Big Hair and Plastic Grass

The "Beeg Mon" Buckles Up

From the days when major league baseball players drove '78 Pontiacs (thanks, Timothy K. Ready!) and the fine MopUpDuty blog comes this fascinating 1979 public service announcement, in which Toronto Blue Jays DH Rico Carty promotes safe driving in Ontario.

With a personality so volatile that he once provoked normally staid Braves teammate Hank Aaron into a fistfight, the self-proclaimed "Beeg Mon" seems like an odd choice for a safety promotion — but maybe after sitting out the entire 1971 season (after leading the NL with a .366 batting average the year before) due to injuries suffered in winter ball, he began to see the value in taking care of himself. (Or maybe, after sustaining permanent eye damage during an early 70s altercation with Atlanta police, he didn't want to run afoul of Canadian cops by driving belt-free.)

In any case, the once-fearsome Carty was definitely slowing down by the time this ad originally saw print; 1979 would be the final season in the beegs for the Beeg Mon, in which he posted a .256/.322/.390 line, belting only 12 homers and 55 RBI in 132 games. Carty spent spring training with the Blue Jays in 1980, but the team cut him in late March, about a month after the Topps card below was released.

 

 

Commish For A Day

This is Bowie Kuhn, Commissioner of Baseball from 1969 to 1984. He was kind of a tool, though to be fair he was woefully unprepared for the changes (social and otherwise) that shook the sport during the 1970s. And at least he wasn't a total puppet of the owners, a la Bud Selig...

Which brings us to the second installment of "High and Tight," the new weekly baseball column I'm doing for Rolling Stone Online. This time out, I consider the current (ineffectual) state of the Commissioner's Office, and ask our panel of rockers the burning question, "What are up to three things YOU would change about baseball if you were Commish for a day?" Read their answers HERE.

In other news, a tip of the Monsanto Toupee goes out to Trevor Seigler, who made a nice mention of Big Hair and Plastic Grass (which comes out this June in paperback, btw) in his Paste Magazine look back at Jim Bouton's Ball Four. Any time your work is mentioned positively in the same breath as one of the greatest baseball memoirs of all time, you've just gotta say, in the immortal words of Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz, "Aw, Shitfuck!" Now to go pound some celebratory Budweiser...

Babe's House: Before The Renovation

Dig this very cool shot of Yankee Stadium, taken a year or two before it was closed at the end of the '73 season for massive renovations. (Photo courtesy of THIS amazing site.)

Not only does this shot give you an idea of how supremely funky the area around "The House That Ruth Built" truly was in the early 70s, but it also showcases two things you're not likely to see near major league ballparks (or anywhere else) these days: namely, billboards for Benson & Hedges cigarettes and Afro Sheen.

There probably aren't too many ballparks with little movie theaters tucked away behind the left field bleachers, either. How righteous would it have been to see Bobby Murcer, Thurman Munson and Sparky Lyle in action during an afternoon game, then grab a drink at the corner bar and go catch a screening of, say, Across 110th Street? I tried to blow up the image to see what (or who) was playing there at the time this pic was taken, but no dice. However, my friend Michael Fallon says it's Romance of a Horse Thief, a 1971 western starring Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach. Well played, Michael!

Nate The (Briefly) Great

It took a bad dude to look intimidating in the mustard yellows and fecal browns of the 1970s San Diego Padres, but there was no Padres player badder than Nate Colbert. Still the all-time franchise home run leader with 163 taters, Colbert (whose birthday it is today) was pretty much the only reason — other than maybe relaxing in the sun with a beer and a joint — to visit San Diego Stadium from 1969 through 1973.

Six-feet-two-inches of free-swinging right-handed power, Nate averaged nearly 30 homers a season and 133 whiffs during those years, a period when both totals were considered pretty damn noteworthy. Most noteworthy of all was Nate's 1972 season, when he hit 38 homers with 111 RBI, driving in 22.7% of the 488 runs the anemic Padres scored that year; second in the Padres' production heirarchy was Leron Lee, who hit .300 with 12 HR and 47 RBI. Several years ago on his excellent Cardboard Gods blog, Josh Wilker suggested that Colbert's '72 season might be the offensive counterpart to Steve Carlton's mind-boggling 1972 pitching performance. Carlton won 27 games that year, or 45.8 percent of his team's victories; Colbert drove in 22.7 percent of his team's runs. Neither percentage has ever been bettered.

Nor have Nate's twin feats of August 1, 1972, when he hit five homers and drove in 13 runs during a doubleheader against the Atlanta Braves, respectively tying Stan Musial's mark for home runs in a doubleheader and breaking the mark of 11 RBI in a doubleheader held by Earl Averill, Jim Tabor and Boog Powell. There's a popular story that an eight-year-old Colbert, who grew up in St. Louis, was actually AT the old Busch Stadium on May 2, 1954 when Musial cranked his record-setting five homers against the New York Giants. I suppose the tale could actually be true, but it smacks so much of sugarcoated Field of Dreams feel-good wish-fulfillment that thinking about it just makes my teeth hurt. A more interesting fact (to me at least) is that, in that one day, Colbert drove in one more run than starting Padres shortstop Enzo Hernandez had knocked in over the course of the entire 1971 season.

A three-time All Star with the Padres, Colbert began to be plagued by back injuries in 1974, posting a cruddy .207 average with 14 homers and 54 RBI in 119 games. He was 28, the age when most players supposedly peak, but he was putting on weight and his career was already in free-fall. The Padres traded him in November of that year as part of a three-way deal with that sent (among others) Eddie Brinkman to St. Louis, Sonny Seibert to San Diego and Colbert to Detroit; it's safe to say that nobody came out ahead in that trade, but the Tigers really got the short end of the stick. Hitting .147/.231/.276 with 4 homers and 8 RBI in 173 plate appearances, Colbert couldn't even hold down the starting first base gig on one of the worst teams in Tigers history. The Tigers sold him to Montreal in June; his performance improved only slightly with the Expos (.173/.230/.395 with 4 HR and 11 RBI in 87 plate appearances), but he did pose for a pretty muttonchop-tastic 1976 Topps card while he was with them..

After 14 games with the Expos in 1976, Montreal gave Colbert his release, and he — like so many other once-great players on their last legs — briefly found himself in the kelly green and Fort Knox gold of Charlie Finley's Oakland A's...though only after spending most of the '76 season with Oakland's Tucson Toros Triple-A farm team. Nate clubbed 12 homers for the Toros in 238 plate appearances, but those would be the final taters of his professional career. Called up to the A's at the end of the season, Nate went 0-for-5 in two games against the Angels. The A's granted him free agency in November, and his career was over at the age of 30.

I'm not sure what's happened to Nate since, but I do love this 1981 quote from Padres/Cards pitcher Bob Shirley: "Tradition here [in St. Louis] is Stan Musial coming into the clubhouse making the rounds. Tradition in San Diego is Nate Colbert coming into the clubhouse and trying to sell you a used car."

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

On this date in 1977, the Toronto Blue Jays win their first-ever home opener, beating the Chicago White Sox 9-5 at frigid, snow-covered Exhibition Stadium. Rookie Doug Ault's two home runs highlighted the Jays' victory, but Sox infielder Jack Brohamer's pre-game "cross country skiing" foray across the frozen astroturf on a pair of catcher's shin guards remains the most indelible image from the day.

"A Disaster Combined With A Catastrophe..."

In honor of Opening Day around the league, here's the trailer for 1976's Bad News Bears, still my all-time favorite baseball flick, not to mention my favorite Walter Matthau performance. (And, as a devoted fan of the original The Taking of Pelham 123, that's saying something.) Enjoy...

Happy Birthday, "Super Jew" — And Some Super Cool News, Too!

First of all, funky birthday greetings goin' out today to Mike "Super Jew" Epstein, first baseman for the World Champion '72 Oakland A's (he hit .270 with 26 homers and 70 RBI that year), who also sported the most righteous pair of muttonchops ever worn by a Jewish ballplayer. Here he's shown celebrating the A's WS victory over the Reds with Catfish Hunter and fellow member of the tribe Ken Holtzman.

Second, I wanted to hip you all to the fact that I'll be penning a weekly rock n' roll baseball column for Rolling Stone Online, called "High and Tight" — which will also feature such musically-inclined seamheads as Anthrax's Scott Ian, The Baseball Project's Steve Wynn and Scott McCaughey, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and the great Handsome Dick Manitoba weighing in on a new topic of discussion each week.

Check out the inaugural installment of "High and Tight" — in which we reflect on our favorite Opening Day memories — right here. More entertaining than game of whist with Bud Selig, or your money back!

 

Dick Allen Holds Forth On Hair Products

I've been reading Cal Fussman's excellent After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes, and came across this magnificent quote from Dick Allen:

"You'd give the clubhouse guys fees for amenities, and they'd put supplies in your locker. But there wasn't shit in there for us black players. You'd pay the same money as everyone else, but you never saw an Afro comb in your locker. Nothing in there for YOU to use. Well, there was a razor. But the brothers, man, we got pimples and shit. We used Murray's Magic Shave. So we went to the clubbies and asked them to get it for us, and they came back and said, 'No, there ain't two sets of rules here, one for the whites and one for blacks.' Isn't that something? Arguing about Afro combs and Murray's Magic Shave?"

Allen was talking here about what it was like in the Phillies' clubhouse in the 60s, but his quote nicely sets up the changes (grooming and otherwise) that were coming down the pike in the 70s. If only Bob Costas had managed to get an answer that was even half that illuminating out of Allen during their profoundly disappointing Studio 42 segment from 2009...