Frank's Place: Sad, final days of every baseball season
The garage door rose Thursday morning and a new season introduced itself. The morning sky, flimsy and blue the day before, had acquired a grave heftiness overnight. The newspaper rested among the first fallen sycamore leaves scattered across the lawn. Stepping outside, I shivered. And sighed.
The garage door rose Thursday morning and a new season introduced itself.
The morning sky, flimsy and blue the day before, had acquired a grave heftiness overnight. The newspaper rested among the first fallen sycamore leaves scattered across the lawn. Stepping outside, I shivered. And sighed.
Autumn, when the air cools, the light fades, and the earth browns, is a melancholy season. "You expected to be sad in the fall," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who understood sadness.
That's certainly true when you're a fan of a going-nowhere baseball team drearily playing out its September schedule.
As the 2016 season wanes, interest in the Phillies has receded from an already low ebb. Citizens Bank Park crowds have diminished dramatically. Televised games, normally pleasant diversions, are flat and lifeless.
It seems odd that at this meaningless moment, losing teams call up their best young prospects. Promising talent is thrust into a dreary tableau. Eagerness is engulfed by ennui.
Some of the youngsters the Phillies and other teams summon this month will stick around in the future. But for others, these September appearances will constitute their entire big-league tenure. And a really unlucky few will get into just one game, then never see the majors again.
What could be more bittersweet? A lifetime's anticipation realized and gone in an instant. One brief moment on the mound, in the field, or at bat, and then never being able to do it again.
These one-game wonders will always be noted in baseball's statistics, but their childhood dreams will never be completely fulfilled.
"You know we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening," Archie "Moonlight" Graham said in W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe, the basis of the film Field of Dreams. "Back then I thought, well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize that was the only day."
Graham was not just a fictional character but a real-life player whose "only day" came on June 29, 1905. That afternoon in Brooklyn he entered in the eighth inning as a Giants' defensive replacement. When the top of the ninth ended in the 11-1 Giants win, he was on deck, stranded there forever.
He's just one of countless baseball figures who endured the cruel irony of a one-and-done career. According to the website BaseballReference.com, there have been 995 of them, their stories ranging from ridiculous to tragic, comical to mundane.
Unquestionably, the best-known was Eddie Gaedel.
Just 3-foot-7, Gaedel had no baseball ability. He was signed to a one-day contract in 1951 as part of a stunt by St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck. A first-inning pinch-hitter, he walked on four pitches from flustered Tigers pitcher Bob Cain. A pinch-runner was sent in and, exiting the field to a standing ovation, Gaedel doffed his cap.
It was his broken life's highlight. Ten years later, at age 36, Gaedel was beaten to death during a brawl at a Chicago bowling alley.
Darby resident Harry O'Neill died six years following his lone appearance as a Philadelphia A's catcher in 1939. A Marine, he was killed by a sniper on Iwo Jima, one of just two players with big-league experience to perish during World War II.
On the final day of the 1963 season, the Houston Colt .45s started an 18-year-outfielder named John Paciorek. He went 3 for 3 with a couple of walks, three RBIs, and four runs scored. But an offseason back injury kept Paciorek from ever playing again.
The oddest case might be that of Larry Yount, who played exactly 2,855 fewer games than his Hall of Fame younger brother, Robin. An Astros pitcher, he was announced into a September 1971 game but never threw a pitch.
In 2014, a band called the Baseball Project recorded a song called "Larry Yount." Its lyrics explain what happened:
I took my warm-up tosses and I felt something snap.
They pulled me out, sent me down, and that was that.
Their anonymous names are sprinkled like little tears throughout the statistical encyclopedia Total Baseball - Bob Daughters on Page 822, Ferd Eunick on 864, Russ Kerns and Mel Kerr on 1,018, Steve Kuczek on 1,033.
Amid these mostly heartbreaking stories, Kuczek's solitary appearance stands out as comic relief.
Sept. 29, 1949, was a miserable, rainy day in Boston. The Braves had a doubleheader with Brooklyn, a team still battling St. Louis for the pennant.
The steady rain intensified in Game 2, but because of the game's implications, the umpires kept playing. Soaked and cold, eager to end the game and their season, the Braves weren't happy. Some started a fire on the dugout steps. In the bottom of the fifth, Connie Ryan walked to the on-deck circle in a rain slicker.
Unamused, umpire George Barr ejected Ryan. Pinch-hitter Kuczek then doubled. After the third out made it official, the game was called. The Dodgers would win the pennant and Kuczek's batting average would be frozen forever at 1.000.
Thursday night, the fewest fans of the 2016 season (15,247) watched the Phillies get thumped by Pittsburgh at Citizens Bank Park, where the flowers that bloomed all summer along the outfield wall had faded.
Departing on that dark and brisk autumn night, 200 days before the next Phillies season begins, they were unusually quiet.
"Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold," Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast. "But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen."
@philafitz