Hot Tito Summer, 1959

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Lately I’ve been thinking about Tito Francona—the father, not the managerial offspring with the recycled nickname and the postmodern baseball pedigree. The old one, the real one, who once hit .363 for Cleveland in a year that now feels like an administrative error in the record books. After that, he dissolved into the gray sediment of the statistical compost where most men in this game eventually rot, unnoticed, unremembered, as if their brief perfection had been some kind of clerical oversight.

In 1959, Tito Francona could hit as if he’d been momentarily granted access to some secret order of perfection. Every swing seemed touched by an unseen intelligence, a mysterious alignment of body, time, and chance. And then, as happens with almost everyone who’s ever tried to make a living at this strange and merciless game, the magic began to leak away—slowly, imperceptibly, until it was just gone.

I like these kinds of ballplayers, the ones who had one magnificent season and then settled into competence. Baseball keeps statistics on everything, which should mean nothing is forgotten, but somehow the opposite is true. We remember the grotesque extremes: the home run records, the perfect games, the failures so spectacular they take on mythic weight. But Tito Francona hitting .363 one season? He didn’t have enough AB’s (399) to qualify for a batting title, hence he fell into the crack between memory and oblivion where most of us quietly live our lives.

When he got to Oakland in 1969, he was 35 and the team was young and hungry. Within two years they’d be champions, growing mustaches, fighting in the clubhouse and generally behaving like Hells Angels that happened to be good at baseball. Tito wasn’t part of that. He was already what young men call old, though thirty-five is nothing at all, just the age when the body starts sending quiet messages about dissolving talent and a smaller paycheck.

Oakland Coliseum, 1969

I think about his son, Little Tito, managing the Red Sox years later, wearing his father’s number, carrying the name forward. The father must have watched those World Series wins with complicated feelings–pride certainly, but also perhaps that peculiar ache of seeing your child surpass you, and become the version of the name people remember. This is the bargain parents make. We raise our children to eclipse us.

The game doesn’t care about any of this, of course. It just keeps going, generation after generation, young men arriving to do what young men have always done–hit the ball, catch the ball, throw the ball, fail most of the time. Tito Francona played it well enough for fifteen years, brilliantly for one, and then went home to raise a son who would win 2 World Series championships. There are worse legacies. There are worse ways to disappear.

The Ghosts of Oakland

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Dave Beard wasn’t famous, and that’s kind of the point.

In the long, cracked pavement of baseball history, there are the guys who get their faces on baseball cards kids actually want, and then there are the guys who just sort of show up. The grinders. The ones who throw when their arms are wet noodles and nobody’s in the stands except some drunk guy in section 128 yelling, “Let’s go, Oakland!” like it still meant something.

Beard was one of those guys. A righty from Atlanta, he was called up from minor league purgatory (Tacoma) in 1980…when the Coliseum still smelled like cigarettes, wet concrete, and stale beer. He was twenty and looked like the kind of kid who’d help you move a couch without being asked. The big names were long gone—Catfish, Reggie, Vida. But what was left was a weird hangover phase and a bunch of kids trying to keep the lights on.

Billy Martin was managing back then when managers looked like they could, and would get into a bar fight—chain-smoking, yelling, driving pitchers into the ground because that’s what men like him did. Beard fit right in and didn’t complain. Just threw until his shoulder felt like rubber bands about to snap. In ’82 he was damn good—ten wins, eleven saves, the kind of numbers that make you think maybe this game could love him back.

But baseball doesn’t love anyone for long.

By ’83 his arm was mush and the radar gun didn’t care. The A’s had moved on. Salt Lake. Iowa. Bus rides and near empty stands. Motel rooms with buzzing air conditioners. Beard became another name on the transaction wire, another face fading into the cocaine static of the 1980s. His last game came in ’89—the same year Field of Dreams tried to deke us into thinking this whole thing was about redemption and fathers playing catch in cornfields. Beard knew better. Baseball was about labor. It chewed you up, then asked for seconds.

He finished 19–20 with a 4.70 ERA. That’s not failure…that’s survival.

No one’s naming their kid after Dave Beard. There’s no statue, no tribute video, just a box score and the faint outline of a man who once mattered for a minute. But if you look close enough—past the lights, the money, and the bullshit—you can see the beauty in it.

The Education of Tommy Lasorda

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You are twenty-eight years old, your name is Tommy Lasorda, and you have just been purchased by Kansas City—a city that exists primarily as a way station between more important places, a baseball purgatory where careers go to test their faith against indifference. The year is 1956, and you have spent the better part of a decade learning that wanting something and deserving it are entirely different propositions, that the gap between a man’s dreams and his abilities can be measured in the precise distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.

The Athletics are not really the Athletics anymore—they are owner Arnold Johnson’s experiment in making the team a Yankees minor league affiliate, a franchise that treats tradition the way a demolition crew treats condemned buildings. You have come here not because anyone believes in your fastball, which was never fast enough, or your curveball, which breaks more like a prayer than a weapon, but because Kansas City needs bodies to fill uniforms, and you are, if nothing else, a body that knows how to throw a baseball in the general direction of home plate.

What you don’t yet understand is that failure, when it arrives with sufficient regularity, becomes its own form of education. Each batter who turns your best pitch into a line drive teaches you something about the mathematics of disappointment, about the way hope calculates its own meaning. You will spend exactly one season here, appearing in eighteen games, posting an earned run average that reads like a small town’s zip code, and learning that baseball’s cruelest lesson isn’t that you aren’t t good enough—it’s that being not good enough can take so very long to prove.

But Kansas City gives you something more valuable than statistics: it teaches you about devotion without reward, about the particular madness of men who continue to show up to a job that has already fired them in their hearts. Years later, when you are managing the Dodgers (and beating those very same Athletics) and screaming at umpires with a passion that borders on religious ecstasy, you will draw from this reservoir of accumulated disappointment, this understanding that baseball breaks everyone eventually, and the only choice is whether to let it break you quietly or loudly.

You are twenty-eight years old in Kansas City, and you are learning that sometimes a man’s greatest contribution to the game he loves is not what he accomplishes, but what he survives.

4 Home Runs in a Shopping Mall

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Nick Kurtz, a rookie first baseman who looks like he wandered out of a protein shake commercial, suddenly materialized in the record books with one of those evenings that read less like baseball and more like a wild night of drinking. In Houston, of all places—an indoor shopping mall disguised as a ballpark—he went 6-for-6, swatting four home runs, crossing the plate six times, and dragging in eight RBIs as if this were all perfectly normal. He tied Shawn Green’s ancient videogame stat-line from 2002, and, being 22 years old and unknown to almost everyone outside of Northern California, became the first rookie to ever do it.

The adjectives were automatic—prodigious, historic, sublime—and you could hear the broadcasters practically orgasming over it, their voices cracking with that faux-reverence they use for anything remotely “epic.” But what really mattered wasn’t the game, not the numbers, not even Nick Kurtz, who looked like any other rookie in a too-big uniform. What mattered was the machinery—how the whole thing got packaged in real time, hashtags exploding, clips looping on ESPN, Twitter accounts spitting out “immortality” memes like a Vegas slot machine stuck on jackpot. A kid goes 6-for-6, four bombs and suddenly he’s a “story.”

Still, there is something unsettling about the sheer improbability of it. Four home runs is not just one more than three; it’s the moment when arithmetic loses its patience and veers into mythology. The difference between a great night and an unrepeatable aberration. Baseball is built on aberrations: men hitting safely in 56 consecutive games, men striking out 20 batters, men swatting 73 home runs in a season while looking like Michelin men with abnormal skulls. None of these things make sense; all of them endure.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know if Kurtz will turn into the next McGwire or the next Jack Cust. Baseball doesn’t care about your origin story; it just eats talent and spits out statistics. But this one night—this fever dream of total bases—means Kurtz will never again be anonymous. He could go 0-for-his-next-50, and people will still say, “That’s the guy who once hit four homers in a game.”

For a franchise hanging by a thread, clinging to Las Vegas rumors and endless mediocrity, Kurtz gave us something better than hope. He gave us a story worth telling. And in Sacramento, that’s rarer than a summer day below 100 degrees.

My Baseball Card Collection: Troy Neel

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Probably not the only scumbag in my collection.

Troy Neel, whose bat had all the subtlety of a cocktail waitress slapping your face at a Reno craps table, found something like purpose in Japan—though “purpose” might be too generous for a man whose entire career felt like a long, amoral slide into sunless basements. By the time he arrived at the Orix BlueWave in 1995, Neel had already proven that he was exactly the sort of player Major League Baseball pretends not to know what to do with: too unreliable to be a franchise cornerstone, too productive to vanish completely, too American to understand the word “team.”

Japan, of course, specializes in repurposing the detritus of American empire. For five seasons, Neel clubbed home runs like he was punishing the baseball for something it said about his beloved mama. In over 2,000 at-bats, he mashed 136 homers with a .882 OPS, and in 1996 he won the Japan Series MVP as a sort of cherry on top.

But statistics were never really the story with Troy Neel. Not in the States, and certainly not in Japan. The real fascination lay in the performance of identity. Gaijin (foreign) sluggers are expected to be both deities and dogs: dominate the league while bowing at every corner. The Nippon Professional Baseball League functions, in part, as a recycling plant for imperial overstock—failed closers, paunchy outfielders, men who once posed shirtless in spring training magazines but now come trailing steroid whispers and ex-wives. In this small pantheon of exile, Neel found what we might dare to call use. Not purpose—let us not ennoble him—but instrumentality. He became, in essence, a hammer employed to strike the proper contrast against the exquisite art of contact hitting.

And yet, somehow, the BlueWave didn’t just tolerate him—they built around him. This is the pre-“Ichiro Superstar” era we’re talking about, before Japan exported its own mythologies to America. Neel was the meat of the lineup, the blunt-force trauma. Watching him stagger around the bases after a home run, you could almost feel the tectonic tension between cultures: Japanese fans clapping politely, unsure whether to adore or fear this vaguely menacing beefcake in their midst.

But of course the story, like all American stories, ends in flight. Post-retirement, Neel did not return home to ticker-tape parades or nostalgia-stained minor league coaching gigs. No. He absconded to a tropical refuge like a bad myth, a fugitive from child support orders totaling over $700,000. He chose Vanuatu—a place so remote it seems invented by someone who lost faith in maps. There, among coconut husks and the soft bleating of goats, he lived a sort of Robinson Crusoe cosplay, becoming, for a time, the most wanted deadbeat father in the history of the Texas Attorney General’s office.

So yes, Troy Neel was a success in Japan. In the way that a bloodstain is a success for a Rorschach test. He did what so many American expatriates do: took the money, ignored the culture, and left behind a confused shrine. Somewhere in Kobe, there’s still a dusty BlueWave jersey with his number on it. Probably under glass next to the dude’s mugshot as if to complete the narrative.

The Japanese Babe Ruth

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Somewhere, in the space between the faint eroticism of boyhood memories—crease-lined baseball cards folded into back pockets, forgotten but never lost—and the cold, abstract calculations of “exit velocity,” there is Munetaka Murakami. He exists there, quietly, as if waiting for someone to notice him, suspended between memory and measure, between the past we cannot reclaim and the numbers we cannot escape.

In 2022, Murakami didn’t just hit home runs—he detonated them. Fifty-six. A neat, profane number that passed Sadaharu Oh like a middle finger on a national holiday. You don’t pass Oh, they said. Not in this country. Not without offending several ghostly bureaucrats in stiff suits. But Murakami did, and then he bowed, maybe even laughed, and went out for grilled meat on a stick while Japan wondered whether it had just witnessed the death of decorum.

There’s something beautifully messy about his swing. It’s not Ichiro’s painter’s stroke. It’s not Ohtani’s metronomic perfection. It’s violent, wild, almost defiant like he’s swinging at ghosts, and half the time, he connects. The other half? He strikes out like like Wile E. Coyote falling into the abyss. But that’s him. He’s real in a way that a lot of players aren’t allowed to be anymore, and plays like a glitch in NPB’s cultural algorithm…a contradiction in cleats.

Talk to teammates, and they’ll tell you: he’s just a kid. Giggles in the dugout. Goofs around during BP. Rides an emotional roller coaster that sometimes crashes into the umpire’s strike zone. But they’ll also tell you he works. Grinds. Watches film until his eyes blur. Has the hands of a sculptor and the forearms of a forklift.

And now the question is: when—not if. The Americans are circling. The Yankees want to put him in pinstripes and do promos at strip-mall sushi joints. The Padres are practically begging while dangling the beach lifestyle and flip-flops. The Cubs—America’s great tragedy—think maybe, just maybe, he’s the answer to a century of futility and shriveled hot dogs in those inebriated, ivy-covered bleachers.

Munetaka Murakami isn’t just a slugger. He’s a cultural moment. A glorious swing-for-the-fences gamble in a world that loves a clean single. And when he finally shows up stateside and hits forty bombs and makes a few pitchers question their life choices, we’ll all feign clairvoyance. We’ll all say we saw it coming.

Dick Mountain Is Back!!!

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Yesterday, 45-year-old Rich Hill took the bump for Kansas City. The Royals are Hill’s 14th big league team, tying an MLB record with Edwin Jackson, and the broadcast was gleefully talking about how old Hill was during multiple innings. The jokes came easy: about his AARP card, his antique curveball, his resemblance not to the young fireballers of the moment but to someone’s beloved middle school gym teacher with a bum knee and a whistle he never quite remembers to use. And in a way, you couldn’t blame them. The man on the mound looked like he had wandered in from some bygone era of baseball—an era when starters went deep, when arms were patched up with tobacco juice and grit, and when pitchers like Hill, gaunt and grizzled, were more myth than man.

Rich Hill, with his looping, 70-mph curveball that seems to defy physics and satire in equal measure, isn’t supposed to still be here…not in the analytically engineered, data-drunk 2020’s where algorithms whisper in the ears of managers, and youth is worshipped like a minor deity. He’s a man out of time, like a pulp hero marooned in a postmodern novel, slinging junk past hitters who were playing tee-ball when he made his big league debut. You could write his story as a baseball picaresque, a road novel stitched together from the patches of fourteen uniforms, each chapter unfolding in a different dugout, a different city, a different stage of professional reinvention.

He’s been DFA’d, resurrected, injured, rehired, and rediscovered. He pitched for the Long Island Ducks, for God’s sake—the indie-league equivalent of a punk band playing bar mitzvahs to pay the rent. He rebuilt himself there, reclaimed his motion, sharpened the fluttering blade of his curveball until it could, once again, cut through the noise.

Watching him now—tall and almost lanky, hunched slightly like a man bracing against time itself—you feel something beyond nostalgia. You feel admiration. For the stubbornness. For the love of the thing. For the idea that sometimes what keeps a man going isn’t money or rings or ERA+ but the sheer, mad joy of still being allowed to try.

Rich Hill isn’t supposed to still be here. But here he is. Like a glitch in the simulation. Like a memory that refuses to fade. Still throwing. Still daring hitters to believe in clocks.

Beer Cups!!!

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The package came on a Friday, late in the afternoon, when the sky had folded in on itself and the rain was less a weather event than a condition of being. A fine mist–barely rain at all–hung in the air like a veil, softening the outlines of buildings, of trees, and of memory itself. The package was small, almost weightless, as though it had passed not only through distance but through something more difficult to name—through silence, perhaps, or absence, or the quiet persistence of someone else’s story finally brushing against your own.

Inside were three beer cups from the 1993 baseball season–the kind you used to find at stadiums, filled with cheap beer and the low hum of summer days. Mark had sent them—Mark Tomasik from RetroSimba, who seems to operate in his own quiet orbit of baseball nostalgia and detail. That’s just how it goes sometimes…you’re dreamily sitting in your apartment listening to Thelonious Monk, and suddenly you’re holding a fragment of someone else’s memory, a breadcrumb trail to a version of yourself you hadn’t realized you’d lost.

Mark McGwire’s face stared back at me, stylized and immortalized on plastic, frozen in mid-motion—part myth, part marketing. On the reverse, a calendar etched with games long since played, wins and losses swallowed by time, forgotten by all but the few who keep score in their heads.

Mark included a note, as he always does, full of the small details that mean everything if you know how to read them:

Hi, Gary,

These beer cups come from the only game I ever attended in Oakland, on June 17th, 1993. A laid-back, sunny, and mild Thursday afternoon. The A’s beat the White Sox, 5-2. Bobby Witt outdueled Alex Fernandez, and Rickey Henderson walked 4 times. The Sox had Tim Raines and Frank Thomas.

The wife and I will never forget that the vendors were selling carrot sticks and celery sticks to fans in the stands. Also, look at the size of these beer cups–and low prices too!

We loved our experience at the Coliseum. It was full of friendly people—from the guy at the ticket window to the fans seated around us. The women had little battery operated fans to stay cool in the blazing East Bay sun.

P.S. We all joined in booing Ruben Sierra and wishing Jose Canseco would come back.

The Curious Case of Darius Trapp

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I recently met Darius Trapp at a sports bar in Waco, Texas, to chat about his baseball career with the Oakland A’s in the early 1980s. He wanted to watch the March Madness games, maybe have a few cocktails, so we decided to rendezvous at his local watering hole…a Hooters. A tawdry (and bankrupt) shrine to tackiness, titties, waitresses with feigned interest and a certain kind of desolation that refuses to die in suburban ‘Merika.

He told me on the phone that he barely remembers his big league career, except in fragments. The green and gold. The white cleats. The way the clubhouse smelled like sweat and cigarettes and whatever the guys had ordered in Styrofoam containers the night before. The way the stadium lights were too bright, and how they turned the outfield into something abstract, hard-edged and depthless. It actually happened in the Summer of ‘82. A “cup of coffee” with the A’s, as they say, but he was only there because of an injury, to plug a hole.

Trapp was officially an Oakland Athletic for 2 weeks and 12 at-bats. Just long enough to sit in coach on a short flight from Tacoma, to go 0-4 in his debut, and to fist a bloop “dying quail” single off Mike Witt for his first ML knock two days later. Also long enough to strike out six times in his last nine plate appearances, and to sign a handful of baseball cards for kids who would not remember his name by the time school started.

When I arrived, Trapp was already there, slouched in a booth beneath a flickering Coors Light sign, his drink—something brown, bottom shelf—half gone. He looked the way most ex-athletes do: thick around the middle but with shoulders that suggested menace, or at least the ability to recall menace with some degree of accuracy. His style said that this day had no greater sense of importance—sweat pants and a Baylor Bears t-shirt.

“You’re late,” he muttered, eyes on the screen. “And you owe me a drink.”

I flagged down the waitress, a blonde in orange hot pants with the blank expression of someone who had heard every joke twice. “Another for him,” I said. “And a beer for me.”

Trapp finally glanced at me, sizing me up like I was a pitcher he wasn’t sure had a breaking ball. “So,” he said, swirling his drink, “what do you want to know?”

I leaned back. “Tell me about the A’s in the ‘80s.”

He scoffed, shook his head. “Jesus. It was a mess. This was a Billy Martin team, meaning there was very little joy involved. The man never even looked at me or spoke my name. Told me to ‘just do my job’ like I was some office flunky. The older guys—Dave Lopes, Joe Rudi—acted like I wasn’t there. Some utility guy, whose name I forget, gave me a dip in the dugout. Burned like hell. One of the relievers chewed coffee grounds instead of tobacco. Said it kept him sharper than coke. He’s dead now, I think.”

He remembers the hotels more than the games, the late nights wandering strange cities, the bars near the team hotel where locals didn’t even know they had a major league club in town that week. Some girl—brunette, maybe a little older—took him back to her place in Milwaukee after a game. Asked him how long he’d been in the bigs. He lied. She smiled. The next morning, she dropped him off at the stadium, and he struck out three times against Pete Vuckovich.

“The guys told me she’d be a slump buster,” he said, shaking his head. “She wasn’t.”

On the day he was sent back down, there was no ceremony. Just a handshake, a plane ticket, and a return to obscurity in the bus leagues. It was as easy as a snake shedding skin. He still tells people about it, of course. Because that’s what you do. You tell the story, and hope someone listens.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring past me at something I couldn’t see. “You know what I miss?” he said, not waiting for an answer. “That first hit of the game, when the bat connects just right, and for a second, everything aligns. It’s clean. It’s perfect.”

The waitress came back, set my beer down like she was angry about it. Trapp watched her go. “They used to put effort into pretending, now they don’t even bother.”

On the screen, a player missed a crucial free throw. The crowd groaned. Trapp smirked, raised his glass to no one in particular. “Hell of a shot,” he muttered. Then, looking back at me, “You gettin’ all this down?”

Reminder: today is April 1st. This is dedicated to Sidd Finch.

‘Ol Satch

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Hello friends! I’m back to give thanks to Steve from Brewers Baseball and Things. He recently sent me these books, and I am absolutely over the moon about them. Steve and I have followed each other on this platform for about 12 years, and I am thankful that our fondness for blogging has turned into a friendship. He was actually the first person to “like” and comment on my page waaay back in 2012. He’s an awesome guy. Please check out and follow his blog if you already haven’t. The dude can really fashion one hell of a sentence and knows a lot about baseball and life in general. P.S. He also really loves Harold Baines, Gorman Thomas, a frosty beer and The Wu Tang Clan.

***

“They said that the best fastball pitcher in baseball was Bob Feller. Well, I saw Bob Feller. I saw him real good. And I faced Satchel Paige, too. If I was going to compare them, I’d say this: Bob Feller was fast, but Satchel Paige was just as fast, and maybe a little faster.”–Ted Williams

I’ve always been intrigued by Satchel Paige. Not just the pitcher, not just the legend, but the guy himself—the kind of cat who moved through the world like he knew some secret the rest of us weren’t in on. An enigma, a cipher, a man whose age bent and shifted depending on who was asking. He was untouchable, floating somewhere between myth and memory, like a street corner prophet with a fastball that could tear a hole through your ass and sing a southern hymn while doing it.

The thing about Paige is that his story is made up of gaps. No one really knows how old he was. No one knows how many games he pitched. No one knows how many women he bedded. The details drift, suspended in the air like dust in the afternoon light. In that way, he exists more as a concept than a man—an echo of something both real and unreal, like a half-remembered dream.

Me and Satch in Austin, TX

I read somewhere that he once struck out a whole team in the dead of night; the game played under the weak glow of car headlights, the outfield dissolving into darkness. Did it happen? Who gives a shit! Paige understood that truth is elastic and that the best stories are the ones that make people lean in. He barnstormed through America, riding buses held together by rust and a prayer, showing up in racist backwater towns to throw unhittable pitches for cash and respect. He was just a wandering artist—a vagabond—painting the strike zone and then painting the town red.

“Don’t look back,” he said. “Something might be gaining on you.” And sure, at first glance, it’s a folksy, almost koan-like piece of advice, the kind of thing a charismatic uncle might drop into conversation with a knowing smirk, something that seems self-evident but also oddly profound, like the best aphorisms always are. But the more you turn it over in your mind, the more it starts swelling into something bigger.

Was he talking about regret? Because regret isn’t just gaining on you—it’s already inside you, like some kind of parasite for all the versions of yourself that could have been but weren’t. Or maybe he was talking about the ever-forward momentum of existence, which, if you think about it too hard, gets unsettling fast. Like the second you’re aware of time as a thing, a force, you’re trapped inside it, and it’s impossible not to imagine it chasing you down like a baserunner caught in a rundown.

Or perhaps Satch was literally just talking about baseball, about how a runner stretching a single into a double can’t afford to glance back because hesitation is the difference between safe and out. Which is to say, maybe Paige understood something the rest of us struggle with: sometimes, you just have to keep running.