Lee Lowenfish

In my last post, dear readers, I was skeptical that the World Series could match Toronto's thrilling come-from-behind ALCS win over Seattle.  Boy, was I wrong!  The deep and plucky Blue Jays have once again shown their mettle.  After losing that 18-inning classic in Game 3 on old reliable Freddie Freeman's solo HR, they soundly beat on LAD's home turf the defending champions in Games 4 and 5. They now need just one win at home at the raucous Rogers Centre to become World Champs for the first time since their 1992-23 back-to-back titles. 

 

For the first time all post-season, I am rooting for Toronto to finish the job without a Game 7 when "anything can happen," to quote the old baseball cliche. What the Blue Jays have proven all season and now in October is that they know how to come back from deficits and hold on to leads. Hall of Famers Earl Weaver and Yogi Berra loved to talk about "deep depth" as the key to a winning team. Well, these Blue Jays are replete with efficient "next man up" players.

 

Game 5 provided a perfect example. When George Springer, leadoff man extraordinaire and igniter of the Toronto offense, was sidelined with an oblique injury incurred on a swing during the Game 3 marathon, others have stepped up. Like Davis Schneider in Game 5, who smacked big ticket LAD acquistion Blake Snell's first pitch for a home run.  Two pitches later, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. did the same thing and Toronto never gave up the lead in its 6-1 win. 22-year-old RHP Trey Yesavage, still listed as a rookie because he only arrived in MLB in September, was masterful, pitching 7 innings of 1-run ball with 0 walks and 12 strikeouts.  

 

When the Dodgers briefly cut the deficit to 2-1 on Enrique "Kike" Hernandez's 3rd inning solo homer, the Blue Jays immediately answered. Dodger right fielder Teoscar Hernandez (no relation to Kike and who will not make people forget Aaron Judge as a fielder) misplayed Daulton Varsho's single into a triple. Then third baseman Ernie Clement, one of the many unheralded players on Toronto, quickly drove in Varsho with a sacrifice fly to restore the 2-run lead.  (Varsho is named for the late Phillie catcher Darren Daulton who played with Daulton's father Gary Varsho on the 1993 Phillies that lost the World Series to Toronto.)   

 

Ernie Clement is a grinding player I liked when he played for Cleveland. I didn't realize he had actually been DFAed twice by the Guardians (designated for assingment) and once by another organization before finding a home in Toronto.  He's from Rochester NY - not far away across Lake Ontario - where he played high school hockey as well as baseball.  Intelligent scouts love to sign players who participate in other sports, especially ones where they may not be stars.  It can provide a sign on what kind of a teammate the baseball prospect may be in a situation where other athletes are better. 

 

Another of my favorites on the likable Toronto team is starter Chris Bassitt, the former Oakland Athletic and New York Met RHP who has pitched flawless baseball as a bullpen set-up man.  Bassitt is a thinking man's pitcher who doesn't light up the radar gun with triple digits but if the moment is right, the Toledo O native who pitched for Akron University will slip in a 72-mph pitch to confound a batter.    Bassitt is a free agent after the season and there are rumors that the Orioles are interested as well they should be. There could be a good competition for the hurler who will be 37 next season. 

 

Toronto shortstop Bo Bichette will be another, higher-priced free agent available 5 days after the World Series when free agency officially begins. I happened to be watching TV in early September when Bichette hurt his knee awkwardly sliding into home plate and thrown out on a great throw from Yankee right fielder Cody Bellinger.  A diminished but still dangerous Bichette certainly deepens the Toronto lineup. With a healthier former Met Andres Gimenez now entrenched at short, Bichette is playing second when he is in the field. He is likely to get huge ovations this weekend in what could well be his swan song as a Blue Jay.  BTW Bellinger is also going to be a free agent and should be highly coveted. 

 

But enough of the business side of baseball.  There will be plenty of time to discuss that in the months ahead. I for one believe that the owners may try to lock out the players after next season's World Series, but I also believe that the strategy won't work becaause nothing will stop the rich owners from spending.  The big problem remains that their weak partners don't want to spend on players and just covet the rising franchise values, the slice of revenue sharing from richer owners, gambling money, the supposed coming bonanza on TV streaming rights, and expansion money in the billions if two more franchises are added to make 32 teams, perhaps by the end of the decade. 

 

There will be plenty of time to discuss this and I will try to shed light on this dreary and annoyingly repetitive subject which has been going on since professional free agency started a half-century ago. See the third and last edition of my first book THE IMPERFECT DIAMOPND: A HISTORY OF BASEBALL'S LABOR WARS.  For now I prefer to savor the coming end of an exciting October.  If the Dodgers score just a few runs for 6th game starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto, they could well force Game 7. They still have Shohei Ohtaini to lead off and Mookie Betts to hopefully find his missing batting stroke. But I do think former Oriole number one draft pick Kevin Gausman will compete well against Yamamoto.  We'll find out soon enough.

 

Not much to report on TCM tips for early November but I do want to mention that Sun Nov 2 will be TCM's salute to the late Robert Redford.  So Noir Alley only appears at 12M not 10A.  It's a rarely shown British crime caper "The Great Jewel Robber" (1950). 

 

The Redford films start at 9A "Barefoot in the Park" (1967) with Jane Fonda; 11A "Downhill Racer" (1967) with Gene Hackman; 1P "The Candidate" (1972 with Peter Boyle and Melvyn Douglas; preceded at 1245P with "How to Vote" (1936) a hilarious and approprioate Robert Benchley short with Election Day coming on Nov 4; 3P "All The President's Men" (1976) with RR as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein; 530P "The Sting" (1973) with Paul Newman and Robert Shaw; 8P "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) withl Newman; and 10P "The Way We Were" (1973) with Barbra Streisand. 

 

I once shook Robert Redford's hand at a Jackie Robinson Foundation dinner.  It was early this century at a time when Redford was being considered to play Branch Rickey in the movie "42," a role that Harrison Ford ultimately won and inhabited brilliantly..  Speaking of Robinson here is a note on an event of interest in New York City.

Th Nov 6 at 6P A forum on Jackie Robinson's Military Role and Legacy. Co-sponsored by the New York Statre Department of Veteran Services. It will be held at main offices of Jackie Robinson Foundationl, 75 Varick Street just off Canal Street and near #1 train.   Further information at jackierobinsonfoundation.org  

 

One last TCM film note:  Fri Nov 7 6P "Smart Girls Don't Talk" (1948) a crime picture with Bruce Bennett that came out in the same year he had a crucial if small role in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre". I argue that Bennett might have been the best American athlete ever to make a successful transition to a film career.  He played lineman for a Washington Huskies football team that lost the 1926 Rose Bowl to Georgia led by future western star Johnny Mack Brown.  Bennett became silver medalist in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics but failed to make the 1932 LA Olympics because of an injury suffered acting in a forgettable Hollywood film about football. He was in several Tarzan films drawing the praise of creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. He turned to serious acting in the later 1930s and among his notable roles were Mildred Pierce's first husband in the movie of the same name. He lived for over 100 years, remained married to the same woman, and in this age of NIL, get this: He said the only money he ever received for his sports ability was when an Olympic backer loaned him his car and filled it with gas so Bruce could attempt to make the 1932 American Olympic team.

 

That's all for now.  Stay Positive, Test Negative, and Take It Easy But Take It!    

 

  

   

The news during the weekend of December 20 that Rickey Henderson had died just a few days shy of his 66th birthday on Christmas Day hit the baseball

world very hard.  It was another hard blow after the recent loss of near-Hall of Famers Luis Tiant and Fernando Valenzuela and estimable Rocky Colavito and earlier in 2024 the departures of Hall of Fame immortals Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda. 

 

I never engaged in a one-on-one with Rickey, but when he was with the Mets in 2000 and I was a WNYC sports commentator, I saw him in the clubhouse taking issue with a NY Post reporter who had questioned his hustle on the field. Rickey didn't stoop to the physical threatening of Bobby Bonilla or the bleach-spraying of Bret Saberhagen (both onetime Mets), but he said firmly that nobody should ever question his playing hard or his love of the game. 

 

I have always thought that Rickey's time in New York got off on a wrong note in 1985 when he was on the disabled list for the first weeks of season and he reportedly said to an inquiring reporter, "I ain't got no time for no press." Meanwhile, across town in Queens, another newcomer, Gary Carter, blasted an extra-inning Opening Day walkoff HR against the St. Louis Cardinals, and the next year he was one of the leaders on the 1986 World Champs.  Rickey's NYY teams were always good but never made the then-shorter playoffs and he was traded back to Oakland in mid-1989.    

 

Of course Rickey's statistics were worthy of first ballot Hall of Fame election in 2009. Not only the all-time base stealer but 3,055 career hits, .401 on base percentage and .820 OPS on-base + slugging average. But the outpouring of sympathy comes from the unique character of the man. Check out Rickey's Hall of Fame induction speech in 2009. It is a classic in which he began by noting that if Satchel Paige could start in the majors at age 45, he would play as long as his body held out. His last major league season was 2003, making it 25 in all (not counting his 2004-2005 in independent ball.) 

 

Rickey went on to praise his mother Bobbie who had insisted he give up football although he wanted to play for his adopted home town Oakland Raiders.  "I guess mom knows best," he said, smiling and nodding to her, his wife, and his daughters.  He thanked his Babe Ruth League coach for bribing him with donuts and hot chocolate to get him out of bed and to the ballpark. And his HS guidance counselor for giving him a quarter for every hit, stolen base, and run scored he made in a local game.

 

He thanked Jack "JJ" Guinn, the scout who signed him for the Oakland A's and ignored the nay-sayers who thought a position player couldn't succeed throwing left and batting right. He praised his first minor league manager Tom Trebelhorn, a future Milwaukee Brewers skipper, for teaching him how to slide and take leads from first base. Remembering the day in July 1979 when A's owner Charlie Finley phoned and told him to report to the majors, Rickey chuckled, "Charlie, wherever you at and that donkey, thank you for the opportunity." 

 

RIP Rickey Nelson Henley Henderson - maybe his entertaining originality was preordained when he was born in a family Oldsmobile in Chicago as his mother was being rushed to the hospital and Ricky Nelson music was on the car radio. 

 

HERE'S A COUPLE OF TOUCHING MOMENTS FROM THE END OF THE BASEBALL SEASON: 

**At the end of the Yankees-Royals divisional baseball series, Yankees DH Giancarlo Stanton put a consoling arm around a tearful Bobby Witt Jr. after the Bronx Bombers had eliminated KC. Giancarlo must have been telling the rising superstar shortstop that there will be other chances for him to be on the winning side. 

 

**Isaiah Kiner-Falefa, Pirates (and former Rangers-Yankees) shortstop turned down a $250,000 bonus for playing in a certain number of games so that Pittsburgh rookies just called up from the minors could see some major league action. In this age of blatant greed on all sides, Falefa's gesture deserves a tip of the cap.  Last I looked, Isaiah, who will turn 30 in March, was still a free agent - he is the kind of grinder that every winning team needs.

 

My first post of the New Year will speculate more deeply on off-season maneuvers by MLB teams. I must say now that I don't know what the Cleveland Guardians are doing in trading superior middle infielder Andres Gimenez to the Blue Jays and slugging first baseman Josh Naylor to the Diamondbacks without a seemingly adequate return.  Gimenez's bat has slipped but his defense is world class.  The reverse is true about the burly but productive Naylor who is still only 27.

 

But I must take the time now to list the Sydney Greenstreet films celebrating his 145th birthday that will be on TCM Fri Dec 27 from 845A until 8P.  The day is sentimental for me because it is my half-birthday and also the birthday of my late sister Carol Ann Lowenfish Norton who would have been 86 on Dec 27.  She always knew the game was in my blood although after attending an Orioles game with me in Baltimore, she looked around at the crowd and wrote in a suburban newspaper that the national pastime was not baseball but eating.  

 

845A "That Way With Women" (1947) with Dane Clark and Martha Vickers, Lauren Bacall's precocious little sister in "The Big Sleep" from the year before.

 

*1015A "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) the first Greenstreet-Peter Lorre collaboration.  Starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. John Huston's first directorial hit and watch for his father Walter Huston making a cameo as the man that brings the falcon to Bogart's office.

 

12N "Background to Danger" (1943) set in Turkey directed by Raoul Walsh with Brenda Marshall and George Raft

 

130P "Conflict" (1945) with Bogart and the underappreciated Alexis Smith years before she became a Broadway musical star

 

3P "Mask of Dimitrios" (1944) with Zachary Scott (just before he treats Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth badly in "Mildred Pierce") and Faye Emerson (several years before she hosts with then-husband bandleader Skitch Henderson "Faye and Skitch", a NYC talk show in the early days of TV  

 

*445P "Three Strangers" (1946) with Geraldine Fitzgerald. Ireland's temporary gift to America (she played a memorable bitchy character in Siodmak's "Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" that I saw last week at the director Robert Siodmak Retrospective) and Peter Lorre.  A wish for the new year is made by three strangers.

 

630P "The Verdict" (1946) based on an Israel Zangwill story about a prosecutor who sentences an innocent man to death. With Lorre & Joan Lorring.

 

Sun Dec 29 has quite a lineup, too, starting at 12:15A with Noir Alley's "Postman Never Rings Twice" (1946) James Cain's classic story directed by

Tay Garnett with John Garfield and Lana Turner as the illicit lovers/Cecil Kellaway as the victimized husband/Leon Ames as the prosecutor. Repeated at 10A

 

12N "Ball of Fire" (1942) the original one directed by Howard Hawks with tough gal Barbara Stanwyck loosening up the linguistic professors including Gary Cooper.  Dana Andrews in a rare comic role as Stanwyck's mob boyfriend.

 

And the day ends back-to-back:

8P "Mildred Pierce" (1945) followed I hope by Carol Burnett bringing along her spoof of the movie

 

1030P "Double Indemnity" (1944) with Fred MacMurray/Stanwyck as the illicit lovers and Edward G Robinson sadly figuring it out - the Noir that started it all although I'd vote for Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake in "This Gun For Hire" (1942) with Robert Preston years before his Harold Hill days in "Music Man". One senses the hand of screenwriter W.R. Burnett all over this movie

 

That's all for now.  Here are the mantras, please follow them in these turbulent years of history that I hope won't engulf us all.  But understanding and appreciating the history of baseball, movies, and music will certainly help if only for consolation. 

So all together now:  Stay positive, test negative, and a new one:  stay healthy and stay sane.

 

And as always, take it easy but take it.   Happy New Year!!