it wrong, he got it gloriously, unforgettably wrong — like with 1979's Disco Demolition Night, or 1976's uniform shorts.

The White Sox bermudas were so ugly, so ill-conceived, so utterly traumatizing, that they've wound up looming larger in the imaginations of Sox fans (and baseball fans in general) than they perhaps deserve. To this day, I continue to meet people who INSIST that the Sox wore them for the entire 1976 season, when in fact they didn't actually make their official debut until August 8, 1976, when the Sox played the Royals in the first game of a Sunday double-header. Despite their own embarrassment and the merciless mocking of their opponents, the hapless Sox (who would finish the season with a 64-97 record) actually beat the soon-to-be AL West champs 5-2 while wearing shorts.

There are two statistical oddities that stand out for me in that box score. First off, future Hall of Fame reliever Rich Gossage (pictured above) — who had been converted to a starter for 1976, a conversion that would be permanently reversed as soon as the Sox traded him to the Pirates over the winter — notched his lone save of the 1976 season in that game. Second, the White Sox managed to steal FIVE bases in the game, probably because the Royals figured they wouldn't risk skinning their knees on a hard slide into second. Two of the swipes were by Sox speedsters Jorge Orta and Pat Kelly, but Jerry Hairston, Jack Brohamer and Jim Essian all nabbed their first steals of the season in that game; Essian, a man who would steal only 9 total bases in 12 major league seasons, stole his first career bag that day. Royals catcher Buck Martinez must have been laughing too hard to get off a decent throw.

The other, more understandable myth about the shorts is that they were only worn once; however, they made at least two more regular-season appearances before the weather turned cold that year. The weekend of August 21-22 saw them donned twice against the Orioles. The shorts-clad Sox actually beat the far superior O's 11-10 on the 21st; Ralph "Roadrunner" Garr (pictured above) doesn't look too happy about being called in to pinch-run while wearing such leg-bearing fashions, but he still managed to steal a key base in the 9th before scoring the game-tying run on Pat Kelly's single. Alas, the magic of the shorts didn't hold up the next day, when they lost 6-2 in the first game of a double-header, thanks to Reggie Jackson's pinch-hit grand slam off of Terry Forster in the top of the 9th. Home movie clips from that game can be see in this awesome YouTube video, which includes some choice shots of Comiskey Park, Reggie's grand slam, a between-games beer crate-stacking competition, and of course the infamous shorts.

And that was it for the White Sox shorts... or was it? The Topps 1977 White Sox team card shows the team once again outfitted with them, but I'm pretty sure it was just a shot that was left over from 1976 and (humorously) recycled for the '77 card series. I'd swear on a stack of Dock Ellis hair curlers that that's Terry Forster at the far left of the back row and Pat Kelly third from left in the front; both players were shipped off to other, better teams (Pittsburgh and Baltimore, respectively) shortly after the '76 campaign ended.

Regularly namechecked at the top of "worst/ugliest baseball uniforms" lists, the White Sox shorts have yet to be revived for any sort of "throwback night" festivities. Whaddaya think, folks? Is it time for the shorts to make a comeback, even if only for a night?

Happy Bernie Carbo Day!

 
Before this day slips away from me entirely, I must pay tribute to Bernie Carbo — one of 70s baseball's biggest flakes — on his 64th birthday. I wish I had time to go into a little more detail here, but suffice to say that Carbo never lived up to his massive potential, probably due to the fact that (to hear him tell it now) he was pretty much wasted on a wide variety of substances during just about every major league game he played. Which would, of course, explain the jaw-droppingly pathetic swing he took in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, right before his heroic, game-tying homer. (The at-bat in question starts around the 3:59 mark...

Carbo was, by all accounts, a real flower child — sweet, gentle and completely spaced out — and one who was truly loved by many of his colleagues, despite his eccentricities and often maddening work habits. Sparky Anderson adored him when he came up with the Reds, but just about tore his prematurely white hair out over Bernardo's sudden slide from a stellar rookie season (.310 avg, 454 slg, 21 HR in 1970) to mind-boggling suckitude (.219, .338, 5 hr) the following year. Sadly, Carbo has since revealed that his inability to focus in those days — and his compulsive self-medication — stemmed from the need numb the trauma left over from being molested as a kid. Which puts a rather poignant spin on the otherwise goofy story of the time Bernie came to Red Sox spring training in the company of a large stuffed gorilla called "Mighty Joe Young," which had been given to him by fellow oddball (and former Cardinals teammate) Scipio Spinks. Bernie and the monkey were inseparable...

Carbo bounced around quite a bit over the course of his 12-year major league career, playing for the Reds, the Cardinals (twice), the Red Sox (twice), the Brewers, the Indians and the Pirates. He signed on with his hometown Tigers in 1981, but finally threw in the towel after hitting .190 for their Evansville farm team that summer. He did, however, open up Monsieur Bernardo's Beauty Salon in Detroit around that time, as befit a man with refined tastes and an impressive head of curls...

 

The Split-Finger Splits

On this day in 1977, the Cubs put their ace reliever, Bruce Sutter, on the 21-day disabled list due to arm troubles. While this roster move won't be a particularly momentous milestone in Sutter's career — he will still finish the season with a 1.34 ERA and 31 saves, go on to win a Cy Young in '79, and lead the NL in saves five times on his way to a spot in Cooperstown — it WILL turn out to be fairly significant to the fate of the '77 Cubs.

In Chicago, the Summer of '77 is now fondly recalled as the summer of the "South Side Hitmen" — a summer of "Pitch at Risk to Richie Zisk" signs, Oscar Gamble's luxuriant afro, showers in Comiskey Park's centerfield bleachers, Nancy Faust playing "Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye," and Bill Veeck's motley aggregation of cast-offs and rent-a-players surprising everyone by sitting atop the AL West for much of the summer.

Less well-remembered, however, is the fact that the Cubs were right up there with them. On August 1st, the last game Sutter pitched in before heading the DL, both the Cubs and the White Sox were in first place in their respective divisions; the Cubs, in fact, had led the NL East for two solid (and shocking) months by then, at one point even cruising to a 8.5 game lead over the Phillies and the Cardinals. For the first time in many years, there was even hopeful talk in the Windy City of an all-Chicago World Series.

The Northsiders looked even less intimidating on paper and in the field than their South Side counterparts; their biggest power threat by far was the aging Bobby Murcer (who would lead the team with 27 homers and 89 RBI); Larry Biittner, the team's top utility man, was second in the team home run column with 12. Part-time outfielder Greg Gross hit .322, while the other guys who hit .290 or better were Biittner (.298), Steve Ontiveros (.299), Jerry Morales (.290) and part-time OF Gene Clines (.293). Murderer's Row, or even the South Side Hitmen, they weren't.

Herman Franks' rotation was equally unimpressive — with the exception of hefty hurler Rick Reuschel, who would win 20 games that season with a 2.79 ERA, none of the other regular starters (Ray Burris, Bill Bonham and Mike Krukow) had winning records, ERAs under 4.36, or WHIPs under 1.34. And while the bullpen got a solid year out of a young reliever named Willie Hernandez (8-7, 3.03 ERA in 110 innings), it was their All-Star closer who really kept the Cubs in contention for much of the season. As of August 1st, Sutter had wielded his split-finger fastball in 47 of the Cubs' 99 games, often throwing — as they did back when closers were real men and not "specialists" — two- or even three-innings at a time for a save. His record at that point was 5-1 with 24 saves (he'd also blown 6), 101 strikeouts and a miniscule 1.06 ERA.

But alas, the strain of propping up the Cubs' house of cards proved too much for Sutter; and when he went on the DL this day in 1977, the bottom promptly fell out for the rest of the team. On the morning of August 3d, the Cubs were 62-42 and still two and a half games above the resurgent second-place Phillies. By the time Sutter returned to the bullpen on August 23rd, they had fallen to third place in the NL East, eight-and-a-half games back, and well on their way to a 81-81 record and a fourth-place finish.

The White Sox, of course, couldn't hold their division lead, either — though they still grasped it as late as August 19, there was no stopping the Royals who went 45-16 over the last two months of the season to effectively run away with the AL West. "Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye," indeed — and once again, there would be no post-season joy in Chi-town.

Ode To A Squatty Captain

This one, I still remember like it happened yesterday.

I was at my grandparents' apartment in Freeport, Long Island, spending a week with them during the first of what would become my annual summer visits to NYC. Just the day before, we'd gone to see Dock Ellis and the Mets get blown out by Greg Luzinski and the Phillies; watching the Mets get killed on a brutally hot day at Shea was a bummer, but that was all within what I'd already come to expect within the boundaries of experience as a baseball fan. The death of Thurman Munson, however, was not what I'd signed up for at all.

I remember being pretty freaked out the previous September when I'd heard that Lyman Bostock had been shot to death while stopped at an intersection in Gary, Indiana. But while I liked Lyman as a player, I felt no connection to him as a fan; I'd never seen him play in person, never saw him interviewed on TV, never rooted for his teams.

Thurman Munson, on the other hand, was the very embodiment of baseball to me. I saw him hit a home run in the first major league game I ever attended, a 4-0 defeat of the Tigers at Tiger Stadium. My Dad had scored us great seats behind home plate, about halfway up the stands, so I was able to observe Thurman at work. Even at the age of 10, I knew he was considered one of the top catchers in the game; and since that was right when I was going through the brief period of wanting to be a catcher (basically because the gear was cool, and you got to order the other players around on the field), I paid close attention to every move he made that day.

Squat, scruffy, surly and hard as nails, Munson had been named the Yankees' team captain in the spring of '76, their first since the great Lou Gehrig. He more than lived up to the honor that season, making the All-Star team for the fourth year in a row, hitting .302 with 17 homers and 105 RBI, and leading the Yankees to their first World Series appearance in a dozen seasons. That was the only season I ever actively rooted for the Yankees — I loved that pre-Reggie team with Mickey Rivers, Lou Piniella, Roy White, Chris Chambliss, Graig Nettles, Sparky Lyle (pictured above), Catfish Hunter, Ed Figueroa and, of course, Dock Ellis — and I remember watching crestfallen as the Reds kicked the shit outta them in the October Classic. Thurman hit .529 for the Series, second only to World Series MVP Johnny Bench's .533 mark — but the rest of the team hit .178, and he couldn't do it alone.

Despite his gruff exterior, Thurman was a sensitive dude, and he got extremely pissed when Reds manager Sparky Anderson — never, by his own admission, the most articulate man — told reporters after the World Series that "I don't want to embarrass any other catcher by comparing him to Johnny Bench." He won the AL MVP award that year, but it's doubtful that the honor lessened the sting of Sparky's words; Sparky later said that he'd tried to apologize to Thurman, but the Yankee Captain wasn't having it.

The next two seasons, of course, would be a non-stop riot of slights, misunderstandings and full-blown drama as Thurman inevitably got sucked into the three-way vortex of chaos involving George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin. He came out of it all with two World Championship rings, of course (not to mention a lifetime .373 World Series batting average); but by 1979, he was so sick of the Bronx Zoo soap opera that he'd begun campaigning to be traded to Cleveland, so that he could see his wife and kids every day. An avid aviator, he'd begun flying home to Ohio after games in the Bronx and other relatively nearby cities, in order to get a little extra family time in. The man was old-school; he wanted to play baseball, but the bright lights of New York were nothing compared to the comforts of home and family.

At least, I know all that now, and understand why he was practicing takeoffs and landings in his new twin-engine Cessna Citation when he crashed it at Akron-Canton Airport on August 2, 1979. At the time, though, I didn't get it at all. I didn't get how this larger-than-life figure could be gone, just like that; I didn't get why he would even BE in a cockpit in the middle of baseball season, much less die horribly in one. I remember hearing the news on my grandparents' TV, and then locking myself in their tiny bathroom with the weird metallic wallpaper to shed some quiet, confused tears.

I also understand now — though I didn't then — why Thurman wasn't immediately inducted into the Hall of Fame, like Roberto Clemente had been. Though he was certainly one of the great catchers of his era, he sadly wasn't around long enough to put up HOF-worthy numbers, and his decline in production in '78 and '79 didn't exactly point to greater things to come. But hey, anybody who would actively torment a drunk Billy Martin on the team plane by cranking Neil Diamond on a boom box deserves an eternal place in the Big Hair & Plastic Grass Hall of Fame. Rest in Peace, Thurm.