Sports outlook 6/8

One of the things baseball has done to injure itself, and this more than anything else, is the allowance of free agency, which cut the heart out of one of the game's most interesting aspects -- arguments. That's right, and I'll repeat it. Arguments! Fans used to take their players more seriously than they do today when owners float money under their noses after fans make them their local heroes. And off they go to some other city, often the arch-rival of the one they have just left. It's just hard to argue for a guy who might be playing for a rival next year. You can never forget how much Red Sox fans used to love Roger Clemons. When I was growing up their were several major arguments that dominated baseball conversations. One of the favorite and most heated was over the three New York center fielders, all now Hall of Famers. Was it Duke Snider of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie Mays of the New York Giants or Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees. The most interesting aspect of this controversy was that each of them had at least one thing he could do better than the other two. The second argument was over baseball's two towering stars, Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals and Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. Jim Novak and Thom McCann used to argue that one quite a bit. The third argument was more local than the other two, and one I felt strongly about. Who was baseball's best third baseman, Ken Boyer of the Cardinals or Eddie Mathews of the Milwaukee Braves? Later on, Ron Santo of the Chicago Cubs was thrown into the mix, but he was going up while the others were on the way down. My favorite player of all time, except for a brief period of about three weeks when I first started following baseball, was a guy no one remembers. For some reason… o.k., forget it. I picked Rudy Regalado because I liked his name. His career of 91 games was 2052 fewer than Snider wound up playing. Snider officially became my hero in 1956, the first year I played Pee Wee League ball in Nevada for guess who? The Dodgers. Snider also left me slack jawed in the World Series that October with his exploits in a losing cause to the Yankees. You can guess whose side I took in the center fielder trio controversy. It wasn't until my freshman year in college that "The Duke of Flatbush" helped me out. I had to make a speech to convince and I decided to attempt to convince my instructor, John Eschilman, that Snider was better than Mantle. I also asked for a vote after the speech to see if I had convinced. Since John Ogle and Paul Ames sat next to me, they were duty bound to vote accordingly. But I got an A on the speech and asked my teacher if the vote I took after the speech played a part in the grade. "No," he said. "It was because you convinced ME. And I'm a Yankee fan." I never liked Mathews or the Braves after what they did to Boston and always liked Boyer. Older people around here can still remember it was Boyer who hit the first home run over the old scoreboard at Lyons Stadium down the right field line. Merlin Wekty offered $5 to the first one who did it, and Boyer ripped an opposite field homer the first night it was up. The reason I didn't like Mathews was because the Braves beat out the Dodgers for pennants in both '57 and '58 and all they talked about was Mathews. Boyer was the heir apparent to Stan the Man at St. Louis. Had Boyer been able to spread out his RBI count a little better, his lifetime totals would have put him in the Hall of Fame. What I'm talking about is in consecutive years his RBI totals were: 90, 94, 97, 95 and 98. Two years earlier he'd had 98. The string was followed by 111 and 119. Seven years in a row of 100 RBIs would have certainly done it. In another of baseball's ironies, Boyer hit over .300 five times before going .295 in 1964. His .295 got him the MVP award. And don't forget club propaganda. The Boyer bio in the 1964 Cardinal yearbook opens thusly, "The best third baseman in the big leagues swung a big bat in 1963." Hmm! The sad thing about Boyer, aside from his premature death from cancer at age 51, was something we never knew until semi-recently. He was afraid of the ball. He had a fear of the ball after being hit by a pitch as a kid and that's why he struck out so often. Pitchers knew it and pitched accordingly. Had management known it, this might have been corrected and no telling how much better he could have been. The Musial-Williams argument raged in mid-America because it was, in a lot of ways, valid. When Musial retired, he owned barrels of records. At that time, 19 major league records, 29 National League records and nine All-Star Game records were Musial's. Musial batted over .300 in each of his first 17 years with the Cardinals and owned a lifetime batting average of .340 at age 38. One can only imagine how many home runs Musial might have hit had they not put the screen in front of the right-field pavilion. Balls hit off the screen were still in play and the only way to get a homer to right was belt the ball onto Grand Ave. instead of the short porch that used to yield home runs. What this translated into for Musial was doubles. He hit 725 of them, one more than Ty Cobb and led the league in doubles eight times. No doubt about it, Stan the Man was magnificent and I still remember how god-like he seemed when, the spring after he retired he went south and returned with the Cardinals to Kansas City where they played a pre-season set with the A's. Jim Novak and I were busy getting autographs when Musial walked past us and to the bus. Drat ! We missed that one. As much as I liked Musial, though, Williams was better. But Williams was better than everyone else. The '64 Cardinal yearbook calls Musial the National League's greatest player. In baseball, there are still city rivalries that thrive. I'm sure the most heated is New York-Boston where Yankee fans are in danger at Fenway Park and vice-versa. The primary rivalry in the National League would have to be the Cardinals and Cubs. It's unreal how many fans travel to the other's stadium when those two teams meet. At one time it was Brooklyn and New York where Ebbets Field was all of eight miles south of the Polo Grounds in an alien world. They have kept a rivalry going on the left coast, but Dodger Stadium is a lot farther south of Pacific Bell Park than eight miles. I know the players on the Dodgers and Giants used to dislike each other, especially when Leo Durocher was around, but only recently I learned how much the Cardinals and Dodgers disliked each other in the 1950s. Players who remain with one team throughout their careers have always been rare. The difference is that the good ones stayed around with their first team a whole lot longer than they do today. It makes being a fan tough.