From Ballpark to Courts, an Odd Coupling

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: September 10, 2007

On one end of the boardwalk, Pedro Martínez took a curtain call like Pavarotti after hitting a high C. On the other end of the boardwalk, a few hours later, Roger Federer fell to his knees like Baryshnikov in a moment of joy.

There was passion in Queens yesterday, with Federer celebrating his latest United States Open championship after Martínez staged an unusual midgame celebration of his comeback from shoulder surgery.

The two sports overlap in these parts only a few days every year, putting the upscale tennis fans in the same traffic jam as the blue-and-orange-clad Mets fans (pictured) in their shirts honoring Piazza, Alfonzo, Seaver and many of the current worthies.

On this particular Sunday, Flushing Meadows had its own odd couple: Federer in his man-in-black garb in one arena and Martínez making his first appearance of the season in the Mets’ tacky old dive.

They both knew how to carpe the olddiem. Federer, 26, hit the floor after the final point of a 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2), 6-4 victory over Novak Djokovic, the 20-year-old who captivated tennis fans these past two weeks. (Federer is decidedly not amused by his imitations.) Martínez, soon to turn 36, gave the home fans a bonus when he emerged from the dugout to wave and do an odd little dance step after pitching five scoreless innings in what would become a 4-1 victory over Houston.

These tennis-baseball doubleheaders do not always work out for the Metsies. On a damp, ominous final Friday in 1987, Lori McNeil duffed an approach shot that would have put Steffi Graf in big trouble in their semifinal, and McNeil never recovered. A few hours later, Terry Pendleton of the Cardinals silenced Shea with a home run into the mist against Roger McDowell, effectively destroying the Mets’ hopes of repeating as champions.

The two sports coexist despite the lack of parking spaces, now exacerbated by the construction of the new Mets ballpark (Why do I keep wanting to call it the New Shea?). But everybody gets along, mostly in hope of witnessing something glorious north of the tracks or south of the tracks, connected by a wooden boardwalk with pedicabs shuttling fans back and forth.

The Mets went on first, with Martínez the main attraction. He came to New York three seasons ago to try to help win a World Series, but he was in tears last September when his body broke down. After surgery and hard training, he made it back for five innings in Cincinnati last week. Yesterday he came home, surviving his wildness on the mound and a couple of romps on the basepaths.

Normally charismatic, Martínez squirmed through 92 pitches, then openly celebrated after the Astros were retired in the fifth. Surprisingly, Martínez emerged from the dugout, a jacket on his arm, taking a wave, which no doubt thrilled the Astros. In the old days, a celebration after five innings would have earned a fastball in the ribs, and Roy Oswalt did indeed drill the Mets’ Lastings Milledge one inning later.

“I wanted to do something back for my fans and in front of my fans,” Martínez said later.

“I’m going to savor every little bit that I can get from the game from now on,” he continued. “I’m just coming back from a surgery that, if I have to do it again: ‘See you guys. No more.’ I’m going to enjoy every little moment that I have. Sign as many autographs as I can because it’s not going to last too long.”

He was entitled.

Petey went out before Federer and Djokovic took the court, with the usual assortment of celebs in attendance — Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Charlie Rose, David Stern and, oh, lookie here, Maria Sharapova, who, for the record, was sitting in the Djokovic box. Djokovic says they are friends.

In a quickie television interview before the match, Federer said he was curious how Djokovic would handle his first slam final. Djokovic later said that he was affected by the stress, flubbing seven set points. (“My next book is going to be called ‘Seven Set Points,’ ” he joked afterward, as charming as ever.)

Nevertheless, Djokovic played three competitive sets, and Federer said he was sure Djokovic would be back in many more Grand Slam finals. Roger did not exactly predict that Djokovic would win those finals. That, for the foreseeable future, seems to be Federer’s job, since he has won 12 of his 14 finals so far. His presence is as emphatic as the one-handed backhand winner he struck down the line to win the second set.

Federer doesn’t waste energy on gestures, but he pumped his fist at that one. Later, he hit the deck after winning another slam title. No doubt Martínez can also fall to his knees in ecstasy and would be delighted to unveil this move in a month or so, on the north end of the boardwalk.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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As Testing Continues, Cheating Endures

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: September 8, 2007

Rick Ankiel reportedly received
human growth hormone in 2004.

Perhaps there will come a time when baseball shakes free of these vexing and occasionally damning performance-enhancement headlines. Perhaps the sport will awaken some future morning with a drug-testing program that is as good as it can be, and the right to say there is nothing more the game can do except to punish the cheats when they get caught.

For now, no such claim can be made as the testing apparatus remains incomplete and the slimy residue of industry-wide and years-long neglect is thrown back at baseball like a pie to the face. Rick Ankiel and Troy Glaus are the latest cases, the former based in St. Louis, nine years and a couple of weeks after the first sighting of Mark McGwire’s little bottled helpers.

“It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it,” Tony La Russa, the Cardinals’ manager, said after Ankiel’s assault on National League pitching escalated with two home runs in a rout of the Pirates on Thursday, giving Ankiel, a converted pitcher, nine in 81 at-bats since his return to the majors Aug. 10.

The home runs, yes; and also the timing of the curveball spun into the dirt yesterday, at the feet of Ankiel, the feel-good slugger of the baseball summer.

La Russa’s succinct commentary had barely been heard when Ankiel — author of the greatest comeback story ever told — was added to the growing list of major leaguers suspected of, or who have admitted to, spiking their spinach. The Daily News reported that Ankiel, in 2004, received 12 months’ supply of human growth hormone from a Florida pharmacy that was part of a national, and illegal, prescription drug distribution ring.

•

Ankiel was a pitcher at the time, futilely struggling to overcome the mysterious condition that prevented him from throwing a baseball in the direction he aimed it and an elbow injury that in 2003 required what is known as Tommy John surgery.

Was he taking H.G.H. merely for rehabilitation purposes, as he told reporters in Phoenix last night, while breaking no baseball rules? Assuming as much, does he deserve the benefit of the doubt for what he is achieving now because he reportedly stopped receiving shipments before baseball banned the substance in 2005?

That depends on how one views the purpose of baseball’s own investigation into its so-called steroid era — to comprehend what caused it and take every possible step to dismantle it or to declare mission accomplished by shooting down a select number of easy targets for mounting on Commissioner Bud Selig’s wall.

I’ve said many times that the crusade to invalidate Barry Bonds’s career home run record set last month was always more distraction than solution, the selective pursuit of celebrity for the sake of protecting sacred statistics.

“They have fixated on home runs and records in baseball,” said Dr. Gary I. Wadler, an expert on performance-enhancing drugs and a World Anti-Doping Agency consultant. “But that was never the big picture.”

It was about the rooted culture, always the culture. And here we have more names — Sports Illustrated’s online report on Glaus receiving steroids in 2003 and 2004 followed yesterday — in what has become a steady, insidious drip, reminding us again of how widely infected baseball was with the belief that natural preparation, or recovery, was for suckers.

A player, any player, bought into that or he didn’t. You want to still let Ankiel be Roy Hobbs, the Natural, because his H.G.H. timeline suggests no current foul play and because his inspirational return is just too good to let loose-lipped investigators and nosy newspapermen ruin? Fine, but you forfeit your right to sneer at San Franciscans who long ago extended that courtesy to Bonds, who, after all, became the inflated wonder of the world before baseball had a collectively bargained testing program.

None of that addresses the H.G.H. factor, of course, the elephant in the enhancement arena, not just for Bonds, but an entire sport that lied so insistently to America and, worse, to itself, and now expects people to take it on faith that its players, by and large, would not cheat even if they couldn’t get caught.

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Baseball, Wadler said, has conducted a “misinformation campaign” about the reliability of testing for H.G.H. used by the Olympics because it doesn’t want to confront the players’ union on the drawing of blood. Now, he added, the new formula for cheating is believed to be a combination of H.G.H. with small amounts of steroids that go undetected in urine samples.

As more names leak from the faucet, further illuminating the past, the culture of enhancement continues.

From Bonds to Ankiel, one end of baseball’s summer spectrum to the other, there can be no selective reasoning, no double standard, only a complete accounting of a cheating culture bigger than any one player, and using that historical perspective to move on, confront the future headlines being written right now.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Anticipated Return Must Be More Than Nostalgia Trip

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: September 3, 2007

Atlanta

There comes a time in every athlete’s career when the individual’s greatness is tested, even called into question. There comes a defining moment when the public demands to know whether the gifts that propelled an individual to stardom are being propped up by memories and warm recollections.

For 35-year-old Pedro Martínez, (left) the day of reckoning comes today in Cincinnati, where he will be making his first start for the Mets since September 2006.

He made his last start here in Atlanta. Martínez lasted two and two-thirds innings, allowing eight hits and seven runs as Atlanta walloped the Mets, 13-1. That’s not the way he wants to be remembered.

A month after he made that start, Martínez had rotator cuff surgery. After an agonizing 11-month rehabilitation, he takes the mound against a tough Reds lineup anchored by Ken Griffey Jr.

For all of the speculation by Mets fans on Pedro’s impact on the reeling Mets, today’s start in Cincinnati is not about his leading the Mets to the promised land. They’ve actually done quite well in his absence. Today’s start is largely about Martínez’s securing his legacy. It’s also about the heart of a pitcher who was brought in to resuscitate a franchise and, indirectly, about a young team that has matured to the point where it can now flourish without its leader.

After yesterday’s game, Martínez conceded that personal pride, while not at the core of his comeback, is certainly part of the discussion. “I want to be the Pedro that people are used to seeing,” he said.

At the same time, Martínez knows that that Pedro is long gone. Some fans are looking for signs of a miraculous recovery that may have him looking like the Pedro of 2004 and 2005. Those days are gone as well. He will be 36 next month, and his body has taken a beating: his toe, his hip, his calf and finally, his shoulder.

“I’ve taken some hits on the way to where I am, and I understand what’s going on with my body and the way things are,” he said. “I’m just trying to make adjustments and help the team as much as I can with what I have.”

Truth is, the Mets don’t need Pedro Martínez the way they needed him in 2005, when he was the centerpiece of Omar Minaya’s rebuilding campaign. The Mets — Minaya — wanted to send a message to their fans and to prospective free agents that the Mets were serious about building a winner.

In this respect, if Martínez never wins another game, he has already run a great race for the Mets, above and beyond victories and strikeouts. Martínez was the magnet. As Minaya said yesterday from his home in New Jersey: “When we signed Pedro Martínez, that was the start. If it wasn’t for Pedro, there would be no Carlos Beltrán, no Carlos Delgado, no Billy Wagner.”

Martínez started what Minaya calls the Mets’ rejuvenation.

The Mets signed Tom Glavine in December 2002, after he enjoyed a great career in Atlanta. Even with Glavine, the Mets stumbled through a 66-95 season in 2003 and a 71-91 finish in 2004. The next season, Pedro’s first with the Mets, the team finished 83-79; last season, they were 97-65.

The Mets are infinitely stronger than they were before Martínez was signed in December 2004. The Mets have fought through oceans of injuries, Martínez among them, and somehow managed to cobble their way through.

“We know we can win and win without him,” Glavine said yesterday. “But there’s no question that if he comes back and pitches well, we’re a better team with him.”

The Mets have matured beyond the original purpose of bringing Martínez to New York.

But Mets fans continue to sell their team short. After a disaster in Philadelphia, there was the general — and typical — losing-streak hysteria. There was general agreement that the three-game series with Atlanta would deepen the Mets’ funk. Atlanta would be the Mets’ Waterloo, turn them into a team gasping for air.

Instead, the Mets stormed into Atlanta and swept a three-game series.

That’s character. With the sweep, the Mets have the National League’s best record (76-60) and lead Philadelphia by four games in the East.

Last season, the Mets built a huge lead and coasted into the playoffs. This season, the Mets, with Philadelphia nipping at their heels, have played on the edge.

Where does Pedro Martínez fit into this Mets team that he indirectly helped build? We’ll find out beginning today.

The Mets began this season anticipating that they would have to win without Martínez.

“Obviously we’d love to have him,” Manager Willie Randolph said. “He adds another dimension to this team. But this team has learned to win without Pedro.”

The Mets have learned to win. The question is whether they can win big without Martínez.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

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In Need of Relief, the Mets Find None

Paul Lo Duca walking off the field after
Tadahito Iguchi scored the winning run in the ninth.

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 31, 2007

Philadelphia

Billy Wagner’s 45th and final pitch yesterday, about 20 too many under normal circumstances, was smacked by Chase Utley past the outstretched glove of Carlos Delgado and into right field, taking with it the last vestige of the Mets’ firm control of the National League East.

They have a precarious two-game lead over the surging Phillies, is what they have, all they have, after being swept here in a four-game-series brew of bad performance and worse luck. Beyond that, they have three games in more hostile and typically, for them, unhappy territory, Atlanta, starting tonight, among other urgent issues.

Foremost among them: no reliable setup man for the closer, Wagner. No fireballing phenomenon to pitch by his own rules, like the one currently electrifying the Bronx every couple of days.

In the aftermath of a crushing 11-10 Mets defeat here yesterday, a game they should have won, needed to win, deserved to win, was the inescapable feeling that in the now likely event of a divisional race to the end of September, no Joba for the Mets equals mission improbable.

Hyperbole in the wake of calamity? Perhaps, but the sight of Wagner, alone in the middle of a largely vacant Mets clubhouse and also in accepting the blame for perhaps the worst regular-season defeat of the Omar Minaya-Willie Randolph regime, somehow made Manager Randolph’s decision to use Wagner for two innings simultaneously cautious and desperate.

Under the circumstances and given his alternatives, you could say it was the only choice he had.

“That’s what he gets paid to do,” Randolph said, noting that Wagner hadn’t pitched in the series. “He was ready for it.”

Mind you, not that he volunteered for it.

“Told,” Wagner said to the question of whether he had made a request to start the eighth with the Mets just having been gifted five runs on two hits by the Phillies’ bullpen for a 10-8 lead. But because Wagner, as much as anyone in the Mets’ clubhouse and more than most, is a standup guy, he also said: “I should be able to do that.”

The result, on the other hand, spoke for itself.

Due south from where Joba Chamberlain and the Yankees were tidying up in the Bronx, sweeping the Red Sox in a comparatively brisk 3 hours 1 minute, American League baseball came here in all its messy, excruciating glory, exactly four hours’ worth that saw the Mets spot the Phillies leads of 5-0 and 8-5 and still have a four-game divisional lead in their closer’s hand, albeit that one crucial inning earlier than usual.

In effect, Randolph was subscribing to the Bill Jamesian approach of going with his strength when the situation most demanded it. He could have used Aaron Heilman, but the Phillies had Utley, Pat Burrell and Ryan Howard due up and Heilman, after too many untimely home runs surrendered this season, inspires little confidence.

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Pedro Feliciano, another candidate from the coalition of the willing but not entirely able, had already pitched two innings. Guillermo Mota was no doubt dismissed as detrimental to the condition of Randolph’s stomach after the roller coaster he’d ridden.

Much better last season while on performance-enhancing drugs, Mota has been Minaya’s least admirable maneuver during his three years as general manager. In fact, the bullpen Mota was re-signed to fortify now threatens all the fine work done by Minaya in putting the Mets on the postseason map.

He allowed the very useful Chad Bradford to slip away to Baltimore last winter and was unlucky with the health of Duaner Sánchez. He made a shaky call on Ambiorix Burgos at the expense of a useful pitcher, Brian Bannister. Scott Schoeneweis has been a certifiable bust.

When it all shook out yesterday, when Randolph considered the consequences of losing after the Mets had climbed out of a rare hole dug by Orlando Hernández, he called on Wagner and said, It’s all on you.

Wagner proceeded to give up Burrell’s second home run of the game with one out in the eighth and a two-out walk to Aaron Rowand, elevating his pitch count past 20. In the ninth, Jayson Werth dunked a single into left field, and stole second and third without a throw. Wagner needed a strikeout against Tadahito Iguchi but didn’t have enough left in the tank to get it. Iguchi singled to left and stole second too. Jimmy Rollins was walked intentionally. Here came Utley. There went two games in the standings, from four to two.

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There, in all likelihood, went Wagner’s availability tonight in Atlanta, where the Mets will start a rookie call-up from New Orleans tomorrow and where Pedro Martínez will meet them today for a bullpen session that will determine the next step in his return from surgery last summer.

Unfortunately for the Mets, he won’t be staying — in the bullpen, that is. That’s not his job, and, worse, there is no Joba.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Sheffield Motivates Himself With Conflict and Criticism

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 17, 2007

Gary Sheffield prides himself on being an avowed truth-teller, a revealer of hypocrisy, a debunker of myth, but typically without ample explanation or factual support.

He fancies himself a slugger making grand social statements for the benefit of ballplayerkind but often via a personal agenda. If the chip on his shoulder had a face, it could pass for Barry Bonds’s inflated head.

When he is finished with his flurry of reverberating wails, he can also go acoustic, as he did briefly in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium yesterday, saying, “I don’t take myself too seriously.”

Which poses the question, why should we?

With the Tigers, the seventh team of his impressive 20-year major league career, Sheffield returned to the Bronx for the first time since making the stinging assessment that Joe Torre has a harsher managerial style for black players. In an interview last month on HBO’s “Real Sports,” Sheffield insisted he was not calling Torre a racist. Just saying, in effect, that he acts like one.

“I meant what I said, said what I said and I stand by what I said,” he said yesterday before being lustily booed throughout the Tigers’ 8-5 victory.

Based on his three-year experience here, which ended last fall, Sheffield claimed that black players were more likely to be “called out” by Torre. When asked about Derek Jeter, who has almost a father-son relationship with Torre, Sheffield said that Jeter is a Yankee icon and, as the son of a mixed-race couple, “ain’t all the way black.”

Insulting to Jeter as that may be, his racial makeup does raise an interesting and tangentially relevant point. If, as Sheffield suggests, Jeter counts as half-black, the Yankees right now have half the number of African-American players they did when Elston Howard integrated the franchise in 1955, or eight long years after Jackie Robinson crashed the major league color line.

Of course, they have many Hispanic players, a couple of whom helped win championships for Torre (in all likelihood the truest measure of the manager’s affection). Why African-American participation in baseball is dwindling while Latino players multiply is another subject for debate that Sheffield weighed in on contentiously this season. He told GQ magazine that baseball favors Hispanics because they are easier to control (big news, no doubt, to Manny Ramírez and Pedro Martínez).

But in the HBO interview, Sheffield made little distinction between players of color, and nor did he offer a clear summation of his reckless insinuation, except to say: “I think it’s a, a way of, the way they do things there, you know. They run their ship differently.”

•

Fascinating how, in that unscripted moment, it became “they,” the Yankees, not Torre. And here we do come upon a subject at least worth discussing, a nugget of truth uncovered inside Sheffield’s unfiltered doublespeak. He has been around baseball long enough to know that the Yankees, under George Steinbrenner’s ownership, have not been much more an agent for social change than they were in 1950.

Bob Watson, an African-American, came from outside the family for a two-year run as general manager that included the first of Torre’s four World Series victories in 1996. Reggie Jackson hangs around with the ambiguous title of special adviser. Beyond that, the Yankees’ front office has largely been a reflection of the past.

They have not had a manager of color. Until Torre, African-American players with deep organizational roots or others with post-playing aspirations watched a platoon of white colleagues play an ongoing game of musical managerial chairs.

When Torre was forced to the sideline in 1999 for prostate-cancer treatment, Steinbrenner begged a gimpy, cranky Don Zimmer to fill in rather than appoint Chris Chambliss, who had managed successfully in the minors, or Willie Randolph, whose qualifications at the time were at least as clear as those of the presumed manager-in-waiting, Don Mattingly.

If the Yankees’ social practices are not a symbolic representation of the game’s, whose are? So is it possible that Sheffield — an edgy but by most accounts likable teammate — has a deep-seated anger over the diminishing African-American influence after so many decades of struggle?

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He has always seemed to motivate himself through conflict (like John McEnroe, as one Yankees insider sagely confided last night). In that sense, who was more likely to become a target of frustration after Sheffield’s injury-plagued 2006 season, and the handing of his job to Bobby Abreu?

The principal owner, Steinbrenner, who personally signed Sheffield in the hometown (Tampa) they share, or the manager, Torre, who reportedly (and understandably) preferred Vladimir Guerrero back in ancient times, 2004, and whom Sheffield had to deal with every day?

Sometimes, the price for outspokenness is being called out. Pride, in this case, would seem to be what’s keeping the avowed truth-teller from admitting what it is.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Center Field and Center Stage Are Cabrera’s

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 13, 2007

Cleveland

A quiet young Yankee takes over center field now, in the minimalist tradition of Bernie Williams, following an expensive, short-term rental named Johnny Damon. For the time being, Melky Cabrera attracts little attention inside the clubhouse, speaks Spanish softly and carries a hot stick.

“You put him in there, and now you can’t take him out of there,” Manager Joe Torre said before his Yankees beat the Indians, 5-3, at Jacobs Field, sweeping what was supposed to be a showdown series with a compelling blend of arrogance and exuberance, experience and youth.

For the bargain salary of $432,000 on a $200-plus-million roster, Cabrera stretched his hitting streak to 17 games yesterday, his average over .400 for that stretch, with a home run in the seventh inning and a single in the ninth that was followed by a stolen base and Derek Jeter’s run-scoring hit. Those two apparent tack-on runs turned into the winning margin when Mariano Rivera struggled in the ninth, not that Cabrera cared to brag on them.

•

He celebrated with a plate of food, watching on television as the Red Sox lost in Baltimore, their lead over the Yankees in the American League East shrinking to four precious games. Cabrera took a long shower, left the topic of the surging Yankees to the others, including Jason Giambi, who hit a home run for the second straight day.

That doesn’t change the fact that Giambi is a part-time player now, as is Damon, thanks largely to Cabrera. That’s roughly $36 million combined being paid this season to Giambi and Damon, whose bodies weren’t holding up to the rigors of playing every day, anyway.

Only the Yankees can afford to survive such errors of financial commission, but the bigger news is the roster transformation. These are not your staid post-Paulie (O’Neill) Yankees anymore, plodding along and chanting the existentialist mantra: “We’ll win because we earn.”

Cabrera had a birthday Saturday, his 23rd. Robinson Canó, who had three more hits yesterday as his average soars above .300, is 24. Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain, the rookie pitching jewels who locked down the Indians here in the series opener Friday night, are 21. Everyone says there are even more acclaimed young arms in the minors. The ace of the staff, Chien-Ming Wang, is an ancient 27.

“It feels a lot like when we all came up in the mid-’90s,” said Jeter, referring to himself and other homegrown Yankees — Williams, Jorge Posada and yesterday’s winner, Andy Pettitte.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, the absence of George Steinbrenner — whose health has reportedly been declining — in the daily operation of the team must be cited. The previous commitment to youth occurred when the Boss was under suspension by Major League Baseball.

Whatever his role, Steinbrenner must be enjoying what he’s been watching since early last month, when General Manager Brian Cashman was still on his “big hook,” and the Yankees were a mile behind the A.L. playoff leaders. Writing them off was never a good idea, however, only an opportunity to remember how the baseball season can make false prophets of us all.

It’s a six-month roller-coaster ride, challenging our instincts, toying with emotions, the range of which stretch from Barry Bonds to Rick Ankiel. The season tricks and it teases, but it also instructs. Patience, people. Listen to St. Torre when he says: “You just hang around, go through the streaks. That’s what the season is about, being able to fight through the dark times.”

•

Even when your team has outspent everyone by tens of millions, you wait for it to evolve, to decide which piece goes where, whose time is up, whose future is now.

The Yankees couldn’t afford Damon’s weak arm in center anymore. He’s a spot player now in left and center, a part-time designated hitter, along with Giambi. Center belongs to Cabrera. “Ninety percent of the time, that’s what it’s going to be,” Torre said, unequivocally.

He thinks the veterans are on board, but added, “Buy in or not, there is the reality.”

There is the evidence unfolding night after night. Torre watched Cabrera cut off Víctor Martínez’s drive into the right-center-field gap Saturday — a ball that could have easily gone to the wall for a triple — and throw back across his body to Jeter to narrowly miss nailing Martínez at second.

The captain, Jeter, was impressed, offering this full endorsement: “It’s the things that Melky prevents from happening with his arm. He has to play every day.”

Of course, there is a lot of season left, more dips and loops and challenges to a manager’s conviction. Last fall, Torre gave in when the playoffs came around, went for the graying, distinguished Yankees look and wound up with a lifeless, joyless team.

Not this time, he said. Cabrera’s the man, Yankees youth will be served. No turning back.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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Baseball’s Celebrity Witch Hunt Misses the Mark

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 12, 2007

Cleveland

Chipper Jones did not take nearly enough heat for putting Alex Rodriguez (pictured) into the conversation with Barry Bonds, and that was before Rodriguez gave Jones a pass here Friday night, insisting that Jones, his old friend from when they were Florida high school prodigies, “didn’t say anything out of order.”

Rodriguez’s manager, Joe Torre, said he read Jones’s comments about steroid questions and public trust last week in the New York newspapers and that it was, as Jones fumed afterward, simply another case of those evil tabloid people not synchronizing their headlines and articles.

“He said that anybody is going to come under scrutiny, get asked questions,” Torre said. “And that is true.”

Anybody, apparently, attempting something special, like chasing Bonds, as A-Rod is said to be in the process of doing. He was at 503 homers for his career and 39 for the season, after two two-run blasts in the scorching Yankees’ 11-2 lockdown of the Indians. But is that what the sanctioned and much-ballyhooed investigation, led by former Senator George J. Mitchell, is all about? Pursuing royalty? Protecting records?

If it is, then the pending report will not be an honest accounting of baseball’s implicit acceptance of performance enhancement while other sports were at least acknowledging and legislating against the scourge. It will be a celebrity witch hunt, a few famous heads for the commissioner, Bud Selig, to mount on his wall.

Why investigate that way at all when baseball has the exiled crusader Jose Canseco dropping a big name here, another there, as he shamelessly shops another book proposal, by way of the public?

My guess, my hope, is that Mitchell understands that the essence of his work has been to examine the core issues of a bastardized culture, explain how baseball as an industry injected itself with the belief that steroids — like peanuts and Cracker Jack — were staples of the sport. It should be apparent to everyone by now that the Popeyes who blew past Maris and Ruth and Aaron were far from the only major leaguers spiking their spinach. In the nontesting era, there was so much to be gained, nothing (it seemed) to be risked, from going on the juice even if you weren’t tracking history or the Hall of Fame.

“It’s just so far-fetched, the numbers that those guys are putting up,” Jones said during his Bonds-Rodriguez seminar. “And a lot of it comes from the era that they’re playing in.”

Yes, the home run chases and the subsequent revelations put the spotlight on the sluggers, but why is their enhancement, alleged or admitted, more morally reprehensible than anyone else’s?

•

One career year by an average player on the threshold of free agency could bring the contract of a lifetime. A few chemical boosts could mean the difference between major league perks and minor league misery. If cheating is cheating, the same at all institutional levels of productivity, then why would A-Rod, as Jones said, have to “answer the questions” more than others achieving the unexpected or the extraordinary?

Jorge Posada is hitting .338 this season — or 51 points higher than his career best — with his 36th birthday coming this week. Beyond baseball’s drug-testing program, should he have to “answer the questions” of the legitimacy police? Should Hideki Matsui have to explain his July power surge? Should Joba Chamberlain, 21, with a body type that Roger Clemens didn’t grow into until he was past 30, have to convince us that his 99-mile-an-hour fastball is au naturel?

Before serving a one-game suspension Friday night, Torre said he interpreted Jones’s comments to mean that “anybody is going to come under scrutiny.” But Jones didn’t talk about anybody. He connected A-Rod to Bonds and was shocked when headlines rolled off the presses. How naïve is that?

Jones cited suspicions about A-Rod that were raised self-servingly in a recent radio interview by Canseco, while adding that he was inclined to believe that A-Rod’s home run numbers were pure — which is akin to calling a news conference to announce that your so-called friend probably doesn’t beat his wife.

This isn’t to say Canseco’s first literary work wasn’t enlightening, on the money, with arguably greater impact than the journalistically brilliant “Game of Shadows.” Without Canseco, maybe there is no March 2005 Congressional hearing on steroids, and Mark McGwire winds up sitting between Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn last month in Cooperstown, N.Y.

But let’s not forget that Canseco has an agenda, and knows what he has to do to keep himself relevant: Drop names, big names; and feed the insatiable public appetite for celebrity news. Jones should not have played along. It wasn’t fair to A-Rod, and it didn’t raise the more important institutional questions the Mitchell investigation had better answer.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

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With Homer Chase Over, It’s Back to Pennant Races

Luis Castillo after he hit a two-run single with two outs in the seventh to tie Wednesday night’s game.
Photo by Jason Szenes for The New York Times

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 9, 2007

Now that we don’t have to fret about Barry Bonds at the moment — I mean, the next big story should be either retirement or indictment — can we please get back to the business of squirm-inducing pennant races?

The obsession with Bonds’s home runs has obscured the fact that only eight teams will qualify for the postseason, and that Mets fans and Red Sox fans have been sounding a trifle nervous in recent days.

The Mets are still learning to compete with their longtime nemesis from Atlanta. Last night at steamy Shea Stadium, they tied the current series with a 4-3 victory, on Moises Alou’s emphatic homer in the eighth, before Billy Wagner pitched out of all the trouble he had created for himself.

Meanwhile, destiny’s darlings from the Bronx have inserted themselves back into contention, producing a tectonic grinding between the twin needs of Yankees fans to blame Brian Cashman and Joe Torre, and at the same time exult in their team being the hottest one in baseball.

It was fun to hear a Yankees fan calling into WFAN on Tuesday night to note that the Yankees had won as many games as the Mets, 63, before last night. This behavior could definitely be construed as taunting.

After hearing about the inauspicious first rehabilitation start by Pedro Martínez in Florida — three innings, five runs — fans may have to deal with the reality that Petey is not likely to be a factor down the stretch, that this is not last year, and that one of these days the Mets are going to have to learn to beat the Braves.

The Braves were only three and a half games behind going into last night. Manager Willie Randolph had said that a victory was “very important,” so the Mets would have a chance to win a series against the Braves, which they have failed to accomplish this year. And then there are the Phillies, who pulled a half game ahead of the Braves with last night’s victory.

“There are three very good teams in this division,” David Wright said. “The Braves are standing in our way.” Wright added, “although I’ll say the same thing about the Phillies when we meet them.

“The Braves are a great team,” Wright continued. “It’s up to us to prove we can beat them consistently. We just haven’t done that yet this year.”

•

Even though the Mets beat out the Braves last season, the Braves have improved themselves by trading for Mark Teixeira at the end of July, when most of us were trying to stay awake on Pacific Coast time.

It’s not as if the Mets, the Yankees and the Red Sox are the only teams in baseball — although that is a reasonable conclusion by this East Coast early bird. If there is one thing I have learned from the recent fascination with the slugger-who-cannot-be-named, it is that baseball continues at strange hours in western outposts, long after I have fallen asleep following David Letterman’s opening monologue.

Tracking Mr. 756 has led to learning more about teams — like the Dodgers, the Giants and the Padres — that play in a distant time zone. This is a very big country. I remember a Los Angeles basketball writer once telling me that East Coast types favored Larry Bird over Magic Johnson because they saw Bird far more often than they saw Magic. Fair enough. Lately we have been getting a refresher course in baseball players named Loney, Kouzmanoff and Lewis out on the Far Coast.

At the same time, the Yankees have revived, shucking off a few older players and bringing up younger talent. Why, it almost looks as if Cashman planned it that way. While the nation’s lonely eyes were turned to the aging monument by the bay, the Yankees brought up a young slugger named Shelley Duncan and a young relief pitcher named Joba Chamberlain.

•

My favorite Yankees fan (he knows who he is) has been fearful that the Yankees would not qualify for the postseason, but Tuesday night they unveiled their latest phenom, Chamberlain, who is of American Indian heritage. My friend is already seeing Chamberlain as the reincarnation of the so-called Big Chief, Allie Reynolds, a name that still frightens old Brooklyn fans like me. Other Yankees fans are proclaiming Chamberlain as the next Mariano Rivera.

My favorite Red Sox fan (she knows who she is) announced the other day that the Sox were “only” seven games up on the Yankees. I chided her for sounding like a Yankees fan, always worried. No, she said, Yankees fans expect to win.

The Yankees were flying under the radar, at least until Tuesday, when Toronto threw at Alex Rodriguez for past sins and then old Roger Clemens saved his retaliation until he was just about done anyway. He would take any punishment, proudly. It’s August and there are pennant races, some of them getting tighter and, with that home run thing settled, we can now enjoy them.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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Chasing No. 300, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 5, 2007

Here in the watched-pot department of baseball milestones, we become voyeurs, observing people as they observe other people.

There on the tube was Bud Selig, looking like a peevish, insomniac owl, perched under the eaves of a stadium, waiting for Barry Bonds to pass Henry Aaron and get us all back to our lives.

If Bud were a Woody Allen creation, he would be Commissioner Zelig, everywhere at once, eyewitness to history, waiting on Bonds to hit No. 756, watching as Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th home run, but he is only mortal, and he chose to follow Bonds.

•

A truly omnipresent commissioner would also find a way to watch Tom Glavine (pictured) try to win his 300th game tonight in Chicago, and might even have split himself, parameciumlike, to commiserate with Christine Glavine as the Mets’ bullpen squandered the lead Tuesday night in Milwaukee.

As composed as her husband, she did not express herself in any way that could have upset anybody, but her worried eyes could have been interpreted as saying: “Oh, jeez, poor Tommy and the rest of the guys. Well, now it’s more packing, more room service, more midday activities for the kids.”

Her stricken face reminded me of another look of desperation back in 1962, although Early Wynn was not as pretty as Christine Glavine, I can assure you of that.

Wynn was the Roger Clemens of his time, a burly old cuss. In 2003, Clemens taped Wynn’s dour mug in his locker, as a talisman of his long march to his 300th victory.

It took Clemens four attempts to gain that victory, but it took Wynn eight starts — more than nine months, doctor — to win his 300th. Nobody would wish this on the Glavine family.

As far as I know, Commissioner Ford C. Frick was not hunkering down in Yankee Stadium on the last Friday night of the 1962 season, as the Yankees tuned up for the World Series. Commissioners were not professional witnesses in those days.

Forty-two years old by then, Wynn had been a great pitcher in his time, coming up with Washington in 1939, helping to win pennants for Cleveland in 1954 and Chicago in 1959, and hitting 17 career home runs, one a pinch-hit grand slam.

Known as Gus, he was one of those ornery pitchers who are no longer allowed to exist. How ornery? Mickey Mantle — who slugged 13 homers against Wynn, more than he did against any other pitcher — once drilled a single right past Wynn’s blocky frame, and big Gus promptly fired a fastball pickoff attempt at Mantle’s bad knees, making him dance at first base, which was how the old boy had won 299 games.

On this autumn night in 1962, Wynn had nothing left. He suffered from gout. His weight was far above the listed 200 pounds. And baseball didn’t have trainers and diets and pitch counts the way it does today.

The Sox gave him a 3-1 lead into the seventh inning, but Joe Pepitone pinch-hit a two-run homer, and Manager Al Lopez had no recourse but to send Wynn out for the eighth. The Yankees clobbered him for four runs, ending his season at 299.

As a boy reporter, I interviewed Wynn, slumped in the clubhouse, probably a beer bottle in his hand, profound disgust all over him. It wasn’t the losing. Heck, old Gus had lost before.

It was the prospect of whipping his body into some kind of shape to trudge out there for another season.

Wynn skipped the tortures of spring training, and his old team, Cleveland, signed him in June 1963. He failed in four starts but finally found a team he might beat, the Kansas City Athletics.

“He didn’t throw as hard as Glavine,” said Ed Charles, who played for the A’s that day and is now a prince of New York for his role as poet laureate and third baseman with the 1969 Mets.

“His fastball, if it reached 80, that was stretching it,” Charles recalled of a game 44 years ago. “He was laboring, throwing nothing but bloopers and junk.”

Wynn staggered five innings, leaving with a 5-4 lead before Jerry Walker preserved the 7-4 victory. He said he had not slept the night before because of the gout, and he was glad to leave the game because “I might have fallen on my face; I was exhausted.”

He never won another game, and died in 1999.

•

Forty years after Wynn’s 300th, Clemens had his own travails, flying around America accompanied by his family and friends and a flotilla of camp-follower journalists. He won his 300th on his fourth try, and is still going.

Now it’s Glavine’s turn. He is an admirable player, and his wife seems the same.

My advice to the family: Pack light, expect nothing from the airlines and remember the camera is on you at all times. No. 300 will come — with any luck, sooner than it did for old Gus.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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And Here’s to You Mr. Robinson, My Friend

By GEORGE VECSEY

Published: August 2, 2007

Son. That’s what Bill Robinson called Darryl Strawberry. Not Darryl or Straw or any street variations. Son. On days when Darryl wasn’t quite ready to play, Bill would materialize in front of Darryl’s locker, using that deep, melodious voice.

“When I dogged it,” Strawberry was saying the other day, in grief, “Bill would get all over my butt, but he never yelled. He said, ‘You’re the best in this business.’ He always called me ‘son,’ like he was my father.”

The Mets called him Uncle Bill, and he was a brother to many other people, including me. He earned four World Series rings with four different teams and, who knows, he might have earned another one as the Dodgers’ minor league instructor, but he died in his hotel room Sunday at age 64, and a lot of us are in pain.

“Bill was an incredibly patriarchal person,” said Ron Darling, who pitched for the Mets when Robinson was the hitting instructor in 1986, and is now an insightful commentator. “Bill tried to pass it on to Darryl,” Darling added. “He’d put his arm around him. Darryl wasn’t ready, and Darryl knows it.”

Darryl was the prodigal son that everybody expected to die young. But he has beaten back stomach cancer and intemperance and legal issues to run an autism foundation, based in St. Louis. Now, Strawberry is in New York, waiting to attend Robinson’s funeral Saturday at the Gloucester County Community Church in Sewell, N.J., glad that his surrogate father got to see him sober and healthy.

“He loved me so much,” Darryl said. It was an unconditional love, far beyond the immense talent Strawberry alternately brandished and squandered.

The Yankees envisioned Bill Robinson as that kind of force, trading Clete Boyer, their nimble third baseman, to get Bill to play right field for the 1967 season. Michael Burke, one of the grandest executives in sports, could not curb his enthusiasm, and somehow the title of the black Roger Maris was foisted on Robinson, expectations he could not fulfill. In a sport of failure, Robinson hit .196 and .240 and .171 with the Yankees. I have never seen a player fail with more dignity.

Bill had heard a mantra from the Dodgers’ Willie Davis, “It’s not my life, and it’s not my wife, so why worry?” He repeated it, sharing his love for his strong and beautiful wife, Mary, and their two children, Bill and Kelley Ann. We became friends, in ways I don’t think writers and players do these days, what with the huge gap in income, and the new edge between athletes and the news media.

In the spring of 1968, Bill was worried about how to get his pregnant wife, their little boy and their car up from Florida, so I volunteered to drive, thereby saving myself a plane ticket. As it happened, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that day, and all hell broke loose. When we caught up with the Yankees in Richmond, Va., Bill was pacing outside the team hotel, a worried husband.

After three years of failure, Robinson wound up in Syracuse, but he fought his way back, first with the Phillies, then with the Pirates, earning his first ring as an important member of that boisterous we are fam-a-lee team of 1979. He remained the same person — straight, religious, mindful.

Bill invited my 11-year-old son into the Pirates’ clubhouse after a spring exhibition game in 1981. Suddenly a naked Dave Parker and Bill Madlock emerged from the shower, wearing jewelry and nothing else, and talking the normal, hilarious, scatological trash. In that deep voice, Bill told my son, “Uh, David, maybe you’d better wait outside.”

After batting .258 in 1,472 games, Robinson was hired by the Mets in 1985. “Bill insisted on being called hitting instructor,” Keith Hernandez, another sharp commentator, said. “He wouldn’t let you call him batting coach.

“He told me: ‘I can’t teach you anything, you’re a batting champion, you know what you do. Just tell me what to look for,’ ” Hernandez added.

“Bill would get on you, but he wouldn’t raise his voice,” Mookie Wilson, who didn’t need much prodding, said. “Bill was more subtle than that.”

“He was able to have a close family in a business that does not encourage it,” Darling said, adding, “He did not allow you to go on the field without your full uniform. He’d make you tuck in your shirt.”

Then Darling remembered a brawl or three when Robinson was in the middle of the pile.

•

The Mets won the 1986 World Series — Bill’s second ring — and then underachieved, which led Frank Cashen, the general manager, to dismiss Bill and Sam Perlozzo as a crude warning to Manager Davey Johnson. Robinson could have handled the Mets better than a few lummoxes who came later, but a managing job never happened.

He earned a third ring as a minor league instructor with the Yankees, and a fourth ring in 2003 as the hitting instructor with the improbable Florida Marlins. I got to hug him and Mary outside the clubhouse during that Series. I’d like to say to the fans, the next time you’re tempted to complain about all the rich bums in baseball, think about my friend, who called Darryl Strawberry son.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

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There’s Joy for Ballplayers With No Home

For the Can-Am Grays, a minor-league team, all the games are away games.
Their team bus, the one constant in their season, is the closest thing to a home.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 26, 2007

LITTLE FALLS, N.J.

Dan Shwam has been all over North America on baseball’s lower rungs in his 14 years as a minor league manager with the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks, Mohawk Valley Landsharks, Newburgh Night Hawks, Elmira Pioneers, Catskill Cougars, Evansville Otters, Jackson Senators and Laredo Broncos.

Of course, you can’t have the cushy jobs all the time. Hence his current berth with the Can-Am Grays, the lost boys of minor league baseball. The Grays, after all, have no home, no stadium, no mascot, no sponsors and no fans, other than an occasional mom or girlfriend willing to travel. For a while they had the Toyota 4Runner owned by the hitting coach, Larry Van Allen, but it was totaled when he hit a moose on the way to a June game in Canada.

And yet, Mr. Shwam, 48, seems not at all unhappy with his lot with the Grays, who from late May to early September live in hotel rooms and a bus full of baseball DVDs, playing road games from Atlantic City to Quebec. So, if we could interrupt the sports chatter about dog fighting, fixed basketball games and baseball pharmacology, here’s a second salute (after Sunday’s column on Joel Bennett of the New Jersey Jackals) to baseball where the paychecks are small, the dreams are big, the grass is real and life seems that way, too.

The Grays are not baseball’s first homeless team. In fact, the Can-Am League, whose teams are not affiliated with any from the major league, and its immediate predecessors have had three. The Aces were formed in 2004 when the Allentown Ambassadors went bankrupt, taking their name because they were able to get uniforms from the equally defunct Alexandria Aces of Louisiana (who were resurrected in 2006). Two years ago, when the Bangor Lumberjacks bailed out just before the season started, they became the Grays (wearing the Aces’ old gray pants).

And this year’s version of the Grays (the league splurged on new gray pants) was born when the league had an odd number of teams and needed another to even out the schedule.

“It’s not something you want to do all the time,” said Miles Wolff, the league commissioner. “These guys definitely have it rougher than the other teams, but it still beats working for a living.”

It can definitely get lonely. Willie James, this year’s original shortstop, missed his family so much that he packed up and went home in mid-July. Mr. Shwam’s wife, a baseball lifer, visited briefly from Salt Lake City, where she and Mr. Shwam live, and decided that even by the standards of minor league baseball, being in a different hotel room every fourth day was too depressing. She left, too.

Mr. Wolff, who owns the Quebec Capitales, said he encouraged some of his fans to root for the Grays when they played there. Still, Everett Stull, a Grays pitcher and former major leaguer with Montreal, Atlanta and Milwaukee, said having no field to come home to went counter to the DNA of sports. “You look forward to playing at home, saying, ‘We’re going to protect this house,’ ” he said. “Well, our house is the bus.”

Still, he said, “baseball is baseball,” and the team’s players have learned to stay positive and stick by one another. And being homeless is not all bad. Since they’re always on the road, they get the $18 meal money every day, unlike players for the other teams, who get it only when they travel. There are no expenses for a car or rent for the season. And, at the moment, they’re in the middle of their nearest thing to a homestand, three series in a row against the Jackals and the nearby Sussex Skyhawks, which means 11 nights in a row at the Ramada Inn on Route 10 in East Hanover. (They also get to bat last this series, one way to balance things out a little).

AND life has its surprises. When they showed up at the Jackals’ Yogi Berra Stadium here on Tuesday, the Grays even had fans, two of them, in the persons of Jared Siegel and Michael Goldin, 17-year-old high school seniors from Cedar Grove. The teenagers said they used to root for whomever the Jackals were playing, and got such friendly receptions from the Grays players that they committed. So they sat by the Grays dugout, in their homemade gray Grays T-shirts, waving homemade signs and yelling out encouragement to the catcher J. B Tucker, the outfielders Sean Gamble and Chad Gabriel, the feisty second baseman Josh Colafemina.

The game seesawed back and forth into extra innings, the tension building (and the crowd dwindling), until the new shortstop, Chuck Jeroloman, hit a game-ending single for a 5-4 win in the 12th inning. The Grays mobbed him at home plate, savored their postgame feast of whatever was left over from the concession stands and got back to the Ramada Inn at 12:30 a.m. They would be back on the bus to the stadium at 3 the next afternoon, but for a night — with their second-half standings at 5-3, tied for third place, and both fans thrilled — all was well in Grays Nation.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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