Lee Lowenfish

I have long believed that you shouldn't make prognostications about a season until Memorial Day at the earliest. But, after all, this season started in Korea before winter was over and already the White Sox, Marlins, and Rockies are not likely to ever glimpse .500 all season. 

  

As an Oriole fan, I like their record, solidly more than 10 games over .500 and perhaps the best is yet to come. But they remain very streaky offensively and the pitching staff remains a work in progress. 

 

Temporarily at least, closer Craig Kimbrel has lost his spot because of inconsistent performances.  He did give a refreshingly original explanation for his wildness and his penchant for giving up big hits: "I lost my lanes," he said, making a comparison to bowling.

 

I know that the Dodgers' Mookie Betts is a great bowler but I have never heard him connect the two sports. In this past weekend's series win over the Diamondbacks, the defending National League champion,  Kimbrel's two appearances in non-closing roles were far better. We'll see if he returns to the pressure-packed closing role soon.

 

During the series against Arizona, Anthony Santander, the switch-hitting right fielder from Venezuela, began to show signs of offensive consistency. He hit a 8th inning tying HR in Sat's extra-inning win and blasted an opposite field double in the Sun loss to Dback ace Zac Gallen. (Slumping 2023 NL rookie of the year Corbin Carroll came to life in that victory stroking the ball all over the field and running wild on the bases - he even beat out a relatively routine grounder to shortstop when in a rare lapse Gunnar Henderson, last year's AL ROY, took too much time throwing to first base.)

 

Santander (pronounced with emphasis on the "der") is a quiet but imposing leader of the Orioles and he is so easy to root for. (I wrote this before I saw his YouTube Mother's Day greeting to his mother which made him even more endearing.)   

 

His emergence as a run producer and underrated outfielder has been a longtime in coming. He was signed as a teenager by Cleveland and after six years in the minors, many of them plagued by injuries, the Orioles under the previous Dan Duquette administration plucked him out of the Rule 5 Draft. He doesn't turn 30 until Oct 19.

 

He will be a free agent after the season and there has been no indication that the current adminstration under Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal want to re-sign him. When the duo was running Houston, they let even more talented Carlos Correa and George Springer walk. 

 

This may be my wistful thinking but perhaps new owner David Rubenstein will see Santander's value to the team and take an active role in keeping him around long-term. Certainly Rubenstein's first moves as an owner have been deservingly well-received.  He has spoken genuinely about his love of the Orioles from his earliest days as a native Baltimorean who remembers the team coming from the moribund shell of the St. Louis Browns before the 1954 season. 

 

He is very versed in media performance from his longtime work as a Bloomberg News talk show host. During the Friday game against Arizona, he even took a turn in the Dr. Splash Zone in the outfield seats, joining fans in watery celebration of big Baltimore hits. 

 

Budding ace Corbin Burnes will also be a free agent after the season but I'm willing to let his and Santander's contracts play out after a deep run into the post-season and ideally through a World Series parade. 

 

As for the AL East race this season with Boston perhaps a surprise third right now, it looks likely that the Yankees are here to stay especially if Gerrit Cole returns to form after his elbow injury. And Juan Soto has certainly made a difference in the Yankee lineup and the team's overall upbeat presence. 

He has to be an early favorite in the MVP race.

    

On the college baseball front, more than a few people have expressed surprise to me about Columbia's excellence in baseball that I highlighted last post. It is no sudden emergence but dates back to 2008, the third season with Brett Boretti at the helm when the Lions won their first of six championships in his reign.

 

The field is set for the double-elimination tourney that begins Fri May 17 at 11A with 2nd seed Princeton taking on 3rd seed Cornell. At 3P top-seeded

Columbia faces defending champion Penn who got in when to no surprise to yours truly, Harvard eliminated Yale last weekend.  (Nothing like an ancient rivalry of the super blue-bloods and misery loving company! Yale had to sweep the 3-game series and the Crimson won the second game, 3-2.)   

 

The winners on Friday play Sat at 3P and the losers fight for survival at 11A.  The Friday winners play at 3P.  On Sunday at 11 the survivor of the early Sat game plays the loser of the 3p game.  The winner of that elimination game plays the undefeated team at 3P. 

 

If the undefeated team loses, there is a winner take all match at noon on Mon Feb 20.   All games are at Satow Stadium Robertson Field just north of the football field NW of Bway/2018 Street.  On Mon May 27 at noon, ESPN will announce the 64 teams going to the tournament that winds up in the College World Series 8-game tournament in Omaha in mid-June.  And what does Omaha stand for? 

Opportunity

Makeup

Attitude

Hustle

Always put the team first! 

 

Meanwhile Columbia tennis has earned its first entry into the Elite Eight of NCAA men's tennis.  The Lions will meet #1 seed Ohio State on Th May 16

at 12N on the campus of Oklahoma State in Stillwater Oklahoma.  Like baseball, Columbia tennis has built a winning culture for years, first under coach Bid Goswami and now under his successor Howard Endelman, a former star Columbia player. 

 

Other matches on Thurs will feature Kentucky v Texas Christian U followed by Tennessee v Texas and finally Virginia, trying for a three-peat v Wake

Forest.  Semifinals will be on May 18 and the final May 19. 

 

Here's TCM Tips on sports movies: 

Th May 16 9A  "The Set-up" (1949) one of the great boxing movies with Robert Ryan as a battered but proud pugilist

 

Sa May 18 930A "Rookie of the Year" (1955) directed by John Ford/with John Wayne, his son Patrick Wayne, Ward Bond, Vera Miles

  originally a Screen Directors Guild half-hour TV show - aging sportswriter finds a story in son of banned ballplayer playing the game

  Script co-written by W. R. Burnett (who wrote among other classics "Little Caesar" and "Asphalt Jungle")

 

Th May 23 4p "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" (1949) with Sinatra/Gene Kelly/Esther Williams as owner of an early 20th century team

 

That's all for now.  Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, and Stay positive, test negative.  

I hope the New Year brings you, dear readers, good health and some serenity in a very turbulent time

of history. Personally, I'm looking forward to the April publication of my book BASEBALL'S ENDANGERED SPECIES: INSIDE THE CRAFT OF SCOUTING BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT (U of Nebraska Press that published my Branch Rickey bio and the third edition of my labor history THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND.) 

 

I remain convinced that no organization can win without a good supply of eyes-and-ears scouting augmented but not enslaved to the endless modern technology and its search for certainty in a sport that defies it. I'm glad I'm giving props in my book to the people who deserve to be remembered for their largely selfless contributions of bringing good players and good people into the game.

 

The year 2022 ended with sadness for me with the loss of three dear friends, one of them being White Sox scout John Tumminia. He died at the age of 70 on December 4, 2022, after a long battle with auto-immune encephalitis, a form of brain cancer.

 

I met John not long after he started his scouting career in 1987. We were huddling from the rain in a shed back of home plate that disrupted batting practice before what may have been a minor league game of the Albany-Colonie Yankees. So began a friendship based on a love of the game in all its charms and mysteries.

 

John was named White Sox scout of the year in 2001 and was instrumental in giving the heads up

to many of the World Series winning 2005 team. John scouted Cuban baseball in its amateur heyday and at one time gave a positive recommendation to its entire national team.  Former Yankee champions Jose Contreras and "El Duque" Orlando Hernandez were part of the 2005 Chisox pitching staff. 

 

A native of Brooklyn, John was a graduate of the local St. Francis College where he made their baseball Hall of Fame.  How disappointed he was when many years ago his alma mater gave up the sport. 

 

He played pro ball in Italy in 1975 before returning to NY where for a while he taught theology at a high school in West Islip, NY.  From the mid-1980s through 2008, he was recreation director at the Shawangunk maximum security prison in Wallkill, near Newburgh.  

 

It was quite an experience to walk New York City streets or sit in a restaurant with John Tumminia. His ears and eyes were so attuned to the nuances of people's behavior that he picked up words and movements that I was oblivious to.

 

John was a practicing non-evangelical Christian who meditated every day and cared deeply about all of God's human beings. His compassion for the underprivileged led him to form the Baseball Miracles project to which he devoted his last years.  

 

He and his staff of volunteers sponsored baseball clinics and brought equpment to underserved youngsters all over the world, including Honduras, Kenya, South Africa, and Argentina. But he once told me that the worst poverty he ever saw was on a reservation in the Dakotas.  

 

In a touching piece that Scott Merkin wrote for MLB.com in December 2016, he described John as "a

thin version of Santa". He told the writer that "the expression on the kids' faces is like a light bulb."

 

Another loss last year was the passing of the superb writer and memoir teacher, Jean Hastings Ardell, who left us Oct 7 at the age of 79 after a courageous battle against multiple myeloma and long Covid.  

 

Jean and I met early this century at one of the NINE baseball magazine annual conferences in Arizona.  

She had already written an absorbing and informative book about women in our game, BREAKING INTO BASEBALL. The baseball bond and our shared New York City roots quickly led to us becoming fast friends.  

 

Unlike yours truly who returned in 1976 to NYC after some years in Wisconsin and Baltimore, Jean left our "home town" for college at Butler in Indianapolis and never came back except to visit. By 1965 she settled in southern California where she lived a vibrant life that included once playing bridge with John Wayne.  

 

I never found out more details about that experience or about her first job in SoCal as an assistant to the

renowned architect William Pereira.  She returned to college to get her BA at UC-Irvine in 1988 and

later got her master's in non-fiction writing at USC. 

 

Jean's last book was a collaboration with Ila Borders. MAKING MY PITCH, the story of the first

woman to pitch college baseball. Ila was the first speaker at the early December memorial that was attended by almost 300 people at Newport Beach St. Mark's Presbyterian Church.

 

I was among the many that tuned in via Zoom to hear Ila thank Jean for her gentle guidance as she worked towards the difficult process of coming out as a gay person.   

 

A deeply committed liberal, Jean was never dogmatic. Phil Lance, one of the friends of Jean and her husband Dan Ardell, noted that she taught us "how to open spaces where friendships can grow."

 

Annie Quinn, a writer that Jean mentored, summed up best our aching loss when she quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: "Only true friends leave footprints in your heart." 

 

I quote Jean in the title of this post. I will always remember her saying, "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape."

 

I end in memory of another loss from 2022, Fred Herschowitz who died on August 24 two days before his 80th birthday.  Fred was the WBAI-Pacifica Radio broadcaster that brought me to the airwaves early in 1980 to discuss the first edition of my book, THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND.

 

I became a co-host with him on "Seventh Inning Stretch", the only long-running sports show that highly political leftist station ever scheduled.  I took over the show in late 1982 and remained for most of the decade.

 

Fred was the organizer of the WBAI softball team he aptly dubbed the Turtles.  I will always be

grateful to him for giving me the chance to play third base.  

 

What I lacked in arm and at the plate I tried to make up for with a chest willing to block a smash or two and having "just enough" arm to sling the ball to first base. 

 

Fred's enthusiasm and competitiveness on the softball field at times was overzealous. I'll never forget before a game against WQXR the classical music station, Fred took out a clipping of a violin and burned it.   

 

He was a big Mets fan and I have a feeling that he wouldn't be too thrilled with the team's

seemingly relentless pursuit of free agent shortstop Carlos Correa. Nor am I.

 

Yet Fred was a Queens native and very loyal to the Mets' orange and blue.  He was my neighbor on the Upper West Side and I will always feel the void when I walk up West End Avenue.  

 

That's all for now.  Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, stay positive test negative, and in this time of loss, the words of art and social critic John Ruskin resound more than ever: "There is no wealth but life."