That's the way it goes for the Toronto Maple Leafs; how about a requiem for Vida Blue?
Since history is likely not on the side of Toronto, let's do some history vis-à-vis Vida Blue, and remember a Canadian humorist who sometimes skewered the sports world.
Is it just a knee-jerk reaction, or have the dinks in the doink got worse in the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey prefecture? Nah, maybe they are about the same.
The more the NHL playoffs go on, the less there is to say, although that adage is unlikely to be put into practice on any and all Sportsnet platforms anytime soon. The numbers are easy. Toronto, which in case you have not heard is facing triple match point against the Florida Panthers in a second-round series.
They have received exactly zero goals from the core four of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, and John Tavares. The NHL is not a try league, but even if it were, three of those high-dollar lot were Toronto’s three least offensively active forwards during the 3-2 overtime defeat on Sunday. Nylander was the exception, and still, he scored no goals.
Toronto has scored only six goals across the three defeats. That is one fewer goal than the second-season, star power-free Seattle Kraken sniped against Dallas on Sunday. It is two fewer than the New Jersey Devils scored whilst also facing a two-games-to-none series deficit against Carolina.
C’est la vie and it is always darkest before the dawn. At least there might be a good UrinatingTree video to come out of this calamity. Always a silver lining, and please keep reading, there is better non-box-related-programming down below.
Tangled up in Vida Blue
News about the death of the 1970s pitching star Vida Blue overmatches you with lines of tangency. Let’s play two.
One is that you can see threads between a career-affecting contract dispute that Blue had with the Oakland A’s a half-century ago and the recent negotiation between NFL quarterback Lamar Jackson had with the Baltimore Ravens, even if the dollar figures are vastly different. The other is that the career and life circumstances of Blue, who battled substance use disorder while he was playing Major League Baseball, are right in the wheelhouse of the Social and Statistical Justice Committee that the Baseball Hall of Fame needs to create like yesterday in order to rebuild credibility.1 Such a committee, and I know this will never happen, would reconsider overlooked greats through both an inclusive and analytical lens.
Jackson is getting that money, with US$185 million guaranteed in his new five-season, $260M contract with Baltimore. The fight played out in public between the quarterback and his employer for an oddly long time, with the Baltimore highers-up max-blitzing their most valuable asset with a “plethora of indignities.”2
Generally, in the NFL, a top-flight QB gets top dollar automatically, and good for them. The Ravens did not come to terms with one-time NFL MVP Jackson for months, until after the Philadelphia Eagles gave $180M guaranteed to the less seasoned Jalen Hurts.
On a general principle, one should pay no attention to media noise about contract negotiations. It is not your money being spent; nobody understands the salary cap; and the common perception that salaries and ticket prices are correlated is bumpf. So who cares? Do you have to know what Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldaña are paid before watching Guardians of the Galaxy 3?
That concern trollers in the mass media might have claimed that Lamar Jackson was overplaying his hand seems telling. Outright racism toward the Black quarterback that pervaded American football for far too long seems largely gone. Acceptance seems to fall, at least to my appropriatin’ ginger arse, in the range of what an educator, LeGarrett King, has called “interest convergence.” The NFL counts on Black style and Black excellence as essential for making their sport seem cool and dynamic. The C-suites, though, are the last white enclave in the NFL that pays better than being a kicker or punter.
Jackson bet on himself and represented himself. His style of play, where he can be as much of a rushing threat as a good 75 per cent of running backs and also be a first-rank passer, also goes against received NFL wisdom. Quarterbacks are supposed to rein in their rushing instincts over time and just become an on-field extension of the (usually white) head coach and (usually white) offensive coordinator’s brilliant Scheme.
The subtle coding one might discern from that NFL off-season drama ties to the career arc-altering contract holdout that Blue had with the A’s in 1972.
Briefly, 1971 was the first and only time that two Black pitchers earned the Cy Young Award in both the NL and AL. Ferguson Jenkins, of the Chicago Cubs and Chatham, Ont., won the NL award. Blue, at all of 22, won the AL Cy Young and MVP Award are putting down the following traditional pitching Triple Crown stats: 24-8 record, 1.82 earned-run average, 301 strikeouts. It would take another two decades before another lefty in the AL whiffed 300 in a season.
As a ballplayer with limited experience in the era when the reserve clause bound players to teams, Blue drew “a salary so small that he qualified to live in the publicly subsidized Acorn Projects in West Oakland.” He aimed to negotiate with A’s chairman Charlie O. Finley, who was a notorious tightwad.
For a point of cherry-picked comparison, BB-Ref has full salary information for the hall of fame pitcher Tom Seaver. The New York Mets bumped Tom Terrific up steadily after he established himself in 1967. In ’69, after Seaver won the Cy Young with the Miracle Mets, his salary was doubled to $80,000. Annual raises followed.
Blue, cribbing from his official SABR bio, wanted a salary in the 90 grand range for 1972, just a tick below what the top 10 pitchers in baseball were earning. Jenkins and the Cubs came to terms on a $125,000 deal, which was a nearly 74-per-cent pay hike.
Finley, as he had with A’s white and Black core players, took a hard line. He set the bar at $50K. That led to Blue “not conditioning and practicing as he would have during spring training,” signing a few weeks into the regular season, and regressing. He ended up working out of the bullpen during their run to the first of three consecutive World Series titles. He would recover some of that form in seasons ahead, but never even had another 200-strikeout season.
Challenging the system, as a young person, takes a toll. In 2021, it was a great privilege for Neil Acharya and me to interview the basketball legend Spencer Haywood, about his autobiography. Haywood went all the way to the United States Supreme Court in order to be the first ‘hardship’ player to enter the NBA before his college cohort graduated.
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="There are some loose parallels between the two sportsmen. Both were born in 1949 in the rural Deep South (Blue in Louisiana, Haywood in Mississippi). Both found success in what was not initially their first sporting love.
Haywood, as a child, was fascinated by golf before finding basketball. Blue was a fabulous quarterback in football-mad Louisiana. Schools with an interest convergence in winning football games recruited him. Blue had just lost his steelworker father who died at age 45. Signing with the A’s meant a signing bonus he could use to support his widowed mother and siblings, so he chose baseball.
(There was a time when baseball beat football on the regular for signing multisport talents. It is indicting of the latter that it is flipped. Forty years ago, Patrick Mahomes would have been pitching for the Kansas City Royals, instead of being one of their investors while playing quarterback next door. But I digress.)
Both Haywood and Blue fought substance use disorder and paid a price professionally. Haywood, in that memoir, said that the backlash he faced for taking the NBA to court probably did factor into his struggles. He played his last NBA game two weeks after his 31st birthday before bottoming out (as documented in Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime and Adam McKay’s adaptation Winning Time).
Blue used cocaine, like a lot of North Americans did in the ’70s and ’80s. It led to a prison term and missing an entire season of baseball. In 2021, speaking with the great Candace Buckner of the Washington Post, Blue made a similar observation about how the contract fight he took on a half-century earlier fed into the type of sadness that leads to seeking out illicit solaces: “Who knows how that one year — and the incident itself — changed my attitude… It created this issue.”
It seems best to wrap this up with a chronology of how ballplayers’ fight to collect more economic rents, and the politics of glory, played out.
1974-75: Due to Finley breaching his contract, Blue’s A’s starting rotation mate Jim (Catfish) Hunter becomes baseball’s first free agent. He immediately signs with the Yankees. They overpitch him for 328 innings during a season where they were never within as few eight games of a playoff berth after July 31.
1975-76: Arbitrator Peter Seitz strikes down the reserve clause that, 3½ years prior, forced Blue to play for less than the going rate. The MLB owners take the L with grace and immediately get to work on developing an economic structure that will allow players to test the open market, while also making sure that huge discrepancies between the big markets and small markets will not start to appear by the early 1990s. Actually, no, they would spend most of the next two decades fighting the players’ association and ignoring that they are losing their share of the audience to the NFL, NBA, and college sports.
Charlie Finley wanted to make all of the players free agents every year, figuring it would water down the open market. He trades slugger Reggie Jackson, but faces losing other players for nothing.1977-79: Hunter is mostly spare parts for his final three seasons: 366⅓ innings, 4.52 ERA (86 ERA+), 0.4 WAR. He does earn two more rings with the Yankees.
Blue moves across the Bay to the San Francisco Giants. There are still some solid, All-Star worthy seasons ahead of him.
With a barebones roster, the A’s finish 54-108, and their average attendance falls to 3,787. Granted, the current Oakland team might look at that and say, “Challenge accepted.”1983-84: Blue spends 81 days in prison for cocaine possession, and is suspended for an entire season.
1987: In January, Hunter is elected to the Hall of Fame in his third season of eligibility. A month later, Blue retires amid speculation substance use disorder has flared again, and he later confides in sportswriters that he had to make such a choice. Through the modern statistical lens, though, he has better career stats than Catfish Hunter.
1992-95: Blue draws very little support from the writers who vote for the Hall of Fame, and falls off the ballot.
That brings this around to the soapbox topic about how the Hall of Fame, if it really was up to the task of being honest about baseball’s sins (ha!), would have that Social and Statistical Justice Committee. Revisit players from the 1950s through the ’90s, Black, white, and Latino, and look at how they produced within the adverse circumstances, whether that be institutional racism, labour tension and public backlash against players, and the careers truncated due to a lack of concern about long-term player health.3
Presently, it has Eras Committees that have mostly just served to create sidedoor hall of famers out of players who were varyingly popular, well-connected, or self-promoted while working in the broadcast booth.
Alan Trammell deserved it, sure. But Jim Kaat (45.2 WAR as a pitcher) and Jack Morris (43.6) are in, while there is no groundswell this side of Jon Bois for 1980s Toronto Blue Jays ace Dave Stieb (56.5 WAR in an injury-shortened career).
Dick Allen (58.7 WAR, 156 OPS+) died ignored. So did Jimmy Wynn (55.7, 129 OPS+). It is not a Black-white deal. Boston Red Sox right-field great Dwight Evans (67.2 WAR, 129 OPS+) has not received any love from Coopertown. But the Eras committee could lift the velvet rope for Fred McGriff (52.6, 134 OPS+), not that there is anything wrong with that.
The work of historical documentation and evaluation evolves as new evidence is found. This is purist talk, but that should prevail with the keeper of the game’s history. It is only right to look at African-American and Latino players from the first post-integration decades and how they had to play the game, which is hard enough as it is, while trying to conform to the dominant culture. There has also been a huge cultural shift in regard to how people who develop substance use disorder are supported and treated. Perhaps you look at Vida Blue and think it was amazing he had more pitching WAR than Jack Morris while the nose candy had a hold of him.
I know. Will not happen. The sanitized Official Story of Major League Baseball is that progress moved in a straight line after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke the National and American leagues’ colour line in 1947, and Minnie Miñoso and Roberto Clemente lead the way in creating acceptance for darker-skinned players from the Caribbean islands. And while the War of Drugs is almost universally regarded as an embarrassing failure, who wants to ’fess up for getting carried away with that decades ago?
Any change, anything beyond lip service to social justice, admits acknowledging MLB was far from perfect in the past.
Spencer Haywood was eventually inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. It is too soon to know whether Lamar Jackson will be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Based on what is readily readable, Vida Blue believed he cost himself Cooperstown. But baseball did that more than he did.
Bruce McCall, 1935-2023
Since Canadian-born humorist Bruce McCall went out on my high school hockey number, 87, it seems fine to mention where he was influential.
Sports fell within his satirical lens. If you have not seen his World’s Worst Golf Course animated short, please open it in a new browser tab.
Back in the day, The Best American Sports Writing was on my Christmas list every year, and a family member usually obliged. The 1998 iteration included a McCall essay for Esquire entitled “The Case Against Golf.” That was my introduction to McCall and a worldview that was as askew as anything I had encountered up until then, which mostly included The Kids In The Hall, Monty Python, a housemate’s VHS tape of Mr. Show, and novels by Peter Gent and Kurt Vonnegut.
That would lead to seeking out Thin Ice, a memoir of his early life in Southern Ontario. At that time, I had not been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, and I often felt like a loser since I would rather zone out living in my head and didn’t get on well socially. McCall imparted that there was nothing egregious about taking time to find out where you fit into the world.
I do not share his passion for golf or cars. McCall was no athlete (like me!) but he loved baseball (like me!) and resisted being a made member of Leaf Nation (like me!). He was ride-or-die with the New York Rangers “because they were losers, like me,” and even glued cutout cardboard letters to a blue hockey sweater since it was impossible to find a replica Rangers sweater in Toronto in 1949. When he wore it to school, though, by lunch hour the shirt read, R G S.
In homage, a here-goes-nothing reading from “The Case Against Golf.”
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Four years on: “Harold Baines, really?!”
That included the Ravens having the worst wide receiver production in the NFL in 2022. Why yes, I drafted Jackson for my fantasy team.
Such as overuse of pitchers, and Astroturf.