Hope is a great thing
A couple of weeks ago I was at the hospital in Iowa City, doing some research on my dead ears. My ears are strictly ornamental now, only good for holding up my glasses. Hopefully, the research is beneficial to future generations. I’m amazed at how closely the hospital and the university have shoehorned buildings together. From the parking garage, I could easily throw a baseball through a window in the old field house.
Speaking of the parking garage, one of the banes of man’s existence, there was a large clot of backed up, increasingly impatient traffic. When I finally got to the source, I could see what we were dealing with. A black Suburban had parked at the turn in the garage, the absolute worst place to be, while its occupants unloaded. As I passed by the scofflaw, I caught the license plate: Hot Mom. Being a man, I looked for this “hot mom” but only saw a 30ish blond unloading a stroller, while her husband tried to hide behind the wheel, what with all the vitriol coming at him from traffic backed up both ways. When I realized the average blond was the “hot mom”, my first thought was: that’s false advertising. In Iowa she might be a 7. Maybe an 8 if you’ve had a lot to drink. In Texas, Florida or California, she’s probably a 6. I’m thinking the license plate wasn’t the husband’s idea.
False advertising. Is there anything in baseball more false advertising than spring training or the start of the season? No, that’s not the right term. With baseball, I’ve come to believe that it’s not false advertising, it’s false hope. Every team promotes it, and every fan wants to believe in it.
A player comes out of AA or AAA and hits .400 in a small sample size, naturally, before finally regressing to the mean, as the long season wears on. A pitching phenom looks like the next coming of Doc Gooden, before reality sets in. Hope is a fragile thing.
Like Andy says in The Shawshank Redemption, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. Every baseball fan holds on to hope. I hope the Royals win the Central Division. I hope they make it to the World Series. I hope Bobby Witt wins the MVP and Cole Ragans or Seth Lugo wins the Cy Young. I hope Jac Caglianone becomes the next great Royals player.
False advertising might be the aging player who shows up “in the best shape of their life”. Hurray I guess, but if you’re a professional athlete, why aren’t you in fantastic shape all year round? I don’t think many of these guys are selling refrigerators at Sears in the off-season. They have access to things that ball players of yore couldn’t even dream about: state-of-the-art weight rooms, nutritionists, trainers, hitting and pitching coaches, video and performance shrinks. For several million a year, you damn sure better be showing up to spring training every year in outstanding physical condition and ready to go.
The history of baseball is littered with false hope, guys who rode a glorious hot streak for part, or all, of a season before flaming out. Back in late June of 1990, the Yankees brought up a young first baseman named Kevin Maas to help spell the injury-prone Don Mattingly. Maas played 79 games that summer and got 300 plate appearances and was a revelation, stroking 21 home runs and picking up 43 walks. That was enough to propel him to a second-place finish in the Rookie of the Year vote behind Cleveland catcher Sandy Alomar and ahead of Kevin Appier of the Royals. Based on today’s metrics, Appier should have won the award in a runaway, but voters in those days were easily seduced by the long ball. Unfortunately, Maas was never able to capitalize on his early promise and was out of the league after the 1995 season.
If you saw Mark Fidrych pitch in the summer of 1976, you’ll always remember it. The Bird was a national phenomenon, going 19 and 9 with a 2.34 ERA. Occasionally an athlete captures the nation’s attention. Bo did. Caitlyn Clark is doing it. And Mark Fidrych did it in that bi-centennial summer. He talked to the ball. He’d spend time smoothing out the mound. He played with a joie de vivre that infected even the most cynical baseball fan. Unfortunately, the Tigers mismanaged him. He threw a league-leading 24 complete games that rookie summer, along with 250 innings. He suffered a knee injury in the 1977 spring training, shagging fly balls of all things. He didn’t make a start until late May but by July 12 he was done. He pitched in 11 games in 1977 on that bum knee, which ultimately led to arm problems. Fidrych was never the same. He made 16 more appearances over the next three seasons before his storybook career ended. It was a loss for baseball.
Another one-year comet was the irrepressible young Cleveland outfielder, Joe Charboneau. Super Joe got his shot when Andre Thornton went down with a knee injury in the hot summer of 1980. He got into 131 games and slashed .289/.358/.488 with 23 home runs and 87 RBI. Charboneau had a personality that just wouldn’t quit. Cleveland fans loved him. Fans in other cities loved him. He would drink beer through his nose. Don’t ask me how. He did his own dental work and once fixed his broken nose with a pair of pliers. He was reportedly a descendent of Toussaint Charboneau, who was a guide for Lewis and Clark and was married to Sacagawea. Super Joe would eat lit cigarettes and open beer bottles with his eye socket. I can recall seeing loudmouth drunks at the bar trying to open beer bottles with their eye sockets, just like Super Joe. Try it sometime.
Charboneau was a wild man. Two Cleveland musicians, Don Kriss and Stan Bloch, wrote a song, naturally entitled “Go Joe Charboneau”. It was a massive hit in Cleveland and even picked up airtime in the hinterlands. One of our local stations used to play it occasionally and I can still sing it, though you don’t want to hear that. Charboneau was a runaway winner of the Rookie of the Year. People expected great things. It wasn’t to be. Super Joe played 70 more games over two seasons before the ride ended.
Several players with eventual ties to the Royals had brilliant early careers. Wally Bunker made his debut with the Baltimore Orioles in 1963 as an 18-year-old. In his age 19 season, 1964, he made 29 starts, finishing with a record of 19 and 5 and a sparkling ERA of 2.69. His arm wasn’t ready for the rigors of major league baseball and by 1965, he was suffering from arm problems. Much like his Baltimore teammate and future Royal Roger Nelson, when his arm didn’t hurt, he was electric. He threw a six-hit, 1-0 shutout in the 1966 World Series, part of a historic scoreless streak by the Oriole staff. Baltimore left him unprotected in the 1968 expansion draft and the Royals nabbed him with the 25th pick. He had a solid season for KC in 1969, going 12-11 over a career-high 222 innings, but the wear and tear caught up with him. He only appeared in 31 more games over the next two seasons before calling it a career at the still-tender age of 26.
Wayne Simpson came over to the Royals in the Hal McRae trade prior to the 1973 season, and at the time, many thought Simpson was the key to the deal. It’s easy to see why. As a rookie in 1970, Simpson won 13 of his first 14 decisions and finished with a 14-3 record. That only tells part of the story. Simpson accumulated those 14 wins by July 26. He blew out his rotator cuff in a July 31 game against the Cubs. He tried to pitch two more times that summer, but the pain was unbearable. He only appeared in 16 games as a Royal and the team won five of his first seven starts before the shoulder problems resurfaced. Simpson remains one of the great what-ifs, had today’s surgical and rehab techniques been available then.
The Royals have had their share of false hope. Every franchise has. Clint Hurdle would be our poster boy for false hope. Hurdle earned his praise. He wowed the Royals in a pre-draft workout, then as a 19-year-old in 1977, tore up Omaha to the tune of .328/.449/.529. The Royals brought him up in September of 1977 to give him a taste of big-league pitching. My father and I were sitting in the first row behind home plate in Hurdle’s debut game against the Mariners. In his second plate appearance, Hurdle turned on a Glenn Abbott fastball and deposited the ball deep into the right field water fountains. On the drive home, we were gushing about Hurdle who we thought had a chance to be a Mickey Mantle-type player. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but Hurdle still had a decent career and was even better as a manager. 1977 was a heady time to be a Royals fan. The team had the best record in the game AND what appeared to be the best young prospect in baseball. Ah, those glory days, they’ll pass you by.
How about Angel Berroa? Berroa took KC by storm in the summer of 2003. The Royals surprised everyone that summer, and it was glorious. Berroa played a solid shortstop and had some pop in his bat, hitting .287 with 17 home runs and 73 RBI. He also struck out a hundred times, but hey, who’s counting? He took home the Rookie of the Year award and played in Kansas City for four more seasons, but never with the same success.
My all-time favorite Royal in this category was the Hammer, Bob Hamelin. What’s not to love about Hamelin? He looked like someone who’d be playing in your recreational softball league. In Hamelin’s 1994 rookie campaign, the Royals were battling for the division lead when a strike disrupted the season. The pinnacle for Hamelin came on July 25 in a game against division rival Chicago White Sox. It was a Monday night game and drew an impressive crowd of 32,459 screaming fans to the K. The game went into extra innings tied at three. In the top of the 12th, Tim Raines hit a two-out single to give the Sox a one run lead. Kansas City countered with singles by Dave Henderson and Wally Joyner, which brought the Hammer to the plate, facing Roberto Hernandez, who at the time was one of the top closers in the game. Hamelin blasted the first pitch he saw over the right field fence, sending the crowd into hysterics and giving the Royals a 6-4 walk-off victory. Hammer won the Rookie of the Year award and many, including me, thought he’d be a Kansas City mainstay for many years. He spent two more seasons in KC, one in Detroit and one in Milwaukee, but was never able to recapture the magic. I would venture to say that Hamelin remains one of the most popular Royals of all time. Why? Because for one glorious summer, he gave us hope.
Glory days
Well, they’ll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days
Glory days