Cooperstown Confidential (14 page)

By this time, Parker had left the Pirates and was playing in Cincinnati. He finished the season second in the MVP voting, with a career-high 125 runs batted in. In his nineteen-year career, Parker hit .290 with 339 home runs and appeared in seven All-Star Games.

Parker thinks this should be enough to get him to Cooperstown. “As a Christian, I try not to be bitter about not being in the Hall of Fame,” he told me during a long conversation at the end of 2007. But he
is
bitter. “I was the best player in baseball between 1985 and 1990. Not just as a hitter, all around. Dave Winfield and I changed the entire concept of what an outfielder is. I love Gary Carter, but compare our numbers. Or Wade Boggs. If Boggs is in, I definitely should be in.”

It’s hard to compare Parker with Gary Carter, a catcher. As far as Boggs is concerned, he was a lifetime .328 hitter, with five batting titles and 3,010 hits. True, he didn’t hit for power and barely cracked 1,000 lifetime RBIs, compared to Parker’s nearly 1,500. But Parker’s lifetime batting average is almost forty points lower than Boggs’s. Still, there’s a very good case to be made for Dave Parker. Bill James ranks him above Hall of Fame outfielder Harry Heilmann.

Parker’s best shot at the Hall was in 1998, when he appeared on about 25 percent of the writers’ ballots. Since then, he has gone downhill. He got 11.4 percent in 2007. Some writers, he believes, have ignored him because of his drug use. Others, he suspects, have different motives.

“When I was in Cincinnati, one guy, John Donovan, wrote bad things about me seven days a week. What kind of resentment is that? Is he white? Yeah, he’s white. I hate to bring up racism, but just look around. Why isn’t Lee Smith in the Hall of Fame? He was a great relief pitcher, but he’s not in the Hall. Neither is Andre Dawson. You figure it out.”

Today, Dave Parker is a successful businessman and community elder, the owner of several Popeye’s restaurants around Cincinnati. He also understands what he didn’t get as a younger man—that there is a Hall of Fame price to pay for stiffing baseball writers. “Some of them were jealous of my money and status,” he says. “Some were just racist. But either way, it was hard for me to open up to them.”

It would be nice to believe that Dave Parker’s Cooperstown chances weren’t ruined by the perception in the baseball establishment that he was a “Bad Negro.” It would be nice to believe that about Dick Allen, too.

Allen broke into baseball via the Arkansas Travelers, the Phillies AAA team in Little Rock, in 1960, only three years after Governor Orval Faubus had refused a federal order to integrate Central High School, prompting President Eisenhower to (reluctantly) send 101st Airborne troops to enforce the law. On opening day, Faubus threw out the first pitch and fans screamed racial insults from the stands. Allen stood in the field reciting the Twenty-third Psalm to himself. “I was scared, I don’t mind saying it,” he admitted later. After the game, he found a note on his windshield that summed up local sentiment: “Don’t come back again, nigger.”

In 1963, Allen went up to the Phillies. It wasn’t that much of an improvement over Little Rock. The Phillies had been a notoriously racist franchise from the earliest days of integration. From the start, he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. In 1965, he got into a fight with a white teammate, Frank Thomas, who hit Allen with a bat. Several teammates said that Thomas was the aggressor, but Philly wasn’t a town where a black man hit a white man for any reason. The fans took to throwing garbage and batteries at Allen, and he responded by wearing his batting helmet in the field and saying unpleasant things about the city and its fans. “I can play anywhere,” he once said, “first base, third base, left field, anywhere but Philadelphia.”

Allen also clashed with the front office. On one occasion, Phillies owner Bob Carpenter, who inherited the team from his father, told Allen to “grow up.”

“I am grown up,” Allen snapped. “I grew up black and poor, you grew up white and rich. But we’re both grown.”

The Philadelphia writers sided with management. They branded Allen a head case, and the image stuck. Bill James, no racist, has come out against Allen’s Hall of Fame candidacy on the grounds that he was “at war with the world” and that he did “more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played baseball.”

A lot of Allen’s teammates felt differently. In 1975, after retiring from the Chicago White Sox, a delegation of Phillies players led by Mike Schmidt talked him into coming back to Philadelphia, where he more or less finished his career. In subsequent interviews, all his living managers said good things about him. Does Dick Allen belong in the Hall of Fame? He hit .292 in a low-hitting era, with 351 career homers over fifteen seasons. He won an MVP. Twice he led the American League in home runs. He made seven All-Star teams. It’s true that he wasn’t much of a fielder, but that describes a lot of power hitters in Cooperstown. He could be nasty at times, but that describes a lot of Hall of Famers, too. It is possible that, on merit, Allen didn’t deserve election to Cooperstown. But it is more than possible that his image as a Bad Negro accounts for the fact that in his first year of eligibility he got exactly fourteen votes, or 3.7 percent, from the members of the BBWAA.

Unlike Dick Allen, Albert Belle grew up black and middle-class. He was a Boy Scout, a member of the National Honor Society, and vice president of the Future Business Leaders of America. But the older he got, the less friendly he became, especially to the press, and eventually he refused to give any interviews at all. He let his game do the talking. Belle played twelve seasons, two more than required for membership in the Hall. He hit .295 with 381 homers. In his ten peak seasons, he averaged 37.3 home runs a season. My hero Al Kaline, a first-time selection, averaged a little more than half of that. Belle led the American League three times in runs batted in, once in homers, with 50, and in 1995 he was voted Major League Player of the Year. In the de cade of the nineties, nobody had more runs batted in or extra-base hits.

Albert Belle was a Hall of Fame player by almost any standard. But not only did he have black skin, he had
thin
black skin. He once threw a baseball at a heckler. On another occasion, he chased trick-or-treaters who were egging his house and bumped them with his car. The Indians fined him thousands of dollars every year for damage to the clubhouse and team property. After a bad at-bat in Boston, he took a Louisville slugger to a teammate’s boom box. He demanded that the locker room thermostat be kept at 60 degrees, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Freeze.” When Belle retired in 2001,
New York Daily News
columnist Bill Madden was gleeful. “Sorry, there’ll be no words of sympathy here for Albert Belle,” Madden wrote.

“He was a surly jerk before he got hurt and now he’s a hurt surly jerk . . . He was no credit to the game. Belle’s boorish behavior should be remembered by every member of the Baseball Writers’ Association when it comes time to consider him for the Hall of Fame.”

Bob Lipsyte responded for the defense. “Madden is basically saying, ‘He was not nice to me, so let’s screw him.’ Sportswriters anoint heroes in basically the same way you have crushes in ju nior high school . . . you’ve got someone like Albert Belle, who is somehow basically ungrateful for this enormous opportunity to play this game. If he’s going to appear to us as a surly asshole, then we’ll cover him that way. And then, of course, he’s not gonna talk to us anymore—it’s self-fulfilling.”

Lipsyte’s was a minority view; in 2006, Belle’s first year of eligibility, only forty writers voted for him. The other 92.3 percent of the Cooperstown electors ignored him. In 2007, his total shrunk to nineteen votes, Dick Allen territory.

Jim Rice played his whole career, sixteen seasons, in Boston, where he hit .298 lifetime, with 382 home runs. He was an eight-time All-Star, led the league three times in home runs and twice in runs batted in. He was also among the league leaders in bad public relations. Fourteen years in a row he was up for Cooperstown, and fourteen years in a row he failed to make it.

In 2006, after Rice’s thirteenth miss,
Boston Globe
columnist Dan Shaughnessy diagnosed the problem as Bad Negro Syndrome. “Is Rice coming up short because of his terrible relationship with baseball writers during the time he played? Is this petty payback for years of churlishness? Would Rice be in the Hall of Fame if he’d been as media-friendly as, say, Kevin Millar?”

Rice missed again in 2008. But, as Goose Gossage had predicted, Rice made it in 2009, in his last year of eligibility—barely. He got 76.4 percent of the vote. Rice was asked why it had taken so many years for him to be elected, and he replied with his customary candor: “If you look at my numbers [against] some of the numbers of guys who are in the Hall of Fame—my numbers are compatible. I don’t know why. The only thing I’ll say is I’m glad it’s over with. I’m not going to badmouth any writers or what have you. I’m just looking forward to the days to come.” Just to make sure the point was clear, he added that his numbers hadn’t changed over the last fourteen years.

Gary Sheffield could very well be the new Jim Rice. When he broke into baseball in 1988, he was, at nineteen, the youngest player in the majors. In those days both leagues were still loaded with African-American talent. His career parallels the sharp decrease of black players. Sheffield doesn’t buy baseball’s feel-better theories about the lack of young black talent. Sure, there aren’t many baseball diamonds in inner cities. And it’s true that baseball equipment makes it an expensive game to play. But football also requires good facilities and lots of money, and somehow black players are flourishing at every level.

Sheffield attributes the decline of African-American players to a combination of racial prejudice and the easy availability of cheap, pliable players from Latin America. In the middle of the 2007 season, he unburdened himself on the subject to a reporter from
GQ
magazine. “I called it years ago,” he said.

What I called is that you’re going to see more black faces, but there ain’t
no English going to be coming out . . . [It’s about] being able to tell [Latin
players] what to do
—
being able to control them.

Where I’m from, you can’t control us. You might get a guy to do it that
way for a while because he wants to benefit, but in the end, he is going
to go back to being who he is. And that’s a person that you’re going to
talk to with respect, you’re going to talk to like a man.

These are the things my race demands. So, if you’re equally good as
this Latin player, guess who’s going to get sent home? I know a lot of
players that are home now can outplay a lot of these guys.

Predictably, this racial analysis antagonized the media who, in any event, didn’t care much for Sheffield’s blunt style. The prevailing opinion was expressed by a
New York Post
headline that called him “surly”—the kiss of death for black power hitters hoping for Hall of Fame entry.

I don’t know if Sheffield belongs in the Hall of Fame. Over twenty-one seasons, he has been a .292 hitter, with an OBP of .394. At the start of the 2009 season, he was one home run short of 500. He has made nine All-Star teams, was MLB Player of the Year in 1992, and won a batting championship. But Sheffield is very much in the line of Dick Allen, Dave Parker, Albert Belle, and Jim Rice, a fact underscored by his outspoken remarks about Latino players and the beloved Joe Torre. A discerning reporter named Jesse Sanchez put the question to Sheffield directly: How was this going to affect his future immortality? “First ballot, second ballot, what ever,” Sheffield replied breezily. If he really believes he isn’t going to spend a long time in BBWAA purgatory for his “attitude” and off-the-field opinions, he belongs not only in Cooperstown but in the Optimists’ Hall of Fame.

All this history helped explain why a CBS News/
New York Times
poll, published in July 2007, showed such a stark discrepancy between the way blacks and whites understood the Bonds controversy. The survey found that 54 percent of blacks—but only 29 percent of whites—were rooting for Bonds to break the home run record. Sixty-two percent of black baseball fans said that race was a major or minor factor in ste roid charges against Bonds; just 14 percent of whites agreed. Asked if they had a favorable view of Bonds, black fans responded positively by an almost three-to-one margin; white fans were negative by nearly two to one. Twice as many whites as blacks said that it would be bad for baseball if Bonds broke the home run record.

After the 2007 season, Bonds was indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury about using ste-roids. An indictment is not a conviction. If a se nior government official is indicted for such crimes, it might be seemly for him to step away from the job, at least temporarily. But Bonds was a forty-two-year-old baseball player. Time was running out on his career, and he wanted to play again in 2008. He filed for free agency after the World Series, and he had every reason to expect that he would be snapped up. He had a name that sells tickets in droves and draws more media attention than almost anyone in baseball. On the road, fans might come to boo, but in his home park he would be a hero, as he has been, and remains, in San Francisco.

Even more important, Bonds in 2007 was still one of the best players in baseball. He hit 28 home runs in just 340 at-bats, had a .565 slugging percentage, and led the National League in walks and in on-base percentage (OBP), with a colossal .480. Since 1950, only four players have bested that OBP—Bonds himself from 2001 through 2004, Ted Williams three times, Mickey Mantle twice, and the Tigers’ Norm Cash in his unforgettable (and, sadly, unrepeated) 1961 season. It’s true that Bonds was no longer one of the greatest defensive outfielders in the game, as he had been in his prime, but in most ballparks he would have been adequate, and he was perfect for the American League, where designated hitters don’t need to field at all.