Who Can It Be Now? Lee Andrew May was born on March 23, 1943, in Birmingham, Alabama. He was born into a working-class family. His father Tommy made mattresses and springs, and his mother Mildred plucked and washed chickens in a poultry house. Shortly after Lee's brother Carlos was born, however, Lee's parents divorced and he, his mother, and his brother moved in with their grandmother. Lee was a three-sport star (baseball, football, and basketball) at A. H. Parker High School in Birmingham. Parker is a nearly all-black school -- so much so that when a white girl called Crystal Wadsworth graduated in 2007, she became the first-ever white student to graduate from the school and only the second non-black student to do so (a Latino student graduated in 2006). May was offered a football scholarship to play fullback at the University of Nebraska. It would have been a tough move in many respects for May. After all, staying close to home was not an option for football. After all, it took the SEC until 1966 to integrate (when Kentucky was the first SEC school to sign an African-American athlete to a scholarship), even if Alabama played against an integrated Penn State squad in 1959 in the Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia. Instead, he chose baseball. As he put it in an interview, "the Reds offered me money and I felt I had a better chance in baseball. Plus, I felt I'd have a longer career in baseball . . . and it was safer." Coming out of high school in 1961, May graduated before the onset of the draft and as a result was signed as an amateur free agent by the Reds. He was assigned to Class D Tampa by the Reds in 1961. His manager there, former pitcher Johnny Vander Meer, converted him to first base from the outfield. He played only 26 games that season and came back for a second year in 1962. That winter, he set off for Venezuela and Puerto Rico to play winter ball. Again, as Lee put it in his SABR Biography: "They paid you better in Puerto Rico and Venezuela than your own club paid you. ... I made $350 a month in my first year in the minors and $1,500 a month in Venezuela that same winter." After those two years in Tampa, May moved up to Rocky Mount in the Single-A Carolina League in 1963. He started hitting for more power as he filled out and grew into manhood. That power carried over into Double-A at Macon -- 25 homers at the age of 21 -- and in Triple-A in San Diego in 1965. Indeed, in San Diego, his hitting was outstanding: 34 HR, 103 RBI, .321/.355/.586 with 32 doubles thrown in for good measure. That year earned him a cup of coffee in 1965 and his first ever major league appearance in a game against the Milwaukee Braves. In 1966, he made the team out of spring training. But, buried behind fellow youngster Tony Perez and veteran Gordy Coleman on a mediocre Reds team, he was relegated to pinch hitting a few times without a hit between April 16 and May 7 and found himself back in Triple-A -- this time in Buffalo -- as a result. But, after 1966, he would never play in the minor leagues again. On making the team in 1967, May still had the problem of being difficult to slot into a defensive position. He played 80 games at first that year along with 33 games in LF and 16 games in RF. Meanwhile, to make room for May and fellow first baseman Deron Johnson, the Reds moved Tony Perez to third base. May hit okay -- not great -- in 1967. He was slightly under the league average at OPS+ and walked just 19 times in 472 plate appearances. That lack of walking is probably the biggest knock that can be leveled at May over his career. Even so,The Sporting News named May as its Rookie of the Year. Still, the Reds of the late 1960s were a team that hung around the upper levels of the National League and, in 1969, the National League West without ever getting over the hump. May was an All-Star for the first of three times in his career in 1969, and he hit a ton that year -- 38 HR, 110 RBI (his career high), and slashing at .290/.337/.469. After the 1969 season and despite coming off an 89-73 season, the Reds let manager Dave Bristol join the Milwaukee Brewers organization to be that team's first manager in Milwaukee. In his place, the Reds hired an unknown for his first major league managing job at the age of 36: Sparky Anderson. All Anderson did was manage the team to 102 wins and a World Series loss to the Baltimore Orioles. May put up good power numbers again -- 34 HR, 94 RBI, 34 2Bs -- but his OBP fell below .300, which made him a barely above-average player despite all the taters. Coming off that year, the Reds made few changes. May started at first, Perez at third -- just as they had the previous year. Yet, the results did not follow. The Reds went from 102 wins to 79 wins, so GM Bob Howsam decided to make some major changes -- one of which was to trade Lee May in a blockbuster deal to the Houston Astros. It was a risky move -- May was an All-Star again and finished the season 9th in the NL in 1971 in Offensive WAR (5.1), 4th in SLG (.532), 9th in OBP (.864), and 3rd in HR (39). But the Reds got the better end of the deal. The Astros obtained May along with 2B Tommy Helms and utilityman Jimmy Stewart in exchange for OF Ed Armbrister, P Jack Billingham, OF Cesar Geronimo, 3B Denis Menke, and future HOF 2B (and completely obnoxious announcer) Joe Morgan. May stayed in Houston for just three years. He was an All-Star in 1972 at the age of 29 while leading the NL in strikeouts at 145; he also had his career high in walks in this season with 52 in 647 plate appearances (12 of those were intentional, however). Perhaps the cavernous Astrodome took away a few HRs, as he went from hitting over 30 HR a year to topping out at 29 that same year. May watched as his former teammates -- bolstered by the trade -- became the Big Red Machine while May's Astros finished 3rd, 4th, and 4th behind the Reds. At the end of the 1974 season, May found himself on the move again. The Orioles needed to add power to their team, so they traded for the man nicknamed "The Big Bopper of Birmingham". In exchange, the Astros got IF Rob Andrews and OF-3B-1B Enos Cabell. May put up one final big season in 1976, leading the AL in RBI with 109. Still, his OBP was only .312, again reflecting his hacktastic approach at the plate. May's move to the Orioles provided his second missed opportunity for a World Series ring in 1979, since his Orioles could not close out Willie Stargell's "Family." May only hit one time in that series as Earl Weaver went with switch-hitting future HOF Eddie Murray at first base. May turned 37 just before Opening Day in 1980. His reflexes slowing were accompanied by Weaver giving May next to zero playing time in the field that season. May played the field in just 7 games that season overall, and 61 of his 78 appearances were as the DH. On the clear downslope of a long career, May signed a two-year contract with the Kansas City Royals in December of 1980. He made just 68 appearances and tallied only 165 plate appearances over the two years of that contract. At the end of the 1982 season, May's career came to an end. He finished his career with 354 HR (which is currently 87th all time), 1244 RBI (134th all time), and a slash line of .267/.313/.459 in 8219 plate appearances. It is safe to say that he would not have been an NFL player for that length of time as a fullback. Mustache Check: Yes, the Big Bopper of Birmingham has a big hairy lip here.
Family Ties Lee's brother Carlos May played OF and 1B for the Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees, and California Angels between 1968 and 1977. Lee's son Lee May, Jr. was the first round selection of the New York Mets in the 1986 June Draft with the 21st pick overall. Unfortunately for Lee Jr., he was one of just 9 players out of the 28 selected who did not make it to the major leagues from that first round. Lee's grandson Jacob May was drafted twice for baseball. He was selected the first time in the 39th round of the 2010 June Draft out of high school. Jacob then attended Coastal Carolina University and blossomed. He became the Chicago White Sox 3rd round selection in the 2013 June Draft with the 91st pick overall. Jacob hit .258/.326/.395 at High-A Winston-Salem in the Carolina League at the age of 22 (he was about a year younger than the league average). He's a speedster, stealing 37 bases in 45 attempts last year. Trivial Pursuit/Freeze-Frame Though he never appeared on the show Cheers according to IMDB, May supposedly crushed a ball off Sam Malone -- the former fictional Boston pitcher portrayed by Ted Danson -- entirely out of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. A Few Minutes with Tony L. As a kid, Lee May was an Oriole to me. It was always strange seeing cards for guys like him on other teams to me as a 7-year-old, because my brain was trying to work out how those guys used to play on other teams than the one they were on currently. May served a few teams as a coach after his career ended. He was the Kansas City Royals hitting coach from 1984 to 1986, a job which allowed him finally to be on the winning side of a World Series in 1985. After a year away from the majors in 1986, he was the Cincinnati Reds first base coach in 1988 and 1989 under Pete Rose and, later, his old pal and former Reds and Astros teammate Tommy Helms. Indeed, for his time as a player and as a coach, May was inducted into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame in 2006. He was let go as a coach by the Reds after the 1989 season under the Marge Schott regime. If you're not familiar with Schott, she was a piece of work. She was a chain-smoking widow who made her money taking over her late husband's car dealership. She had a Saint Bernard called Schottzie which ran around on the field at Riverfront Stadium before Reds games. She once got upset when a sold-out opening day Reds game was cancelled because one of the umpires had a heart attack and died on the field. Seriously. Then add in this; Schott was a female, 1980s version of Donald Sterling -- perhaps with more venom that only going back 25 years in this country can add. From all indications, Schott was a racist, apparently making anti-Semitic comments and calling black players her "million-dollar (moron's word from the 1940s for black person)". As one writer from the Cincinnati Enquirer put it recently in the context of the Sterling episode, "Marge didn't limit her ugliness to blacks. She spread it like buckshot. Schott offended everyone from scouts to Jews, gays to blacks. The litany of her indiscretions was comprehensive and impressive." Anyway, May was under the misguided impression that he and Schott had an agreement that May would be kept on after the 1989 season. When he found out that that was not the case, he said, "If baseball is coming to the way this lady is doing things, I don't want any part of it." He ended up back in Kansas City under his former Royals teammate Hal McRae as the hitting coach from 1992 to 1994. Then, when McRae was the manager with the Tampa Bay Rays in a terrible 2002 season, May served as the first base coach. As far as I can tell, that was the end of his baseball coaching career. Of course, he was 60 years old at that point, so you can't really blame him for hanging up his spikes. He also, apparently, had an "Afro hair replacement" done by a guy called Jim Kreuz in Toledo in the 1970s. The fun things you can find in local newspapers. In any event, May is 71 now. As of 2011, he was working with the Reds doing PR and, otherwise, was enjoying his retirement and his 8 grandchildren.
Who Can It Be Now? It's George Brett leading the Royals with a .314 batting average and Larry Gura's 2.72 ERA showing the way on the pitching staff. Unlike most expansion teams, it did not take the Royals very long to begin contending. Starting in 1971 -- with a second place finish and a twenty-game improvement over their previous season -- the Royals finished the season under .500 in just 5 seasons and never finished worse than 10 games under .500. It never hurts when you have a Hall of Famer at third base to pace your club, and with solidly above average outfielders and pitching, you get an excellent team overall. Thanks to the split season and despite the fact that one of the five seasons under .500 was, in fact, 1981, the Royals still made the playoffs that season. The Royals never dug out from their 20-30 first half of the season under Jim Frey before the strike. After the strike, Frey led the team to a 10-10 record before being fired. The Kauffmans brought in Dick Howser, and the club responded by finishing the season 7 games over .500 for the second half. In the morass that was the AL West at that point, that 30-23 record was good enough for first place. Still, the Royals were swept in the Divisional Series by Oakland. Thus, in the offseason, changes were needed. General Manager Joe Burke was pushed out of the player evaluation job and into the Team President role to replace Ewing Kauffman. Whether he was pushed or he jumped, the move let the team promote the new young front office superstar -- the then-41-year-old John Schuerholz -- to General Manager. The man who later built the Braves dynasty in the 1990s started turning over the roster some and stocking the minor leagues for the team that won the World Series in 1986. In a busy offseason before the 1982 season, Schuerholz started with what looked like a minor trade -- sending utility infielder Manny Castillo to the Mariners for a player-to-be-named-later. That player ended up being Bud Black, who spent 7 years in the Royals rotation. Indeed, in total, in the time between the end of the 1981 season and the beginning of the 1982 season, Schuerholz released or traded away 14 players in various deals and received back 10 more. While a lot of these players were on the periphery of the team, it helped to refresh the bench some and get in new blood. That refreshing process appeared to work. The team spent 53 total days in first place during the season and enjoyed a 2 game lead over second place California as late as September 17. But, the problem was that, starting on September 16 and ending on September 28, the Royals lost 10 of their 11 games starting with game 146 of the season. That streak included a three-game sweep by the Angels from September 20 through September 22 -- a series which started with the two teams tied for first place. A late 5-game winning streak started too late to salvage the division title, leading the Royals to scratch their heads and play the "what-if" game. Mustache Check: Team leaders on the Royals don't "do" facial hair. Or at least George Brett and Larry Gura did not on this card. Pass the Dutchie Not to beat a dead horse, but the Royals in 1982 had a pretty bad drug problem. Two of the players that John Schuerholz traded for were Jerry Martin and Vida Blue. This story from the New York Times news service details how deeply the problem went. The story mentions that, during the 1982 season, Kansas City drug dealer Mark Liebl had a room he called "The Cooperstown Room" to signify the baseball luminaries that had snorted cocaine there. The story mentions specifically the Kansas City "Four" who went to prison -- Blue, Martin, Willie Mays Aikens, and Willie Wilson -- but it also drops the names of other Royals who played on the 1982 team and other players in the league who bought cocaine from Liebl. Such players as Don Hood, U.L. Washington, and Al Cowens. While the story does not give all the names of the players, it mentions that Liebl's sworn testimony used in the investigative process named a total of thirteen players other than the four who went to prison, and that these players played on the Royals or on at least three other teams. Indeed, Liebl mentioned that orders for cocaine were placed from the telephone in the Royals clubhouse and that drugs were delivered to the stadium. In other words, owners were probably relieved in the late 1980s when steroids replaced cocaine as the drugs of choice for major league baseball players. As much as many of us complain about steroids "ruining" the game in the 1990s and early 2000s, cocaine likely had as much of an effect -- and probably a more deleterious effect -- in the 1970s and 1980s. A Few Minutes with Tony L. The Royals of 1982 were an excellent baseball team. Apparently, as the story above seems to hint at, half of them were snorting cocaine and John Schuerholz's trades in the offseason added to that number. Now, other than the guys mentioned in that story above, I have no idea who was and who was not throwing their money away on drugs, nor am I going to speculate about it. How did the Royals blow their lead in September? The most difficult part of that losing streak to understand are the 5 losses in 6 games against the two worst teams in the division -- the Oakland Athletics and the Minnesota Twins. The Twins swept the Royals in a weekend series from September 17-19 before a grand total of 22,850 fans for the three games. The Friday night game saw Paul Splittorff give up 4 runs in the bottom of the third and reliever Bob Tufts give up a single run in the bottom of the eighth. That single run meant that the Royals' furious comeback in the eighth and ninth innings off Brad Havens and Ron Davis fell a run short. In Saturday's afternoon game, Vida Blue and Don Hood both were hit early and often, giving up 10 runs by the end of 6 innings. Hey -- stay away from the nose candy, guys! Then Sunday, the Royals started Bill Castro -- for only the second time that season and the seventh time in his career -- and hit was hit for 5 runs in four innings. In short, it was their pitching that did it -- and, frankly, their pitching had been an issue that season. A team ERA of 4.08 was good enough only for 10th in the league, and the club struck out just 650 batters all year. That just was not good enough, and it made clear what Schuerholz's next steps had to be -- fixing the starting rotation. Now, for the Brewers and HOF Countdown: Former Brewers on the Checklist There are two. Ken Brett spent all of the 1972 season as a Milwaukee Brewer after spending four seasons in Boston. The Brewers sent him to the Phillies as part of trading for Don Money. Jamie Quirk was traded by the Royals to the Brewers after the 1976 season with Jim Wohlford and Bob McClure in exchange for Jim Colborn and Darrell Porter (boy, did the Royals win that trade) and, then, was traded back to the Royals in mid-1978 for a minor leaguer and money.
Former Brewers Appearing in 1982 for the Royals But not on Cardboard Brewers castoff Bill Castro -- who came back to Milwaukee later for many years and served as the bullpen coach and, later, as pitching coach -- appeared in 21 games and made four starts for the 1982 Royals. He pitched 75-2/3 innings in KC in 1982. Future Brewers on the Checklist Not a single one. Future Brewers Appearing But Not on the Checklist Once again, not a single one. Future Hall of Famers on the Checklist There's the obvious one, of course -- the hitter on the front of the card. George Brett had a pretty good 1982, hitting .301/.378/.505. Brett's the only one, though. Future Hall of Famers Appearing in 1982 but not on the checklist As was the case for the Astros, no one other than Brett played for the Royals in 1982 that made it to the Hall of Fame. The only guy who received some consideration for the Hall of Fame was Vida Blue, but Vida's career numbers were affected both by injuries and, more to the point, his personal drug demons. Certainly, he started off his career with an incredible 1971 -- Cy Young and MVP -- but the 312 innings at age 21 might have caused problems in 1972. He rebounded from that, but, from the age of 32 forward, his "decline" phase looked more like a "collapse" phase. Other guys who could have been considered: Hal McRae, Frank White, Amos Otis, Willie Wilson. As a collective, that is a lot of talent and is the core of a great team. None of them made it past their first year on the Hall of Fame ballot.
Who Can It Be Now? Richard Blackwell Gale was born on January 19, 1954 in Littleton, New Hampshire. He was not drafted coming out of Littleton High School, so he attended the University of New Hampshire. At 6'7" tall, it should not be a surprise that he attended UNH on a basketball scholarship, only performing with the baseball team on the side. Gale believes that he was noticed while he was playing in the Cape Cod League in 1974. As he put it in an interview with milb.com: "The thing that probably made the biggest impression on people, that got me noticed, was playing in the Cape Code League in 1974. I had a real good season. I got a tremendous amount of exposure playing against top college competition. In college, we were in the old Yankee Conference in New England. We had some good players from there, but it is not like some of the Southern and Western schools." His performance in 1974 led the Kansas City Royals to draft him in the fifth round of the 1975 June Draft -- 6 picks after Lou Whitaker. The Royals assigned Gale to their Gulf Coast league team after he signed, and he pitched decently. He really picked up his game, though, once he was sent to Double-A Jacksonville and Triple-A Omaha in 1977. His 12-7 record and 2.36 K/BB ratio -- along with his 7.7 K/9 innings -- tipped off Royals brass that Gale could pitch in the big leagues. So, at the end of April in 1978, the Royals brought him up to start a game against the Brewers. He pitched very well -- holding the Brew Crew scoreless for 7 innings while striking out four, walking only one, and giving up 6 hits. He got the win in that game and got the win in four of his next five starts. He finished his 1978 season with an excellent 14-8 record and a 3.09 ERA. That was good enough to gain him some consideration for the Rookie of Year Award -- which rightfully went to Lou Whitaker -- and even a couple of points in the AL MVP race -- good enough to tie for 34th place. Unfortunately for Gale, 1978 would be the best year of his career. Using sabermetric tools, one can see very clearly where the problem was here. The cracks in the edifice -- the ones that make that win/loss record and his ERA a pleasant mirage -- are apparent. His K/BB ratio was below 1 -- in 192-1/3 innings, he walked 100, struck out just 88 for a K/BB ratio of 0.88. It takes a bit more math, but there was one huge issue against his repeating 1978 ever again: Gale was very lucky in terms of his opposition's batting average on balls in play. Using the formula of BABIP = Hits minus Home Runs divided by (at bats minus strikeouts minus home runs plus sacrifice flies), hitters against Gale in 1978 hit just .265 on all balls in play that did not clear the fence. As FanGraphs and others have pointed out (all relying on the excellent work that Voros McCracken did fifteen-odd years ago), typically around 30% of all balls in play against a pitcher fall for hits -- i.e., BABIP for pitchers normalizes to around .300. Gale recognized that his defense was outstanding. In the interview with milb.com and in the context of discussing a one-hit shutout he threw against the Texas Rangers, Gale gave credit to Royals manager Whitey Herzog:
Whitey Herzog was amazing at the charts he kept on the hitters. We took a lot of hits away from people because of our defensive positioning. If you look at the chart on Al Oliver, it was almost totally dark up the middle that our shortstop and second baseman took hits away from him all the time.
Now, in fairness, the rest of the quote describes how the defensive positioning led to the only hit of the game for the Rangers -- Oliver tripled -- but you get the point. One variable in BABIP is how efficiently the defense behind a pitcher turns balls in play into outs, and Gale was giving us the heads-up that Herzog might have had something to do with Gale's "lucky" BABIP. Whatever Whitey did in 1978, though, it did not work in 1979. That year, Gale produced a season that looked horrible by his 1978 standards -- 9-10 record, 5.65 ERA, 1.629 WHIP -- In reality, that year was more along the lines of what should have been expected -- his BABIP was .299. Similarly, Gale had what appeared to be a bounceback season in 1980. He finished at 13-9 with a 3.92 ERA and a 1.295 WHIP. Once again, Gale was carrying a four-leaf clover and a rabbit's foot with him to the mound -- balls in play fell for hits only 25.6% of the time (BABIP of .256, if you like that number style better). Then came 1981. That year had to be one of the worst years in Rich Gale's life. He finished 6-6 with a 5.40 ERA, striking out just 47 in 101-2/3 innings while walking an acceptable 38. He was still lucky on balls in play -- likely due in large part to the excellent, fast Royals defense behind him -- but even that number rose to a BABIP of .275. Gale gave up more home runs per nine innings than ever before. And, well...more on what made the year truly bad is below. After the 1981 season, the Royals decided to go in another direction with their pitching staff. They traded Gale along with Bill Laskey to the San Francisco Giants for Jerry Martin. Gale had his final year as a starter with the Giants in 1982, but ended up traded again by the time the next season rolled around -- this time to the Reds in exchange for Mike Vail. He did not impress the Reds in 1983, so they released him in November of 1983. Gale then signed as a free agent with the team he cheered for as a youth -- the Boston Red Sox. This came about in large part because Lou Gorman -- the man who had scouted and signed Gale for the Royals in 1975 -- became the Red Sox' Vice President of Baseball Operations and signed Gale. He spent much of that 1984 season at Triple-A Pawtucket, where he showed he could get kids in their mid-20s out. In the American League in 1984, though, Gale had problems getting big leaguers out. As a result, the Red Sox cut him loose after the 1984 season. After crashing out of the Major Leagues in 1984, Gale spent two years with the Hanshin Tigers in the Japanese Central League. He did not pitch terribly, and he got to see first hand the exploits of American Randy Bass in 1985 -- 54 home runs in 126 games -- and in 1986 -- when Bass hit 47 more! Gale and Bass were the only players who did not have Japanese names on both of those teams (I'm not going to look through the whole roster to determine if there were any Japanese gaijin on that team...). When his two years in Hanshin were done, Gale came back to the United States. He pitched again in 1989 with the Red Sox Double-A affiliate in New Britain and then again in 1991 with the Pawtucket Red Sox (for whom he was serving as pitching coach). But, he never pulled on a major league uniform as a player after 1984. Mustache Check: Rich Gale's wispy red mustache chalks up another point for the hairy lip society. Family Ties Rich Gale and his wife Susan had two sons who played baseball at fairly high levels. Rich's older son Christopher was selected in the 30th round of the 2000 June Draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Chris instead chose to attend college at the University of Virginia and pitched there. He eventually played independent league ball in San Diego, Texas, and Maryland in the mid 2000s. The younger of the two boys to play ball was Andy Gale. Andy went to Phillips Exeter Academy -- a fancy boarding school that the Economist magazine says belongs to "an elite tier of private schools" that counts Eton and Harrow in England as a peer. Andy was drafted out of high school in the forty-third round of the 2004 June Draft by the Expos but chose instead to attend the University of North Carolina as a freshman to play baseball. After his freshman year, Andy decided to transfer to the ugly-ass orange and blue of the University of Florida, where he was limited by injuries. The Verdict A bizarre item that came up in my research was that Rich Gale was arrested on charges of indecent conduct in Maine in May of 2000. According to the newspaper story about the arrest, Gale was charged with "allegedly exposing himself to undercover Maine state trooper Sgt. Thomas Arnold at the Interstate 95 rest stop in Kittery." Gale's defense to the charge, according to the Bangor Daily News in October of 2000, came in a motion filed by his attorney to challenge the evidence for the charge. According to the newspaper account, "[t]he motion suggested that there would have been no charge if the trooper had not 'voluntarily stuck his head in the defendant's vehicle.'" This begs the question as to why Gale had his pants down to begin with, it seems, and, as a result, the last word on the issue came in January 25, 2001. The Bangor Daily News reported then that Gale and prosecutors had reached a plea agreement on a lesser charge. A Few Minutes with Tony L. I teased the idea that 1981 had to be the worst year in Gale's career above. During the 1981 strike, Gale had to take a job to pay his bills. After all, he wasn't exactly a star making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year -- which was big bank in the early 1980s. Needing to stay in the Kansas City area for when the strike was resolved, he took a job as a bartender at the Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City. He had been working there only two to three weeks when catastrophe struck.
If you have never heard of this disaster before, it is worth reading about. As the Wikipedia article regarding the disaster states, it was the worst structural collapse in U.S. History prior to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. The cause for the collapse was a poor structural design in the steel tie rods of the walkway. This disaster today still is a case study in the incorporation of proper safety factors in structural engineering design and in proper reviews of submittals presented by trade contractors for incorporation into the project. Rich Gale was there. He was 40 feet from the dance floor where literally over a thousand people were engaged in a dance contest. Gale spoke frequently about his feelings in the days that followed:
It was frustrating. Here I am a big, strong professional athlete and I can't lift anything to help anybody. It was tough to take . . . seeing people underneath there. I saw some gruesome things. It was the worst thing I've ever seen or imagined.
Here I was complaining about how hard it was making car payments. It was a real selfish conversation, as it turned out a few minutes later. . . . It was like the roof caved in. I was numb, like everyone else. No one knew what was happening. Within a few seconds, I ran out into the lobby to help. It's something I will never forget. I pulled bodies out of the pile of rubble and covered one of the unfortunate souls who perished. For 30 minutes, it was all a nightmare. My life has never been the same since.
Even his pitching suffered, Gale believed:
Before it happened, I was running every day and throwing at least four days a week. I had a good season going before the strike and I wanted to get it over. After the tragedy, I couldn't work out. I became irritable with my wife and had to get away from Kansas City -- so I went home to my folks' cottage in upstate New Hampshire.
I realized how fragile life can be. I also saw what had happened in my life - where baseball became more important than my family. It took a bigger role and after the tragedy, I kept thinking just how unimportant baseball really is.
Gale did return to baseball, and stayed in baseball for most of the rest of his career. He has served as a pitching coach both in the minor leagues and, for two seasons, in the majors with the Boston Red Sox in 1992 and 1993. His last position was with the Triple-A Nashville Sounds in the Milwaukee Brewer organization. For some reason, he walked away in the middle of June in 2011 and, from all indications, that was the end for his baseball career.
Who Can It Be Now? Willie Mays Aikens was born on October 14, 1954, in Seneca, South Carolina. He attended Seneca High School, but he was not drafted out of high school. He went on to attend South Carolina State University, a historically black land-grant university located in Orangeburg, South Carolina, which is notable in its past for churning out multiple NFL players in its history including NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones and is notable today for teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. He went to SC State for only a year, as the school dropped baseball after his freshman year in college. Aikens grew up in poverty in the Bruce Hill neighborhood in Seneca. He believes that his name -- making him seemingly predestined to be a baseball player -- was not in homage to the great Giants centerfielder, but rather was a combination of putting his Uncle Willie's name with Dr. Mays's last name from the down the street in his neighborhood. Whichever is true, multiple people interviewed for a story for a 2004 article about Aikens said that he grew up in a "shack" that had either a dirt floor or a floor so worn that you could see the dirt through it. Aikens's mother often worked the streets, and he never met his natural father. Worse still, he lived in a house with an alcoholic stepfather who abused him physically. A major influence in his early life was his high school baseball coach, Willie McNeil. McNeil helped place Aikens at South Carolina State and bought Aikens clothes when Aikens's family could not afford to. More importantly, McNeil encouraged Aikens and told him that Aikens had a special talent for hitting the ball that most players did not have. While Aikens was at SCSU, they played a series in Baltimore. A scout for the Orioles, Wally Youse, walked up and invited Aikens to play in a semi-pro baseball league in Baltimore where, supposedly, Reggie Jackson had played before. In Baltimore, Aikens played well and showed off his prodigious power. In the meantime, SCSU dropped baseball, so Aikens waited out the fall semester and was the 2nd pick overall in the 1975 January Regular Draft. He was selected by the California Angels on the advice of one of their new scouts -- Wally Youse. As an aside, Aikens's former SCSU teammate Gene Richards went first in that draft to the Padres. Aikens signed nearly immediately and began his minor league career in Quad Cities in the Midwest League. There, he showed the the power scouts had seen, but his fielding was indifferent at best and horrible at worst -- he hit 17 home runs, but made 26 errors. Aikens moved up to the Texas League and Double-A El Paso -- one of the most hitter friendly parks in the minor leagues at the time -- where he swatted 30 homers. In 1977, Aikens started his season at the age of 22 in Triple-A. The Angels called him up in May of 1977 in the wake of trading Bruce Bochte to the Cleveland Indians. The call to the majors came too early for Aikens, who started off well when he received regular playing time, but then struggled when he was called upon mainly in pinch hitting duties. As a result, Aikens split 1977 between the majors and Triple-A Salt Lake City and, then spent the entirety of 1978 in Utah. After showing in 1978 that he really had nothing more to prove in Triple-A -- a year of 29 home runs and a .326/.419/.551 slash line will do that -- the Angels kept him on their roster for all of 1979. He hit very well - an OPS of .869 was highlighted by 21 home runs in 447 plate appearances. Things were going well, except for the fact that 1979 was also the year that teammates introduced Aikens to cocaine. Aikens was blocked at first base by future Hall of Famer Rod Carew. Aikens was not an outfielder, and the Angels needed the designated hitter role for Don Baylor because Baylor was a major defensive liability in left field. Since Baylor was the reining American League MVP, the Angels chose Baylor over Aikens and traded Aikens to the Kansas City Royals with Rance Mulliniks for Al Cowens, Todd Cruz, and Craig Eaton. The trade worked out well for the Royals, who went to the World Series in 1980. It also worked for Aikens. Despite the Royals loss in the Series, Aikens had two different games in the series where he hit two home runs -- Game One and Game Four. By this time, Aikens told Amy Nelson of SBNation, he was high on cocaine every day: "Every day, every game of the World Series ... I snorted cocaine. It had become a part of my life." Aikens played well in 1981 as well, hitting 17 home runs in just 101 games in a season that ended unhappily again for the Royals, who lost to the Oakland A's in the ALDS series after the strike-shortened season. The 1982 season was not as happy for the Royals, as they finished three games behind Aikens's former club, the California Angels. It is impossible to tell the story of Aikens's career, however, without mentioning the off-field problems. In 1983, an FBI agent warned the entire Royals team that a prominent cocaine dealer had a wiretap on his phone line such that calling the dealer would be a bad idea. Even team leader Hal McRae pulled Aikens aside on two different occasions to warn Aikens that there was trouble ahead. Despite this warning, Jerry Martin, Vida Blue, Willie Wilson, and Willie Aikens all called the dealer and all were charged with federal drug crimes. Aikens told the Washington Times last October that his attorney called the Player's Association to find out what would happened if a ballplayer got convicted with a felony. The response was that the player probably would never play in the major leagues again. So, the players worked out a plea deal to a misdemeanor and first-time offender status. The judge made examples of the players and sent them to prison, meaning that Aikens and his cohorts were the first ever active major leaguers to spend time in federal prison. Aikens missed the first six weeks of the 1984 season as a result. Also while Aikens was in prison, the Royals shipped him to the Blue Jays for Jorge Orta. 1984 would be the last full season that Aikens spent in the majors. Teams do not have much patience with convicted cocaine users who hit .205/.298/.376 -- or for that matter, for any player with that slash line who can't field a position. In 1995, he spent 105 games in Triple-A and hit well again, but Toronto gave him just 12 games in the majors and did not resign him. He did finish on a high-note, though -- he homered in his last at-bat. That was not the end of his playing career -- just the end of his major league career. Aikens spent the years 1986 to 1991 in the Mexican League and hit like crazy once again. There was interest from Japan in having Aikens play there, but his criminal record meant that he could not qualify for a visa there. He just didn't get the chance back in the US to play again. Pass the Dutchie Steve Howe got chance after chance -- 7 in total -- to rehabilitate himself and play again in the majors. Left-handed pitchers get tons of chances. Overweight, stone-hand first basemen are apparently a dime-a-dozen and get tossed aside. Or, perhaps, that is how baseball justified giving Howe all the chances he had. For his part, Aikens recognized that he got a rap in baseball when he rebelled against being platooned by Dick Howser -- in addition to the jail sentence of course -- and so those two issues together led to a much shorter leash for Aikens. Just as with Steve Howe, you cannot talk about Aikens without talking about his drug use, abuse, and eventual prison sentence. His sentence -- and the crimes he committed -- in some respects reflect a female police officer who knew Aikens used crack and used Aikens to get her enough crack to hit the federal guideline minimums for a very, very long sentence. Some background: in the mid-to-late 1980s, the Reagan years of "Just Say No" were in their height. The US staggered back away from the sexual and chemical permissiveness of the 1960s and (especially) 1970s and into the more repressive 1980s. Helped down this path in part by the discovery of the AIDS epidemic -- especially in gay communities and among intravenous drug users -- the hysteria toward drug use reached new levels. America began a "War on Drugs." This caused the supply of illicit drugs such as cocaine to dwindle and, as any Econ 100 student could tell you, when supply dwindles without a corresponding change in demand, prices soar. When the prices for powder cocaine soared, street dealers found that they could cook down small amounts of cocaine to create little rocks -- crack rock. Because other chemicals were added to the cocaine, the actual amount of cocaine in each rock got smaller. In other words, the cocaine supply lasted longer as a result. The side effect to this was the fact that crack was affordable to nearly anyone -- with prices as low as $2.50 a dose according to Wikipedia. Politicians saw this "crack epidemic" -- which was mainly a problem in neighborhoods that were predominantly poor and predominantly black -- and believed that harsher penalties for selling crack were needed. Those penalties were enacted right after the death of Len Bias, the former University of Maryland star and first round pick of the Boston Celtics who died two days after the draft from a cocaine overdose. This brings us back to Willie Aikens. Aikens saw a woman he liked on the streets of Kansas City in December 1993 and struck up a friendship with her. She was an undercover narcotics officer. She asked him on several occasions to get crack for her. In fact, knowing that the sentences for crack were much harsher, she asked him specifically to cook powder cocaine into crack. He was convicted of multiple counts of trafficking crack cocaine -- a total of 2.2 grams of the stuff. The sentence he received was a mandatory sentence under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines -- 248 months...20 years, 8 months, no parole. To be sentenced to the same amount of time in jail for selling powder cocaine, Aikens would have had to deal 15 pounds of cocaine. I tend not to have too much sympathy for those people who break the law, but that sentence rightfully became a cause celebre for advocates against the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. In a strange way, Aikens was lucky -- had he not be imprisoned, he would not have changed his life and, quite frankly, he probably would not be alive today. Aikens got out of prison in June of 2008. George Brett helped him get his life back on track by starting with a small step -- inviting Aikens to tell his story to a group of middle schoolers that included Brett's own son. After hearing Aikens speak -- and in Amy Nelson's video Brett talks about this -- Brett knew that Aikens needed to get back into baseball to help the young players today to avoid his pitfalls. Another helping hand was extended again by Hal McRae, who got Aikens a job in construction when Aikens first got out of prison. Thanks to his Hall of Fame former teammate and friend getting him started and, after that, Aikens's own responsible actions after that, the Royals named Aikens as a minor league coach in 2011. The World According to Garp Much of the information for this post resulted from the fact that Aikens was doing publicity for his memoir about his past failings, his prison life, his reaching for his Bible while there, and his redemption on leaving prison. The book is called Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home. After doing the research I've done for this entry, I may just buy the book. In the wake of the book coming out, my fellow Vanderbilt graduate Tyler Kepner wrote a moving story about why all of us should read that book. It's an uplifting story of redemption, and based on that alone, it would not be surprising to see a movie made. Perhaps Mark Ciardi -- the former Brewers pitcher and producer of The Rookie -- can take that on as his next baseball movie. A Few Minutes With Tony L. I distinctly recall when Aikens, Vida Blue, Willie Wilson, and Jerry Martin went to prison. By that point, I was nearly 12 years old so I knew what it meant to be going to jail when someone talked about it. From that point on, a Pavlovian response of "druggie" came into my head whenever I saw a story about one of those players or saw a baseball card of one of them or even just heard someone mention them in conversation. Aikens deserves better than that now. He is brutally honest -- calling alcohol the worst drunk available. He says very honestly that if he had had access to steroids in the early 1980s, he absolutely would have used them: "If I did illegal drugs while I was a player, why wouldn't I do something that would enhance my performance on the baseball field? Of course I would have done them." The SB Nation Royals Review website in 2009 called Aikens the #36 Greatest Royal in their history for his four seasons in Kansas City. Certainly based on his on-field exploits, Aikens deserves that honor. The great thing about Aikens to me is that he has turned himself around from all indications. He has had a lot of bad things happen to him in his life -- from a 42-year-old wife having a stroke to being brought up in an abusive household. He has also brought a lot of bad things on himself too because of his drug use -- from being denied the ability to get a lucrative contract in Japan to spending the years in prison that he did. Avoiding recidivism -- avoiding the issues that puts a person in jail -- is tough. It appears that Aikens is succeeding. If you are interested, you can follow Aikens on Twitter. His e-mail address is there on his account, and he has a website as well. Indeed, from that second link, you can get a signed version of the card featured above for $10 in either blue or black sharpie. For whatever reason, I feel like Aikens deserves our support as baseball fans -- not sympathy, mind you, but support. He deserves it a lot more than, say, Pete Rose does -- that is for sure.
