by Tim Wendel
“I wanted to play this game,” he said. “I’d heard that I wasn’t big enough. But I’d always been able to pretty much block that all out. Being a major league baseball player, that’s what I thought I always wanted to be ever since I can remember. I always wanted to make it to the big leagues, but more than anything I just wanted the chance to see how far I could go in this game.”
His approach began back home in Utica, a town of sixty-two thousand between Albany and Syracuse. In these parts one learned to just play even if it meant basketball (Lemke’s other favorite sport) outdoors in freezing temperatures when the school janitor refused to unlock the gym. Or learning to switch-hit because the field where Lemke and his buddies played pickup games had too many trees in left field and drives in that direction were deemed long outs. That ballpark was on the grounds of the Mohawk Valley Psychiatric Center, beside the trees in left field, and sometimes games were halted so the mental patients could take a stroll. “I go back to that field sometimes now, and I laugh,” Lemke told the New York Times. “It looks so small, and we used to think it was so big. It was a lot of fun. It was a beautiful place.”
Back then sports moved with the seasons in this part of the world, and Lemke later realized this was becoming increasingly unusual. “When it became spring,” he recalled, “warm enough to play ball, you were really excited about it. Sometimes I feel sorry for kids today, especially the ones in a warm-weather climate. They get overexposed to one sport too often, and then it’s not much fun. I can safely say I was more interested in basketball than baseball growing up, but you’re never sure how things are going to work out.
“I believe I was in eighth grade when Andy Van Slyke got drafted in baseball, and we couldn’t believe it. Sure he was from Utica, but we knew Andy Van Slyke as a basketball player, not a baseball player. Back then you played everything.”
Playing just for the joy of playing became about the only thing Lemke had going for him early in his pro career. After several solid seasons in the minors, including winning All-Star honors in the Gulf Coast League, Lemke’s trajectory stalled. In 1985 he hit .216 in the South Atlantic League and his professional career appeared to be coming to an end. But then Lemke hit a team-best eighteen home runs the following season, and by 1990 he had somehow climbed through the Braves’ minor-league system to become a part-time player with the big-league club in Atlanta.
As with Brian Harper, being a backup in the big leagues was just fine with Lemke. He worked hard at becoming a proficient pinch-hitter and late-inning defensive replacement. In 1991 he hit a .333 as a pinch-hitter and made only ten errors in 136 games. When Jeff Treadway, the Braves’ regular second baseman, was sidelined with a wrist injury, Lemke moved into the starting lineup. During the final weeks of the 1991 regular season, as the Braves surged past Los Angeles, Lemke had several key hits, and his performance continued into the postseason.
Atlanta manager Bobby Cox often called Lemke “Dirt,” a term of affection and accuracy because Lemke loved to get his jersey dirty, perhaps as much as his boyhood hero, Pete Rose.
“It doesn’t shock anyone on this team that he has hit,” Cox said. “He’s paid for his defense, sure, and in that role he can turn the double play as well as anyone. But he can hit. He hit in the minors, he’s hit in spots here.”
When it came to the 1991 Series, when he became a household name Lemke explained that every “player is going to have a hot streak in a season. I guess I waited all season for mine.”
———
In the seventh inning of Game Four the Twins and Braves traded solo home runs. Mike Pagliarulo homered to right field. The run batted in was Pagliarulo’s second of the evening and a mistake by John Smoltz. Using his curveball to get ahead in the count, Smoltz came inside with a fastball, and Pagliarulo turned on the pitch, driving the ball out of the park. For a moment it appeared that the Twins would capture their first World Series road victory since 1925, when they were the Washington Senators and Walter Johnson pitched them to victory against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Yet that tenuous grasp on the past soon slipped away. Minnesota starter Jack Morris, who, with his bushy moustache and prickly disposition, looked like he could have pitched in the Roaring Twenties, had already been lifted from the game. Seeing a chance to open up a bigger lead, Tom Kelly pinch-hit Gene Larkin for Morris in the top of the seventh inning. So it fell to the Twins’ bullpen to bring this one home, with Carl Willis now taking the mound.
This right-hander was rumored to throw an occasional spitball, and he got two outs before the Braves’ Lonnie Smith stepped in. Smith blasted the first pitch he saw from Willis out to straightaway center field, and the game was tied again, this time at 2–2.
Without the interest of the Atlanta Braves and, specifically, manager Bobby Cox, Smith probably wouldn’t have been in the major leagues in 1991. Due to a series of disastrous personal decisions and actions, the outfielder had worn out his welcome in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Kansas City. For here was a guy who once tackled the Phillie Phanatic because the mascot wouldn’t stop poking fun at him, testified against a teammate or two in a well-publicized drug trial, almost died from a cocaine overdose in a hotel room, and once seriously considered shooting his general manager.
The last incident occurred in 1987 after Smith was summoned to testify in the trial of Curtis Strong, the one-time clubhouse caterer convicted of dealing drugs to major leaguers. Heading into a new season, the only offer Smith received was a low-ball one from John Schuerholz, then the Royals’ general manager. Smith appeared in just forty-eight games in the majors in 1987, hitting .251, and was released by Kansas City at the end of the year.
Back home in South Carolina, seemingly out of baseball for good, Smith plotted his revenge. He purchased a 9mm pistol at a pawn shop and schemed about how he could go to Kansas City and shoot Schuerholz in the stadium parking lot. Even though Smith didn’t care whether he spent the rest of his life in prison, he held off and began to call teams, looking for a job instead. Only Atlanta general manager Bobby Cox showed any interest, so Smith began the 1988 season in the Braves’ minor leagues. After hitting .300 with nine home runs in Richmond, the Braves’ Triple-A affiliate, he was called up to the parent club and became the team’s starting left fielder.
Cox once told explained that Smith “was a special player. He had absolutely no fear. He stood up on top of the plate and dared a pitcher to come inside. Then when they did, he didn’t say a thing. And he’d knock the shortstop halfway into left field” to break up a double play.
Of course, when Cox became manager the following season Schuerholz was hired as the Braves’ new general manager. For the most part Smith steered clear of his old nemesis. Yet when the Braves clinched the National League West in 1991, Smith and Schuerholz found themselves next to each other in the victorious clubhouse. Amid the champagne and celebration they hugged, even though Smith later said that he “hated it. It was something that had to be done. It was a joyous time, and I didn’t want to disrupt it.”
———
Before the series began, most experts graded the Minnesota bullpen ahead of Atlanta’s relief corps. But that hadn’t proven to be the case in the Fall Classic itself. Except for Alejandro Peña’s gopher ball to Chili Davis in Game Three, the Braves had come through in a big way. They would again tonight, as Mark Wohlers and Mike Stanton kept Minnesota off the scoreboard as the game headed to the bottom of the ninth. The Twins went down in order in the top of the frame, thanks in large part to David Justice’s sliding catch in right field.
Needing to rest closer Rick Aguilera, Kelly turned to Willis and then Mark Guthrie to close things out. The plan worked at first, but Guthrie got into trouble when Lemke tripled to the gap in left-center field. After driving in the winning run the night before, the Lemke hit parade continued, as he now had three hits (single, double, and now a triple) in Game Four.
“Mark Lemke, Mark Lemke,” Gene Larkin repeated years later. “Forget about Ron Gant or Terry Pendleton or e
ven David Justice. Mark Lemke was the hitter for the Braves that just wore us out.”
———
Near the end of the 1991 regular season Jim Lefebvre reached me at Baseball Weekly’s office in Rosslyn, Virginia.
“You trying to get me fired?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, confused by what he was talking about.
“Because that last column of yours made me look pretty bad,” he continued.
“I’m not trying to make anybody look bad,” I replied.
“It’s lousy enough that the local writers have it out for me,” Lefebvre said. “You learn to expect that, but to get it from the national media just makes things that much worse on my end.”
For the life of me I couldn’t remember what I had written that was so awful in this manager’s eyes.
“Do me a favor,” Lefebvre added. “Before you write anything more, call me, okay?”
“Well . . . ”
“Call the direct number to the team. I’ll leave your name with the switchboard. They’ll pass you right through to me.”
With that, he hung up.
Curious, I looked at the previous week’s issue, and all I found was a short item in which I second-guessed Lefebvre’s use of his bullpen in a recent loss. What was going on to have Jim Lefebvre so concerned about what I was writing? After all, he was a colorful guy who knew the game. If anything, the powers that be in Seattle could have marketed him as the face of the franchise.
During his playing days in Los Angeles Lefebvre enjoyed playing minor characters on such popular television shows as Gilligan’s Island and Batman. In 1965 he joined Wes Parker, Jim Gilliam, and Maury Wills in the Dodgers’ all switch-hitter infield, and the courtship of his wife had demonstrated real determination. Lefebvre first glimpsed the beauty with long black hair and dressed in a purple miniskirt at a hotel coffee shop in Los Angeles the day after Christmas in 1968. He returned to the hotel for three consecutive mornings until he saw her again. Jean Bakke told Lefebvre that she didn’t recognize him and didn’t follow his team. “I was a Braves fan,” she later explained, “and I hated anyone who’d beat them.” But that didn’t deter the ballplayer nicknamed “Frenchy.” The two began dating and were married the night before the All-Star Game.
When Lefebvre’s major-league playing career ended he signed with the Lotte Orions and became the first player to win a championship in America and Japan. After his playing days were over he was named batting coach for the Dodgers until he ran afoul of manager Tommy Lasorda and was replaced by Manny Mota before the 1980 season. The Lasorda-Lefebvre feud made headlines in Los Angeles when the two crossed paths during a taping at KNBC-TV. After his interview Lasorda waited for Lefebvre, calling him disloyal to the Dodgers. When Lasorda tried to take a swing at Lefebvre, the former coach split his old boss’s lip.
“Lasorda left with blood on his face, and Lefebvre left with a smile on his,” said sportscaster Steve Somers.
Lasorda later claimed that Lefebvre had sucker-punched him. Yet Lefebvre told the Los Angeles Times, “Well, I’ll tell you what, it was the sucker who got punched all right.”
Lefebvre recalled that his former manager took off his watch and suit jacket before trying to land the first punch in a vacant studio in Burbank. “Then I decked him. His lip was bleeding, and it definitely wasn’t bleeding Dodger blue. He kept saying, ‘Look what you’ve done to me, look what you’ve done to me. I’ll sue.’ The only regret I had then was that I knew I’d never be able to wear a Dodger uniform again.”
Few regrets, a guy willing to stand on principle—Jim Lefebvre was the kind of manager who could really rally a ballclub. Certainly he couldn’t be worried about holding on to his job, could he? But then I looked at the latest standings, with the Mariners a half-dozen or so games behind the Twins in the American League West. In 1991 more and more major-league managers found themselves under the gun. A major shift was taking place in how they were judged and, ultimately, rated. Ownership arguably held them to higher standard—perhaps an unfair one.
A record fourteen managers would be fired in 1991. The Cubs went through two skippers all by themselves this season. The long list of dismissals had begun in April, only a few weeks into the season, when Philadelphia let go Nick Leyva. The pink slips really started to fly when three managers—the Cubs’ Don Zimmer, the Royals’ John Wathan, and the Orioles’ Frank Robinson—were fired on consecutive days a month later. By midseason seven teams had decided to make a change.
“With free agents, owners put out a lot of money and expect instant results,” Robinson told Baseball America after his dismissal. “But there’s no guarantee. These people still have to execute, but what we have now is a society syndrome of win or else.”
Despite leading the St. Louis Cardinals to a winning record (84–78) after Whitey Herzog quit the season before, Joe Torre knew that he wouldn’t be cut any slack. “If we don’t do well next year, if we start out under .500, guys are going be out for my scalp,” he said at the time. “I understand that. It goes with the job. It has nothing to do with being fair.”
As the national pastime gained a corporate identity, with Disney and the Tribune Company buying big-league franchises, the new bosses often couldn’t understand why what worked in other areas of industry regularly fell flat in baseball. “You have people in ownership who aren’t around baseball,” Detroit manager Sparky Anderson said. “They understand tire companies or department stores.”
Second-guessing and the concept of “win now or else” spread throughout the game, with managers becoming the convenient fall guys. After all, it’s easier to blame and fire the manager than reconstruct an entire twenty-five-man roster. As Don Zimmer explained, the new wave of ownership didn’t really want to understand the game’s nuances. On paper, for example, Ryne Sandberg certainly had the numbers to bat third in the Chicago lineup. Yet the All-Star second baseman was more comfortable batting second, so that’s where Zimmer put him despite second-guessing from on high.
In many ways this was the beginning of “Moneyball,” in which numbers and formulas superseded hands-on experience and personal insight. In fact, the first time I ever saw the term Moneyball was on the cover of Baseball America in late 1991, with the subhead, “Managers, GMs and Scouting Directors Come Under the Gun.” In 1991, however, baseball had not quite fallen into two distinctive camps—the haves and the have-nots. Believe it or not, the Oakland Athletics, the ballclub that would eventually usher in the new days of “Moneyball,” had one of the biggest payrolls in the game this season, at almost $34 million. The San Francisco Giants, California Angels, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and Los Angeles Dodgers were right up there at $30 million-plus, with the New York Yankees close behind. If you took away the Houston Astros at $12.8 million or the Baltimore Orioles at $15 million, most teams were still in the ballpark financially.
“This time was the end of payroll balance in baseball,” said Ted Robinson, who was the Twins’ television voice in 1991. “In that era you had Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Oakland, and Minnesota winning division titles. Back then the financial disparity in terms of team payroll wasn’t nearly as wide between teams as it is today.”
One could argue this trend mirrored a growing rift in our society when it came to compensation and job security. Between 1982 and 2003 the top 5 percent of music acts took home 90 percent of all concert revenues. On the home front the richest households, the top 1 percent, doubled their share of the national income over roughly the same time frame, going from taking 10 percent to 20 percent of the riches. “We’re increasingly becoming a winner-take-all economy, a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced,” said Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, in an address given at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He could have just as easily given the address at baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
“Over recent decades technological change, globalization, and erosion of the institutions and practices that supp
ort shared prosperity in the US have put the middle class under increasing stress,” he added. “The lucky and the talented—and it is often hard to tell the difference—have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up.”
Even after leading their respective teams to the World Series, Bobby Cox and Tom Kelly realized they didn’t have much job security in this ever-shifting economy. The baseball world was changing too fast for any guarantees, especially for a pair of baseball lifers. Not only were fourteen managers fired in 1991, such longtime baseball men as Davey Johnson, Syd Thrift, Dallas Green, and Jack McKeon were shown the door too.
“It used to be if you became a general manager or a club president you’d have it for life if you wanted, you’d die with your boots on,” Green told the New York Times in the fall of 1991. Green had led the Philadelphia Phillies to their first title in 1980 and tried his best to rebuild the Chicago Cubs before being let go. “But times have changed, feelings have changed. That’s why I think it’s almost impossible to conceive of there ever being dynasties or long-term managers or long-term general managers.”
Baseball’s new reality left Thrift, a former general manager with the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees, wondering about loyalty and whether he had been played for a sap. “It used to be you’d turn down jobs to stay,” he said. “I did that in Pittsburgh, turning down a five-year job with the Orioles. I wanted to stay because I thought I’d get to finish what I started. But I got fired. I guess that makes me loyal—and an idiot—doesn’t it?”
Even Tom Kelly couldn’t help thinking that the deck was becoming increasingly stacked against him too. Although he may have led his team to another World Series, what did the future really hold for a guy with only a high school degree, with corporate types becoming as thick as loons on a Minnesota lake in his sport?