Down to the Last Pitch

by Tim Wendel

  The Braves initially shifted from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953 and saw more than 2.2 million people go through the turnstiles in 1957 when they culminated a memorable season by upsetting the New York Yankees in the World Series. In the season following the Braves’ relocation to Milwaukee, the Athletics left Philadelphia for Kansas City, and in 1958, there was the radical realignment that rocked the baseball world, as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants headed to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. After the American League Angels set up shop in southern California in 1961 and a National League franchise began in Houston a season later, the map of baseball was forever altered.

  “When Walter O’Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958, it marked the era of disloyal teams and changed the sports world forever,” wrote economist Andrew Zimbalist, author of Baseball and Billions. “Despite O’Malley’s perfidy in the eyes of Brooklyn, for many, family ownership is associated with stability in sports.”

  One can argue the pros and cons of family ownership, and Zimbalist himself maintained that corporate decision-makers are “more likely to be professional and proficient; less likely to be eccentric and errant. But no matter who was now in charge, ballclubs became more prone to leave town after the exodus by the Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast.”

  By the early 1960s the Milwaukee Braves themselves were struggling on the field, and their attendance in Wisconsin dropped below 1 million patrons annually. In 1965 ownership announced it was moving the ballclub again, this time to Atlanta. After several rounds in the courts, where arguments about baseball antitrust exemption and what, if anything, local ownership owed its fan base were debated, the Braves (with the help of Bowie Kuhn, who was a National League attorney at the time) got necessary approval to flee town and headed south in a hurry.

  As Major League Baseball had gone west in a big way with the Dodgers and Giants, in doing so the national pastime had kind of forgotten about the Deep South and what a rich regional market that could be. In particular, many stellar ballplayers hailed from the “Peach State.” In 2010 the Magnolia Chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research selected its all-time, Georgia-born all-star team, which included Jackie Robinson at second base, Josh Gibson behind the plate, and Fred “Dixie” Walker and Ty Cobb in the outfield. From 1901 to 1965 the Atlanta Crackers won fourteen championships at the minor-league level, more than any other team in organized baseball except for the Yankees. Eddie Mathews, Luke Appling, Tim McCarver, Paul Richards, Chuck Tanner, and announcer Ernie Harwell were among those who spent time in Atlanta before moving on to the major leagues.

  When the Crackers went on the road their home field, Ponce de Leon Park, became home to the Black Crackers. When the park hosted Negro League teams, including two appearances by Satchel Paige in 1940, seating was open for Black Crackers games and segregated when the White Crackers returned home. According to historian Leslie Heaphy, black fans were relegated to bleacher seats in left field.

  In April 1949 the Brooklyn Dodgers came to town for a three-game exhibition series with the Crackers. Of course, the Dodgers had such African American athletes as Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson on the roster, and even though the Ku Klux Klan urged Atlanta residents to boycott the games, local fans packed the stands to overflowing, with hundreds more atop the three tiers of billboards between the outfield fence and the railroad tracks. The highlight of the final game was “Robinson’s steal of home on the front end of a double steal in the second inning,” Norman L. Macht later wrote. “There were no fights, no riots, or disturbances of any kind at any of the games.”

  At the local level professional baseball received impressive support, with the Coca-Cola Company, the Georgia Power Company, and the city of Atlanta owning the White Crackers at various points. Even the Reverend Billy Graham proved to be a real fan of baseball in the South; in fact, the preacher once dreamed of playing first base for the Philadelphia Athletics and helped link fundamental Christianity and the national pastime together in the modern era. As a teenager Graham played on his high school baseball team in Charlotte, North Carolina, and met Babe Ruth when the Yankees came through town on a barnstorming tour.

  “I’ll never forget meeting him,” Graham once told me. “He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It was my goal in life to be a baseball player. I went on to play semi-pro—paid five dollars a game, two dollars if we lost. The problem with me is that I couldn’t hit very well.”

  At the age of five Graham had also heard Billy Sunday preach. Once an outfielder with the Chicago White Stockings, Sunday was the first baseball player to use his notoriety on the ball diamond to draw crowds in the name of his religious beliefs. Known for his blazing speed but weak bat, Sunday played in the majors from 1883 to 1890. He eventually quit the game at the age of twenty-eight. Drunk, sitting on a street corner, he was overcome with emotion when he heard the singing of a Salvation Army gospel group, wrote Mike Sowell in his book July 2, 1903. Sunday decided to be a preacher and soon became a household name, reportedly once converting 98,264 people during a ten-day revival meeting in New York.

  Still, only after World War II did religion became an integral element in clubhouses and locker rooms of professional sports. Some ballplayers simply couldn’t justify playing on Sunday. Lee Pfund, whose son Randy would one day coach the Los Angeles Lakers, pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. Added to his contract, in Branch Rickey’s handwriting, was a clause citing that Pfund didn’t have to pitch on Sundays.

  Baseball and girls were Graham’s major pursuits until he experienced a religious conversion in his senior year in high school and decided to become an evangelistic preacher. When Graham began his ministry, he turned to sports celebrities to draw a crowd. American mile runner Gil Dodds, the 1943 Sullivan Award winner, often ran while Graham spoke—once doing lap after lap for a crowd of sixty-five thousand at Chicago’s Soldier Field. After his run Dodds would come up to the pulpit and say a few words about how sports and religion were a perfect match for anyone.

  In the 1940s many of the top sports stars were amateurs like Dodds. But as professional sports took center stage in the 1950s, Graham began adding new faces to his regular group of amateur sportsmen—former gangsters and movie stars, according to Wheaton College (Illinois) professor James Mathiesen. Graham went to college at Florida Bible Institute, outside of Tampa. He attended spring training games and eventually “became acquainted with several players, then the owners with many of the clubs,” he recalled. Bobby Richardson first attended one of Graham’s Crusades for Christ in the late 1950s. The New York Yankees’ second baseman would later speak at Graham rallies, including events in Hawaii and Japan. “He’s from North Carolina, and I’m from South Carolina. So there’s a common background,” Richardson explained. “We immediately hit it off.”

  Their sons would later room together at Wheaton College, and Richardson attended Graham-sponsored seminars. Richardson and announcer Red Barber, who was from Columbus, Mississippi, organized the New York Yankees’ chapel services. At first such gatherings were held away from the ballpark, often in a hotel banquet room. But when Mickey Mantle once left a Yankee service in Minneapolis early to beat the traffic and half of the congregation followed him, it was decided that the chapel service should be held at the ballpark.

  In 1973, when Detroit News sportswriter Watson Spoelstra founded the Baseball Chapel, only a few teams regularly held chapel. When Commissioner Bowie Kuhn gave Sunday meetings at the ballpark his blessing, their popularity soared. Today, all major-league teams have chapel meetings, and many offer weekly Bible studies for players and their wives.

  “I think baseball is good as our national pastime,” Graham said. “We look to baseball as our game. It’s a wonderful clean sport.”

  In the Old Testament the prophet Ezekiel envisioned that a river of new life, bringing with it hope and faith, would someday run through then-barren Israel. Some would claim that such a river, at least of dogma and good intenti
ons, has flowed through the national pastime in particular and the sports world in general for several generations now. Yet anybody who has discussed religion at the family dinner table knows how divisive the subject can be. Baseball clubhouses are no different. Walk too much with the Lord, and a ballplayer can sometimes forget to walk with the bases loaded, Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver once said. When he managed in southern California Dick Williams lamented that his Angels pitchers didn’t throw inside enough. He blamed the distressing trend on too many of them being too clean living. After contending in 1978, several San Francisco Giants players—Gary Lavelle, Mike Ivie, Bob Knepper—went public about being born-again Christians, with Lavelle even warning that the Bay Area was the center of devil worship. They dropped well below .500 the next season, going 71–91, and faith became a lightning rod for team dissension and public criticism. If the Giants were a ballclub overwhelmed by religious fervor, the 1991 Minnesota Twins were arguably a squad that survived such a spiritual revival and the resulting controversy.

  In winning it all in 1987, the Twins earned the reputation as a team that worked hard—real hard. “Whether we’re at home or on the road, we always have guys hitting extra,” Kirby Puckett once explained. “I’m one of those guys. I believe that there’s always something that you can do better. . . . I’m always working on it, man.”

  For many of those seasons Gary Gaetti, the Twins’ fiery third baseman, was right alongside Puckett and the others when it came to extra batting practice, clubhouse antics, and off-the-field partying. Puckett went as far as to call Gaetti the soul of the 1987 championship team. He was nicknamed the “Rat” because if a fastball is sometimes called cheese by ballplayers, as in high cheese, no pitcher could throw it past this Rat.

  “He was a completely different breed,” Puckett added. “Here was a guy who had such an impact, on me especially. He was the kind of guy that if you were beating the Twins, he couldn’t take it. Gary Gaetti was just [liable] to scream at you when he was hitting. The next pitch he’d hit five hundred feet for a home run and be screaming at you as he went around the bases. . . . That’s what I remember most about Gary.”

  Everything changed in Twins Land when Gaetti became born again after the 1987 World Series triumph. The guy who was always eager for extra BP, to confront an opposing pitcher, began to arrive later at the ballpark and spend more time at his locker reading the Bible, Puckett remembered. For Kent Hrbek the transformation was especially difficult. He and Gaetti had been roommates since Class A ball in Elizabethton, Tennessee. For years they had played ball, hunted, fished, and hit the bars together. Soon after the 1988 season began, Hrbek asked for a separate room when Gaetti began to talk to him about Jesus Christ. “That’s where I drew the line,” Hrbek said. “That’s the only time we had any flak between us. He was into it deep the first year, and that’s what everybody I talked to told me how it would be.

  “I was quoted in the paper as saying it was like a death in the family. It was like I’d lost Gary Gaetti someplace. It was like he was a different person. A lot of people took offense to that, saying it can’t be that bad. But it was. I’d lost somebody I’d like to chum with and hang out with, stay up to three o’clock in the morning and rant and rave all over the place and have a good time.”

  Hrbek was reminded how much things had changed when he watched the 1989 All-Star Game on television. A few seasons earlier he made the team, and Gaetti had watched from home. When Hrbek was introduced he held up a batting glove with Gaetti’s number eight written on it. In 1988 Gaetti retuned the favor with HI REX, a reference to Hrbek’s nickname T. Rex. By the 1989 All-Star Game, though, Gaetti had left his old buddy far behind. Before that All-Star Game he distributed leaflets that included his picture and testimony. When it came time for the pregame introductions, his batting glove read, JESUS IS LORD. Back home in Minnesota Hrbek turned off the television.

  By 1991 Gaetti was no longer on the Twins’ roster, prompting the platoon of convenience at that position with Scott Leius and Mike Pagliarulo. General manager Andy MacPhail said Gaetti’s newfound faith had “zero bearing” on the ballclub declining to re-sign him. “Gary Gaetti left us because he was offered $11.7 million over four years,” MacPhail said, “two of it guaranteed. It had nothing to do with one’s religion.”

  Sports analyst Greg Cylkowski, who was based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and had advised several Twins players during this period, said the ballclub’s decision not to re-sign Gaetti was by design. MacPhail countered that the ballclub had not only offered Gaetti that four-year deal with $7.1 million guaranteed, but the unique contract also gave him the option to declare himself a free agent after the 1991, 1992, or 1993 seasons. In the end Gaetti headed to the West Coast, but the proposed deal with the novel option plan caught the eye of pitcher Jack Morris. When he signed with the Twins before the 1991 season he received a three-year deal and bargained a similar option, which could make him a free agent after his first and second years in the Twin Cities. Few at the time gave this wrinkle much thought. Morris was thirty-six years old and coming off a 15–18 year with Detroit. In addition, he was returning home, having been raised in St. Paul. Still, the Gaetti option would allow Morris to leave after one season with the Twins if he wanted.

  ———

  Faith can rock a world. Combine it with vision, and everything can be turned upside down.

  An independent operation for much of their history, the Crackers became the Class AA affiliate for the Braves in 1950. After the Southern Association disbanded, Atlanta moved to the International League, becoming the top affiliate for the St. Louis Cardinals and then the Minnesota Twins, of all teams, for another season.

  As the only professional franchise in town, the Braves drew well at first and won the National League West Division in 1969. Yet within three seasons, they fell twenty-five games back in the standings, and despite having home run king Hank Aaron in the lineup, attendance dropped like a stone. That development soon opened the door for one of baseball’s real innovators—Ted Turner.

  During the 1960s Turner brought his family’s billboard company back from financial ruin. A decade later he turned to television, buying an independent UHF station in Atlanta (WJRJ) and making its fare movies and reruns of old TV series. Desperate for more programming, Turner turned to baseball. In 1974 he paid $600,000 for a five-year pact that allowed him to broadcast sixty games annually. At first Turner sent his signal to cable television operators only in the Southeast. Despite being heavily leveraged, he decided to take it up a notch by leasing a channel on a communications satellite. That made his station, soon to be redubbed WTBS, available on cable systems nationwide, and the Braves were on their way to becoming “America’s Team” in the realm of baseball.

  “When I look at heroes and people I worship, he has to be one of them I admire most,” Hank Aaron said. “You’re looking at a genius, someone who is two or three steps ahead of everyone else. Back when he was starting CNN, he’d walk through the stadium, and people thought he was crazy. Well, I’d like to be crazy like that.”

  Turner said the keys to his success were simple. “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise,” he once said.

  As Turner’s gambles began to pay off in a big way, Braves ownership continued to suffer at the gate, and they finally decided to sell. A group in Toronto was interested in buying the ballclub, but Major League Baseball wasn’t eager to move the Braves for the third time in nearly a quarter century. A local buyer was preferable, so much so that Turner’s offer to pay $1 million down and $9 million sometime in the future was accepted. At thirty-seven, with his only other sports experience being as the winning skipper in the 1977 America’s Cup, Turner had a major-league franchise to call his own.

  Although he continued to build his sports and media empire, purchasing the Atlanta Hawks of the National Basketball League and founding the all-news cable channel CNN, Turner sure had a sweet tooth for his Braves. He signed free agents Gary Mathews and And
y Messersmith and clashed with Bob Horner, who had made the big-league club right out of college. He fired Bobby Cox in 1981, only to bring him back as the general manager five years later. In fact, one of Turner’s best quotes of all time came at the press conference when Cox was let go. Asked who was on his short list to be the Braves’ manager, Turner said, “It would be Bobby Cox if I hadn’t just fired him. We need someone like him around here.”

  Perhaps Turner’s best can-you-believe-this moment happened soon after he bought the Braves. With the ballclub mired in a sixteen-game losing streak, Turner ordered manager Dave Bristol to take a leave of absence. With Bristol out of the way, Turner decided to manage the team himself, wearing uniform number twenty-seven. The stunt lasted only one game, as it was found to be a violation of a major-league rule that prohibits players and managers from owning shares of a team. Although Turner lost his only contest in uniform, a 2–1 defeat to the Pittsburgh Pirates, he does remain an owner with a managerial record, duly noted in the record books and at 0–1.

  “[Pitching coach] Johnny Sain probably was the only person in Pittsburgh who didn’t know what was going on,” Braves broadcaster Pete Van Wieren said. “He finally said, ‘Where’s Dave?’ He had no clue.”

  The defeat was the Braves’ seventeenth straight, and coach Vern Benson was the manager the following day when Atlanta snapped its losing streak, with a 6–1 victory.

  “Well, I’d like be down there to take some credit for this,” Turner told the Washington Times.

  Soon enough Bristol returned from his owner-imposed vacation, and things returned to normal in a season that would see Atlanta finish with a 61–101 record. With Bristol back at the helm, the Braves were shut out by the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Despite such antics, Turner’s flair impressed ballplayers elsewhere, especially in locales that were fast becoming small-market have-nots. “The Braves had the resources to keep people, and we didn’t,” said Andy Van Slyke, who had joined the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1987 and would lose to Atlanta in consecutive National League Championship Series. “They, and the Cubs with WGN, were becoming America’s teams. Ted Turner wasn’t afraid to spend money. That certainly wasn’t the case in Pittsburgh.”