He’s too big and burly to resemble a ghost, but the man in the National League uniform at Yankee Stadium last week was a strange sight, probably the strangest sight at the All-Star game. Don Baylor was wearing a baseball uniform.
Baylor, who had played, coached and managed for nearly four decades, had not worn a baseball uniform in two and a half years. Since he served as the Seattle Mariners hitting coach in 2005, Baylor has been unemployed.
Doesn’t anyone want to hire this man? Apparently not. Why not? That is the question.
I’d hire him in an instant, but I don’t own or run a baseball team. Baylor is a solid baseball man whose most glaring shortcoming is that he sometimes doesn’t finish his sentences in interviews.
Baylor, 59 years old, doesn’t know why he has remained unemployed for so long. For three off-seasons and two and a half seasons, managers have been fired and hired, and teams have put together new coaching staffs or changed coaches on their staffs. Yet there has been no job for Baylor.
One example of Baylor’s inability to connect with the right team: Joe Girardi played for Baylor for three years in Colorado and three years in Chicago. Girardi has been hired to manage twice in the last three years, 2006 in Florida and this year in New York. Yet he never called Baylor to talk to him about the possibility of coaching for him.
“I’m just trying to get back into the mainstream,” Baylor said. “Maybe they think I only want to manage period. But being a bench guy, a hitting guy, to be back on the field where I know I can make a difference with a lot of the young players who are coming along – I’d be happy to do any of that.”
Some managers are very likely reluctant to have a coach with such a strong personality as Baylor’s. Managers often don’t want to have coaches like Baylor on their staffs with managerial experience and who would be in position to replace them if the team falters and the general manager wants to make a change.
“That never bothered me when I was a manager and I was hiring guys,” Baylor said. “I always felt I was secure in what I was doing. People I was hiring were going to be guys that could take over for me or they were going to be real good teachers. You’re probably right. Some of the managers probably would say ‘I’m not bringing him in; he’ll be looking over my shoulder.’ I never wanted to be that. I was with Tom Trebelhorn in Milwaukee and I shied away from that as much as I could.”
Besides Seattle, Baylor was a hitting coach in Milwaukee, St. Louis and Atlanta, and he was a bench coach with the Mets in New York. Along the way he developed multiple myeloma, cancer of the blood plasma cells. But the cancer is in his past.
“Health wise I’m fine,” Baylor said. “I’ve been chasing around after my 8-month-old granddaughter so I know I’m fine. I’ve recovered from that as well as anything.”
I have suspected there might be some other reason that Baylor has not even been interviewed for jobs. I thought maybe someone who didn’t like him had spread damaging tales about him.
“I’ve inquired about that,” he said. “There’s nothing there. I don’t know if it’s my strong personality or what. I don’t know what it is. There’s nothing there.”
Baseball, like any sport, can be cruel. If Baylor is out of the game much longer, people in the game who make hiring decisions will begin to forget him. “Oh yeah,” a general manager will say, “whatever happened to Baylor? Haven’t heard about him for years.”
Clint Hurdle, for one, has not forgotten Baylor. The Colorado manager, who served as the National League manager in the All-Star game, called Baylor about a month before and asked if he would be interested in being a special assistant for the game.
Hurdle was the Rockies hitting coach for the last three years of Baylor’s six-year tenure as their manager. “He told the team he wanted to honor loyalty, that I was somebody who had given him a chance,” Baylor said.
While he waits for a chance to work in the majors again, Baylor helps take care of his 81-year-old father and his granddaughter, Brooklyn. “It’s not Brook,” Baylor said. “Donnie and Michelle met in Brooklyn.” He is also helping renovate a 137-year-old church in Austin, Tex., where his grandmother and mother grew up.
And he watches a lot of baseball games “so whenever that chance comes at least you know who you’re talking about player wise.”
IT’S NOT EXACTLY THE PROMISED LAND
Because so few major league players are Jewish, Jewish fans celebrate those who are Jewish with extra enthusiasm. I have long wondered how the players themselves feel about the intense attention, and I got a chance to ask a couple of them about it at the All-Star game.
“It’s awesome,” Ryan Braun of Milwaukee, last year’s National League rookie of the year, said. “It’s something I embrace. There obviously aren’t too many Jewish athletes at the highest level. Not too many are having a lot of success so it’s something I take a lot of pride in and it’s really cool.”
Ian Kinsler, the Texas Rangers second baseman, leads the American League in batting average, hits and runs scored. I asked him if he thought the attention he receives because he is Jewish is too much.
“It’s definitely not too much,” he said. “There aren’t too many of us so it’s not too much. It’s fun. I can’t remember what the movie was called, but it had to do with the Holocaust and Jewish people, when they’re held down against playing activities outside and playing sports and doing all this stuff. Obviously to see Jewish people succeeding in sports, I think it’s a big deal.”
Besides Kinsler and Braun, the Jewish population in the major leagues has Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox, Jason Marquis of the Cubs, Gabe Kapler of the Brewers, Scott Schoeneweis of the Mets, Jon Grabow of the Pirates, Scott Feldman of the Rangers, Brad Ausmus of the Astros and Craig Breslow of the Twins.
Brian Horwitz of the Giants went back to the minors a few weeks ago, but that left 10, just enough Jewish players in the majors for a minyan, a requirement for Jewish prayer services.
A POST-CAREER WIN FOR WINFIELD
Dave Winfield has every reason to be proud of his Hall of Fame career, but he may be prouder of a feat he pulled off after his playing days ended.
“It took two years behind the scenes,” Winfield said of his worthy project. “It just took time. You just can’t approach things head on. Just keep working for a worthy cause.”
Winfield’s cause was to gain recognition for Negro League players, who because of Major League Baseball’s white-only policy until 1947 were unable to play in the majors and gain recognition for themselves.
Now an executive with the San Diego Padres, Winfield hatched an idea and it became reality last month at baseball’s annual June draft. Before the draft officially began, clubs held a one-round ceremonial draft. Each major league club drafted a former, living Negro League player.
The draft was determined beforehand, and the players attended it in Orlando, Fla. Each player received a plaque and a team jersey.
Baseball officials took great credit for holding the draft, but without Winfield’s efforts it never would have happened. He did not have an easy time persuading baseball officials to adopt his project.
“It took a buy-in from ownership, Major League Baseball, players, media and then things kind of happened,” Winfield said.
Winfield was rewarded for his efforts in two ways: Seeing the draft come off the way he had envisioned it and comments from the players. “Every person said that was the greatest thing in baseball,” Winfield said.
TALES OF THE TIMES
This is the type of Sunday notebook I wrote for The New York Times for nearly 25 years. I wrote a total of 1,155 notebooks, seldom missing a Sunday, and produced more than 4,000 original items.. I wrote them until the sports editor, Tom Jolly, told me, the notebook was an anachronism.
“The notebook concept,” Jolly wrote in an e-mail, “was born at a time when the Sunday paper was the place to catch people up on what was going on around the nation, especially on news and events people may have missed. but at a time when the paper is shrinking – literally – and the Internet is growing, a weekly notebook has become an anachronism.”
Considering that Jolly didn’t work for the Times in August 1984, when the notebook was created, how did he know why it was created? It had nothing to do with “news and events people may have missed.”
The Summer Olympics were dominating the paper, and Joe Vecchione, the sports editor at the time, wanted something besides the Olympics in the Sunday sports section and asked me to do a baseball notebook. I did it and kept doing it until Jolly said it was an anachronism and “no one wants to read a 1400-word Sunday notebook any more.”
So now the Times, not missing a beat, runs a 1400-word Sunday “notebook” written primarily by two clerks. It’s a great break for them but an embarrassing decision by the Times. When I sent Jolly an e-mail asking him about “Bats,” the name of this cheap imitation, he replied, “We are repurposing Web material in the Sunday paper.”
This is what the Times has come to, recycling – I think that’s what “repurposing” means – Web site material in the Sunday paper, once the power and the pride of the newspaper industry.