An old-school baseball man

I was talking on Facebook with a friend of mine the other day about -- among other things -- Casey Stengel, the legendary New York Yankees manager and the first skipper of the New York Mets. (And the man whose nickname is the title for this blog, by the way.)

I've always found him to be a fascinating character, a man who's unfortunately best known to the general public for his way of mangling the English language. "Most people my age are dead at the present time," he said after being hired at age 72 to manage the Mets on their entry into the National League in 1962.

And he was also a media favorite for having a playful personality which often hid a subtle and strategic mind. As a player with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1919, he quieted a hostile Brooklyn crowd when he tipped his cap as he came to the plate and a sparrow he had tucked beneath the headgear flew out.

But even even with the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford in the lineup, you don't manage a team to five straight World Series championships (1949-1953) on charm alone. He could also be sarcastic and distant, according to his players.

A lot has been written about him, but the best biography I've found is Stengel: His Life and Times (1984), by former Sports Illustrated staff writer and editor Robert Creamer. I'm glad to see it's recently been put back in print by the University of Nebraska Press, which has an intriguing line of books about sports.

But I'm digressing already. I'm not a New York Yankees fan by any means, but I couldn't help thinking that it's been a sad time recently for their supporters, with the passing of long-time public address announcer Bob Sheppard on July 11 and team owner George Steinbrenner two days later.

And on Wednesday it was announced that Ralph Houk, a man who was sort of a bridge from the Stengel to the Steinbrenner eras, had died at the age of 90.

Houk, a Silver Star medal winner as a World War II veteran, played for Stengel as a backup catcher to Berra in the late Forties and early Fifties. He succeeded Stengel as Yankees manager and led the pinstripers to three American League pennants before becoming the team's general manager after the 1963 season.

He later came back for a much less successful stint at Yankees manager, quitting --- not coincidentally -- at the end of the 1973 season after the first year of Steinbrenner's ownership. He was the first in a long line of managers to bristle under The Boss' interference in the on-field operation of the team.

As a manager, Houk was the Bobby Cox of his era, known for sticking up for his players and earning many colorful ejections from games. As a front-office executive he was one of the last of the old-school hardline baseball men, before free agency and the swing of the balance of power overwhelmingly to the players.

(A couple of other reading recommendations: Jim Bouton's tell-all book, Ball Four in which the former Yankee pitcher tells a hilarious tale of what it was like to negotiate with Houk for a raise, and David Halberstam's portrait of the man in October 1964, a really good book about baseball in an era of social change.)

Houk later became one of the few managers in major league baseball history to lead both the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox (1981-1984) -- which thanks to the excessive hype given that series by modern-day media would be a much bigger deal now than it was then.

He helped develop the players that won the 1986 American League championship for the BoSox and then had a hand in building the Minnesota Twins' 1987 championship team as a vice president for that team in his last major league assignment.

Notes from a "friendly"

It's always interesting to me when cultures meet.

Soccer has always seemed to me to be an especially good setting for that. So, having had the experience of living and working in England for 3-1/2 months a couple of years ago, I particularly enjoyed covering the "friendly" between the local minor league team, the Charlotte Eagles, and the Bolton Wanderers of the English Premier League this week.

It was actually the first time I'd ever seen a Premier League team in person. During our time in London, we lived an easy ride on the Underground from Arsenal's then-new Emirates Stadium, and it was no big deal to get to other teams' venues, either. But tickets were more expensive than to NFL games here, and my U.S. media connections didn't carry enough weight to get me a seat in a press box.

Anyway, the match itself on Wednesday at UNC-Charlotte's TransAmerica Field, was fun. The Wanderers took a deceptively easy-looking 3-0 victory over their American hosts in the first of three matches they'll play in North America before they go home next week. Actually, the score was 1-0 most of the way.

The Eagles, showing some early match jitters, gave up a goal in the eighth minute. But then they settled down and gave the visitors as good a match as they'll get on some days in their EPL schedule, which starts on Aug. 14 against Fulham.

Here's a photo of the match action, taken by my friend Gerry Nelson Wall. The Eagles player is midfielder Darren Toby, not sure who the Bolton player is.



But the most educational part of that experience came the day before, when I spent a couple of hours at TransAmerica Field watching the Wanderers' training session (that's soccer talk for "practice.") I had an opportunity to talk with some of Bolton's staff members and get a feel for what it's like to field a team in the best pro soccer league in the world.

Bottom line -- for teams like Bolton, located in the Manchester area, it's not easy.

I must digress here for a couple of paragraphs about a soccer-related topic that's been bothering me. I wrote just a couple of weeks ago about American antipathy toward soccer and since then I've noticed another sort of right-leaning critique of the sport. (As I've noted before, I try to be non-partisan and apolitical in this blog, but I couldn't let this pass without comment.)

Apparently, soccer is socialistic -- I suppose the argument runs that good Americans shouldn't like it, so it must be Marxist or socialist. Click here and here for a couple of examples of this. I think it's nonsense, but make up your own mind.

Some of these arguments are ridiculous on any level, as doesn't any team sport sometimes ask players to make boosting their own statistics secondary to the greater good of a group? I think it's called "teamwork". (Is LeBron James a socialist because he's probably going to score fewer points with his new team in exchange for what he sees as a better chance to win an NBA championship? )

And doesn't every sport have rules to create a "level playing field"? -- both ice hockey and American football, like soccer, are "onsides" games, but I doubt anyone would call them socialist.

And certainly any realistic look at the economics of "football," especially the Premier League brand, exposes this narrative as, like my English friends would say, rubbish.

The Premier League, like most European leagues, is capitalistic in a way that would make even Major League Baseball owners blush with embarrassment. No salary cap, no revenue sharing, exorbitant "transfer fees" to move players around. You have to go back 15 years to find an EPL champion which was not Chelsea, Arsenal or Manchester United -- by no coincidence the three most wealthy teams in the league.

All of which leaves the Boltons of the league with their own set of problems. The Wanderers finished 14th in the 20-team league last year and avoided relegation, the fate of the EPL's bottom three teams each year.

(I suppose if there's a truly "un-American" aspect to soccer it's this one -- the bottom teams in many European leagues are demoted to a lower classification for the next season of play, to be replaced by the top teams from the lower classification. It wouldn't work for fans here -- the Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals might become permanent residents of Triple A.)

And relegation apparently results in financial disaster, making it that much tougher to bounce back up. Again, using the baseball analogy, instead of selling tickets to games against the Atlanta Braves or New York Yankees, you have Gwinnett and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre coming to town. Big difference.

It's tough enough at the highest level for Bolton, trying to fill 29,000-seat Reebok Stadium in an area with about half a dozen EPL teams in a 50-mile radius.

I had heard from several knowledgeable people before going to London that media coverage of football in England was so intense that the team PR person's role was more that of a protector than as a facilitator. I got a little taste of that during my interviews with Wanderers manager Owen Coyle and player Ricardo Gardner. While Bolton's media relations guys were as nice as they could be, it was clear that they didn't want the questioning to drag on any longer than necessary, so you had to get what you needed quickly.

Now I've been in PR before, so I've had the experience of being interviewed as well as my more accustomed role of being the interviewer. But I was surprised to end up as an "expert source" for the Bolton media, including a newspaper reporter traveling with the team.

Click here for my turn at English media stardom, as I gave the folks back home some background on the Eagles. Cheers!

The LBJ Show

(NOTE: A random thought before my take on the biggest story in American sports this week. The fact that "LBJ" now is regularly used as shorthand for NBA star LeBron James has given me a little pause in recent months, as I grew up thinking those were the initials of the 36th President of the United States. I had the same frame of reference problem a few years back when I found out that most youngsters these days know "Fergie" as a Black-Eyed Pea rather than the former Duchess of York of the British royal family.)

As I've noted in this blog before, I'm not much of a follower of professional basketball, so I haven't been waiting anxiously for weeks to find out which team was going to get the services of free agent forward LeBron James, late of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

But I have to admit it will be interesting even to the casual fan to see if his acquisition makes the Miami Heat the 2010s equivalent of the Los Angeles Lakers of the late Sixties and early Seventies. They created a similar high-powered "Dream Team" lineup when Wilt Chamberlain joined fellow future Hall of Famers Jerry West and Elgin Baylor via trade from Philadelphia in 1968.

James and guard Dwyane Wade seem ticketed for the Hall of Fame already and the Heat's other high-profile free-agent acquisition, center Chris Bosh, could have that potential. And the pundits are already speculating on the number of championships that Miami will win in the next five years.

But I've been much more interested in the event that the James signing became. Would he stay in Cleveland? Would it be New York? Chicago? It pretty much became a TV series, culminating in ESPN's unprecedented one-hour special built around James' announcement of his decision on Thursday. It all seemed so excessive, for something that could have been handled with a news conference or even a tweet. Even serious NBA fans I know were getting an overdose of this hype.

The show was a ratings draw, viewed by 7.3% of American homes, a very robust number for the current TV universe. But it got bad reviews, mostly for letting the telecast go on for nearly 30 munutes before James actually announced his decision. He did so in an interview with Jim Gray, a respected journalist perhaps best known for his on-air grilling of baseball star Pete Rose about gambling.

And journalism ethicists had a field day. The show was actually the brainchild of Gray, who pitched it to ESPN and James' management team, which was consulted about possible questions that would be asked. ESPN turned ad sales for the show over to James' team, which said they would donate revenue to the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America, a favorite charity of James.

It's not the first time the World Wide Leader has entered into a questionable business relationship with someone it covered on the news side. In 2006, ESPN aired several episodes of "Bonds on Bonds," a reality show that followed Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants. It was highly criticized as being a PR vehicle for the embattled slugger, who was facing legal problems related to allegations of steroid use as he closed in on the all-time home run record. The show was cancelled before the end of its scheduled 10-episode run due to creative control issues with its temperamental star -- who saw that coming?

Finally, I've been fascinated by the reaction to LeBron's leaving his home state of Ohio, where he took the Cavaliers to one NBA final and brought the franchise back to respectability -- but not to a championship. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's front page today summarizes the local mood pretty well. But I think it's an overreaction to brand him a traitor in the fashion of Art Modell, the owner of the original Cleveland Browns who spirited the team away to Baltimore in 1996.

It's as if people are shocked -- shocked! -- to find out suddenly that professional basketball is a business. Just like television.