Roger Neilson's 'pomme ball,' Fergie Jenkins, Cliff Johnson: Diamond Drivel
The ramp-up of football makes September a great time of the year, and also stirs up memories to ramble about baseball. Three left turns and we'll get home.
My mornings entail waking up with a case of the Cliff Johnsons. Therein lies the rub, it occurred to him while lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson, dead.1
No one has ever described themself feeling that way while they picked lint from their navel. Put it down as the apogee of Remembering Some Guys, to start thinking about a journeyman ballplayer who played his last major-league baseball game in 1986. Yet an epitaph for Cliff Johnson — “a man without a position” — describes my life.2
Football is the game I spend the most hours with, baseball is the teacher… mother… secret lover that provides a sense of normalcy. Football is more fun and visceral. It deserves to be our last vernacular sport. The lords of the realm in baseball bobbled that long ago.
Come September, I get clingy with baseball. The regular season is all but in the books. Major League Baseball has also destroyed the competitive integrity of the playoffs in the chase for media rights. It’s just not what it was when only four teams competed in the second season. Baseball just is. The stories are more shareable since the basics are simpler than football.
Here are three left turns. One involves a Hockey Hall of Fame coach. One is just looking up stats about Canada’s greatest ballplayer. And, ah-duh, let’s outro with a memory of being present for the last hurrah of Cliff Johnson.
This will be clipped in your inbox, and I share your frustration.
Turn 1: Trolly Roger
Extremely online sports fans know Roger Neilson, O.C. (1934-2003) through the May 2018 Secret Base video about how he “mercilessly trolled the NHL into creating a better rule book.” The best bit of Neilsonian tomfoolery happened on Ontario ball diamonds.
The last day of August is Dave Bresnahan Day for aggregators. Bresnahan was the minor-league catcher who pulled off the “Great Potato Incident” in the Eastern League in 1987.
Neilson used that at least once when he coached baseball in the summers in between Ontario hockey league (OHL) seasons with the Peterborough Petes. Whether this is verifiable, that most of it happened, and if we do not write this down, we stand to lose it.
This antic appears in Wayne Scanlan’s Neilson bio, Roger's World The Life and Unusual Times of Roger Neilson (McClelland and Stewart, 2004). I read it in one sitting one Friday afternoon at the Norfolk Public Library main branch. Neilson’s ballplayers used an apple. Those who struggled with Grade 10 French could still franglais up some wordplay: a pomme ball.
Neilson would call a mound conference and put the pomme ball in some apple-cheeked ballplayer’s glove. The pomme ball would soar beyond the third baseman and touch the outfield grass, where the left fielder would take care of it.
Once Neilson tried it in a Peterborough-Kingston game at Megaffin Stadium. The umpire immediately forfeited the game to Kingston. Now I have to wonder if anyone ever named their fantasy team, regardless of sport, the Kingston Killjoys. It slaps almost as much as Napanee Slappers, the moniker fellow traveller Jason Cormier once coined for a fictional hockey team.
The pomme ball is not in the Secret Base video, but it was part of the lore of Roger Neilson. It inspired a column by Archie McDonald that appeared in one of the Vancouver broadsheets four days after Dave Bresnahan’s Great Potato Incident.
When the opposition had runners on second and third during a bantam game, Neilson called a conference on the mound and slipped a naked Granny Smith to his catcher. On the next pitch the catcher threw the apple over the third baseman’s head and tagged the astonished runner with the real ball.
The left fielder destroyed the evidence by squashing the apple.3
Since everything begets a reference in my broken brain, I imagine Neilson introducing the play at practice. But I imagined him talking like Conan O’Brien in the Vintage Baseball sketch.
‘Squash the apple, fielder.’
It is the type of sports story you could imagine Kingston’s contribution to the writers’ wing in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Bob Elliott, collecting. Elliott appended a few diamond vignettes to his book The Northern Game: Baseball The Canadian Way (Sportclassic Books, 2005).
One of them is cued when a righty batter rips an inside pitch past the third baseman. And you get chaos before the umpire throws up their hands to say it was justfoul.
During his days in Ottawa, Elliott was coaching a game when one of his players lined a ball that kicked up baseline chalk. The potential winning run was coming around, and the umpire called it foul.
Elliott went out to argue with a player who could interpret between him and the French-speaking umpire. Finally, the player said: “Bobby, he says the ball hit the foul part of the line.”
Roger Neilson would have told you that’s not in the rulebook. Then again, he was loose with his… interpretations.
Turn 2: Jenkins hits 94
As an Xennial, what I know about Hall-of-Fame righty starter Fergie Jenkins is all secondhand. His hardball halcyon predates me. Baseball began morphing into a playoff sport across his playing days, and he was never on a playoff team. He might have been in 1978 if the Boston Red Sox were not determined to purge the Loyal Order of the Buffalo Heads, the players who hung out with Bill (Spaceman) Lee.4
Does anyone need a reminder of his brilliance contained in his traditional stats and retroactive fancystats?5
Not too shabby, eh.
The Jenkinaisssance from the last few years has been wonderful. The Chatham Coloured All-Stars teams from the 1930s have mostly received their long-overdue due. The Intercounty Baseball League has the Chatham Barnstormers playing at Fergie Jenkins Field. Fergie Jenkins is due to turn 82 years old about two weeks before Christmas. Like the bookworm who dreads the day their favorite author is gone, I may never meet him, but I want him to be around as long as possible.
Sept. 1 is a Fergie Jenkins day. Sept. 2 is a Dave Stieb day. Jenkins, to borrow a phrase from recent SportsLit guest Ken Dryden, was an “all-rounder.”
In 1971, he hit six home runs, more than any of the Cubs’ catchers and middle infielders, who were allowed to take batting practice every day. Put some respect on that, even if your concept of baseball has involved the DH since Day 1. On Sept. 1that season, Jenkins augmented his complete-game win by hitting two home runs in a Cubs’ win against the Montréal Expos.6
The first was against Bill Stoneman. Stoneman pitched two no-hitters for the Expos. He held the franchise single-season record for strikeouts for a quarter-century until Pedro Martínez harnessed all his stuff — just in time to be moved to Boston.
Jenkins never threw a no-hitter. Sept. 2 is the anniversary of Stieb finally getting one for the Blue Jays, which remains the only one across their 48-season history.
I had to look for Fergie Jenkins’ best Game Score. He put up 94 twice during his peak years — in starts less than a year apart for the Cubs and Texas. There is a commonality between his first and my memory of the last hurrah of Cliff Johnson, which came in a season when Dave Stieb got on the struggle bus.
The first time was July 22, 1973. It was a microcosm of his Cubs career.
I love poring into Baseball-Reference to rebuild a game in the mind’s eyes. The Cubs and Jenkins vs. San Francisco on a Sunday at Wrigley Field. Since Game Score is a fancy counting stat, Jenkins earned a 94 through holding San Fran across 12 innings of low-run ball. Only six batters on-boarded across a dozen frames. Bobby Bonds, two days before the ninth birthday of his son Barry, led off the game by hitting a single. Jenkins retired him the next four turns. Jenkins held fellow hall-of-famer Willie McCovey to 0-for-4 with a base on balls. After the Cubs finally pinch-hit for Jenkins, the Giants won by scoring thrice in the 13th inning.
Was that the beginning of the end for Jenkins in what is now mass-marketed as Wrigleyville? The extra-innings L took the Cubs down a rung to 6 games above .500, and back into a tie for first place with St. Louis.7
It does not take Dan Epstein to know ’73 was the season of the “you gotta believe!” New York Mets. Those Mets never got higher than 5 games above break-even. They finished first since the rules said someone had to. Long after the fact, it’s more like the Cubs conceded the mini-pennant by playing .397 ball after that Jenkins’ 12-inning no-decision.
If you learned the career arc of Dave Stieb off the backs of O-Pee-Chee cards, you know about the two seasons, 1986 and ’87. And then came back with a second peak period before back pain got him.
That was Jenkins for a lot of that ’73 season. Softness showed in the rate stats: a 3.89 ERA, 3.67 FIP, and 1.196 WHIP. He was debited with a 14-16 record, after six consecutive seasons as a 20-win earner. In today’s parlance, the Cubs’ window was closing.
Here is where I get illuminated by Mike Shropshire’s Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and ‘The Worst Baseball Team in History’ — The 1973-1975 Texas Rangers (Donald I. Fine, 1996). As Shropshire told it, Illinois native Herzog shared some intel about his home state’s ballclub and their Black ace heading toward a mutual breakup.
“The wind has been blowing out a lot at Wrigley Field and Fergie’s getting a little weird…” is how Herzog related that the Rangers knew they could add an ace for an ante of two prospects. Herzog did not want to include Bill Madlock in that trade, but they did.
So that sets up Jenkins’ other 94-game score effort. It was in his American League début with Texas on April 6, 1974: a one-hit, one-walk shutout for a 2-0 win against Reggie Jackson and the Oakland A’s, who went on to win their third consecutive World Series title.
Jenkins whiffed Jackson in the first meaningful matchup between the two future Hall of Famers. He tallied 10 strikeouts while going just ‘one over the minimum.’ He worked around a fielder’s error. His catcher Jim Sundberg threw out MLB stolen base champions Bert Campaneris (1968) and Bill North (1976) when each tried to steal second.
Good times. Of course, oddly enough, both Madlock and Sundberg play quite different roles in the collective consciousness of Blue Jays fans over age 45. And I am not ready to talk about that.
Jenkins was a close second to Oakland’s Catfish Hunter in ’74 Cy Young Award voting. He could have become the first Cy Young winner in the AL and NL. Fancy stats show Gaylord Perry was the most dominant pitcher in AL competition. Bert Blyleven also got little love from the award voters, foreshadowing later difficulty earning his plaque in Cooperstown.
Turn 3: By the labour of Cliff
That is two left turns. Check the third-base coach, to see if he is waving you in.
The end of August cues memories of my parents getting me out of my first Blue Jays games at the old Exhibition Stadium.
The second time was Aug. 29, 1986. Friday night, after a day at the CNE and a tour through the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, before it moved to St. Marys, Ont. It was just Dad and 9-year-old me; Mum and two tuckered-out younger siblings were in our hotel room.
I have to add this. It was the night after The Big Event wrestling show that drew 61,000-plus fans. Not being a wrestling fan, I had no idea until many years later. Yet at that stage, Hulk Hogan had nothing on Rance Mulliniks, Cliff Johnson, or Garth Iorg, to say nothing of the Blue Jays front-line stars, because baseball was real. Please excuse me, I mean unscripted.
Also, wouldn’t The Man Without A Position be a great wrestler origin story? A pore over Johnson’s game log shows that Labour Day weekend 1986 was his requiem. He hit the last two of his career 196 home runs. Across 15 seasons, where no team saw fit to get him 500 plate appearances, he slugged .459, onboarded .355, and his OPS+ was a meaty 125.8
At this stage, I filter all baseball lives through the shifting relationship between laborers and capital. It is part of the narrative of sports that is largely unwritten.
Johnson’s baseball-industry intake came through the draft in 1966, the year Marvin Miller became executive director of the Players’ Association. A decade later, he earned two World Series rings as a role player alongside Jackson on the Bronx Zoo Yankees in the first two seasons after ballplayers got economic liberty. He vanished from MLB after that ’86 season during the Collusion I phase. He had the AL/NL record of 21 career pinch-hit home runs. It now resides with Matt Stairs of Fredericton, N.B., about 12 different MLB teams, and the late and lamented Ottawa Lynx.
All I knew in 1986 about Cliff Johnson was that he had a lived-in look and could launch home runs. You would retro-apply Dad Strength to him.
That Friday night, he smote game-tying hits in the eighth and ninth innings to rally the Jays to a 6-5 win against the Minnesota Twins.
Some characteristic struggles for the 1986 iteration of Dave Stieb got the Jays into a three-run deficit through the middle innings. They rallied, and Johnson, who once uttered the credo “happiness to me is going to bat four times a night” homered in his fourth trip to bat of the night to tie the score 4-4 after eight innings.
The Twins retook the lead against the sidearming Mark Eichhorn in the top of the ninth, with Billy Beane of Moneyball fame tapping home. And, no, Billy Beane did not write Moneyball, as the late great Joe Morgan accused him of doing. Nor, in this case, did Beane get on base — he came on to pinch-run for Roy Smalley.
(A few seasons prior, Smalley had been an all-star shortstop while Minnesota was managed by his uncle, Gene Mauch. Mauch, the first manager of the Montréal Expos, once said, “Sometimes I think of Roy as my nephew, and other times I think of him as my sister's son.”
(What a positive dude. Hard to believe Mauch wore two of the worst collapses in baseball history — the 1964 Pholdin' Phils and the ‘One Pitch Away’ 1986 California Angels.)
The Twins might have nicked Eichhorn for a pair and a two-run lead. However, Jesse Barfield threw a runner out at home to end the frame. Barfield, of course, became the Jays’ first 40-home run hitter that season, and Bill James later chose him as having the best outfield arm of any 1980s player.
Kelly Gruber wrested a leadoff base on balls to start the last of the ninth inning. Gruber made the ‘three left turns’ to score the equalizer through singles by the late Tony Fernández and the aforementioned Cliff Johnson.
A throwing error tacked to Johnson’s one-out equalizer. The Twins used an intentional walk to load the bases and set up to induce a double play to force extra innings.
Barfield hit a ground ball to shortstop Greg Gagne, who flipped to Steve Lombardozzi for the force at second base. Barfield beat Lombardozzi’s relay to first baseman Kent Hrbek, allowing Fernández to score the decider.
Back then, teams did not make a big thing out of a walk-off win, giving sports drink showers and tearing the jersey off the man of the hour. The game just ended.
What I remember. Dad and I departed by walking, with thousands of others, across the great expanse of artificial turf behind the temporary outfield fence toward an exit gate. The official program said Exhibition Stadium had the largest Astroturf surface in North America. It had to be big enough for both a ballfield that was 330 feet to each foul pole, the elongated Canadian football gridiron, and all the accouterments of a big-time wrestling show.
It is a good memory. Sure, the carpet had forever chemicals, but it was soft and yielding under my feet. The thrill of the fake grass, so to speak.
The experiential is what sticks. This is what the major leaguers play on… it felt a world apart from the gravel-and-grass softball diamonds just two hours away in my cranny of the world.
Those stadiums got an F in form. They graded out well in Function though. Football, baseball, concerts, and wrestling on one site. Disparate with commonalities.
Perhaps that was a plus. Sports are an experiential business, and if the game is bad there is always someplace else to look. As a kid, it was all about the game. You had to turn toward it — Exhibition Stadium’s bleacher seats did not face home plate — and learn by watching.
Two Minnesota infielders involved in that non-double play are involved in some bon mots from another sportswriter hero, Steve Rushin. Kent Hrbek, ol’ Buy A Vowel, and Greg Gagne started for the worst-to-first 1991 Minnesota Twins. Those Twins were worthy World Series champions.9
Rushin, barely a half-decade after working in concessions at Twins games, covering the '91 M run in Sports Illustrated. The inimitable Rushin — if ya can't imitate him, don't copy him — showed the way of survival in sports media entails leaning into the random and professionally absurd. Write about the fringy stuff, and have fun while it lasts, since it almost always ends in a heartbreak.
And why would Rushin feel that way? You guessed it. Like me, he is a Minnesota Vikings fan.
I do not remember what he wrote about the baseball games of the best World Series in the last 35 years. I do recall Rushin depicted Twins manager Tom Kelly being politely befuddled by a press conference question about “Kent Erbeck and Dave Gagner” from a French-speaking reporter — probably not the same person who told Bob Elliott’s translator that a potential game-winning double hit the foul side of the line. Per Rushin, one player did not exist, and the other played centre for the Minnesota North Stars, rather than shortstop for the Minnesota Twins.
In other words, Atlanta outfielder Lonnie Smith wasn’t the only person Greg Gagne deked in October 1991.
Lonnie Smith had the nickname “Skates” for his maladroitness afield, so maybe that fed the cosmic imbalance that led to confusing sports and the given names of Gagne and Gagner, the French words for “win.”
Either way. I know this is a too long, don’t read, with too many tangents. What was even the point beyond I like stories? That there are no bad days at a ballyard. You need to look in for something to put a charge into you like Cliff Johnson getting into one that long-ago late-summer night.
I always track a little about everything, which I post regularly to Notes. Otherwise, this is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Aug. 29-Sept. 3, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.; traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas.
The singer-songwriter, not the early-2010s San Francisco Giants closer. Made you look.
Cliff Johnson, BR Bullpen.
Archie McDonald, “Minor-league catcher gets big-league laugh,” Vancouver Sun, Sept. 4, 1987.
On Oct. 2, someone will share the memory of Bucky Bleeping Dent in the one-game playoff (something MLB doesn’t have anymore, because who needs fun?) between the Yankees and Red Sox in 1978. It was just the cake-taker after the Red Sox baseball ops outsmarted themselves out of spite They got a minimal return for Jenkins and benched Bill Lee. Then they ended up having only three reliable starters in September.
Jenkins in 1978 earned 5.5 wins above replacement in Texas, fashioning a 3.04 earned-run average and 2.95 FIP (fielding-independent pitching). He led the AL in strikeout-to-walk ratio. Meantime, in September, the Red Sox ruined the confidence of second-year pro Bobby Sprowl and took relief ace Bob Stanley out of his natural habitat. Cursed? More like an own-goal.
Fergie Jenkins, Baseball-Reference.com.
That very day, the Pittsburgh Pirates fielded the first all-Black starting nine in the history of the American and National leagues. The historic lineup was Rennie Stennett, second base; Gene Clines; centrefield; Roberto Clemente, rightfield; Willie Stargell, leftfield; Manny Sanguillén, catcher; Dave Cash, third base; Al Oliver, first base; Jackie Hernández, shortstop; Dock Ellis, pitcher.
St. Louis won their game that day by defeating Los Angeles at home. Al Hrabosky earned his first MLB save. Hrabosky’s facial hair inspired Dennis Maruk to grow a Fu Manchu, and later Ken Reid wrote a biography of Maruk that Neil Acharya and I read for our first episode of SportsLit.
I do not use batting average, which fails to show cause-and-effect between batting production and run scoring. The problem is that there is no good verb linked to on-base percentage. I am trying ‘onboarding.’ Make it catch on at school.
Unlike 1987 — .349 winning percentage away from the Metrodome.