Roger Clemens, Rickey Henderson… and Jesse Orosco
Good Jesse Orosco Number news for geezers who are far from the Wheelchair Brigade.
44 year old Roger Clemens is coming back this summer.
48 year old Rickey Henderson wants to:
“Seeing Roger come back, all the seed that it plants is ask me to come back one time,” Henderson said Tuesday in the Mets clubhouse before New York played the San Francisco Giants.
“I’m going to look at it at the end of the year. I might come out with some crazy stuff, a press conference telling every club, ‘Put me on the field with your best player and see if I come out of it.’ If I can’t do it, I’ll call it quits at the end,” he said.
Rickey never really had the farewell tour he deserves. I hope there’s a team that will give him a chance and that baseball fans make it worth it for the team owners and for Rickey and for baseball.
Back to the Rocket… according to the Mercury News: “The Yankees would like him to pitch in minor league home games, where they are in control of grooming the mounds.”
Is there something special about how the mound is groomed for Rocket? I’ve Googled unsuccessfully.
Got any stories about special field grooming to slow basestealers, deaden infield grounders, help pitchers? How much “home field advantage” can be stacked to the advantage of the home team by the grounds crew? Do tell.
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I always used to hear about groundskeeping/cheating. Most stories involved benefiting bunters, speedsters and or sinkerball pitchers. Here are some instances I turned up. In googling the keyword is “Groundskeeper”. Combine that with “mound”, “Bunt,” “Cheat”, “sinker.” etc.
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/list/cheaters/ballplayers.html
7. The Bossard Family (groundskeepers, Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, 1920s-present)
When Gene Bossard, who took care of the Comiskey Park field from 1940-83, died in 1998 at age 80, he knew that his legacy of altering the field to the White Sox’s advantage would continue through his son, Roger, who followed him as head groundskeeper. According to his Sun-Times obit, “The Comiskey Park infield once was known as ‘Bossard’s Swamp’ because he kept it watered down for sinkerball pitchers Dick Donovan, Tommy John and Joel Horlen. He also soaked the area around first base when opposing base stealers came to town, and he kept the baselines raised so that Nellie Fox’s bunts stayed fair.”
http://thesoulofbaseball.blogspot.com/2007/04/baseball-stuff-i-didnt-know.html
– The Baltimore Chop came from John McGraw (of course) who was the manager in Baltimore for a short while. He told the groundskeeper not to water the ground in front of home plate. So that ground was hard as concrete, and when the Baltimore players would crack thebaseball into dirt, the ball would bounce high like a superball, and they would get base hits. Picked up that tidbit from Frank Deford’s fun book “The Old Ball Game.”
http://www.pittsburghquarterly.com/pages/spring_summer2006/ss2006_38majorleague.htm
“My only Pittsburgh regret was that I didn’t record the stories of Hall of Famers Honus Wagner and Pie Traynor. I used to sit on that bench and just listen. The whole atmosphere was great in Pittsburgh. It was a delight to sit with the ushers, whether I went in as a player or broadcaster. Pete Argentine, the head usher — I used to go to his house for dinner. When I’d come back in town, one of the ushers would say, ‘So and so passed away,’ and I would feel it. It was different then. And when they were hurting, you were hurting, from players to ushers to groundskeepers. John Fogarty was headgroundskeeper. They called the infield Fogarty’s Brickyard. The groundskeeper was, before artificial surface, like the 10th player on the team. If you had a sinker ball pitcher who would get a lot of ground ball outs, the first bounce was the important one. So thegroundskeeper would keep the ground in front of the plate soft to deaden the bounce. If you had a fast club, you’d want it hard so the ball would go straight up and the batter could beat it out. If your club couldbunt , you’d slope the dirt in between the grass and the baseline line and add an extra coat of paint on the foul line. So the ball would stay fair. If you had a slow third baseman, and the other team was going tobunt, you’d slope it the other way.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_26_227/ai_104440066
Then there is the time-honored art of mound doctoring by the groundskeeper. It takes just a few hours to re-tool the mound, and it happens. A lot.
Cubs broadcaster Steve Stone, who won the Cy Young Award with the Orioles in 1980, says legendary Orioles groundskeeper Pat Santarone would ask how he wanted the slope. “He’d shave off a little on the slope or pack it up for whatever the starter that night wanted” Stone says.