Scenes from Before the 1988 Old Timers Game

Leo Durocher, nearly 83 and preparing to manage the N.L. All-Stars at the Old Timers Game of 1988 [before the All-Star Game], was listening to the Cincinnati Reds’ team physician, in a pregame clubhouse meeting, telling the players not to exert themselves in the 90-degree heat.

Durocher, who was drinking milk, not alcohol, as he talked, said: “He was talking like a professor. He told us, ‘Drink Gatorade! Get plenty of water! Keep the fluids in your body!’
“Finally, I hit the table and I said, ‘Damn it, Doc! Take a hike! I never held a meeting this long for a World Series game.’
“And everyone broke up, laughing. And that ended the meeting.”

Durocher added: “I never held long team meetings. After we beat Cleveland three straight (in the 1954 World Series), we were dressing for the fourth game, and Alvin Dark said, ‘Are you ready, Leo?’ I said, ‘Whenever you are.’ And Dark said, ‘This is a lousy town. Let’s beat ‘em and go home.’ We didn’t need no meeting.”

Billy Williams told a reporter: “You should have been on the team bus. Leo was sitting next to Jocko Conlan. They were chirping away. All in a good frame of mind.”

Duroocher showed off a black and blue bruise near his left elbow and said: “When Jocko talks to you, he’s in the habit of grabbing you. Since my quadruple bypass, my doctor told me if I hit anything I’ll get a bruise. I bruise easily. And Jocko has trouble hearing. I kept telling him, ‘Jocko, I’m sitting alongside of you. It’s me. I can hear.’ ” [Read more about Conlan here.]

Life had quieted down for Durocher. He explained: “No more cards. I don’t go to the club. I don’t monkey around.

“I hang around. Play golf. Take it easy. What the hell, I’m in no hurry to go anyplace. I’m older than dirt: 83 coming up, July 27.

“I talk to him (Dr. Michael DeBakey, a heart surgeon) all the time. He told me, ‘Stop walking four, five miles a day. Two miles is as good as five.’ He said, ‘Play nine holes of golf, and if you feel good, take the cart for the last nine. But whatever you do, don’t walk 18. Don’t walk up and down those hills.’ “

He told of watching the ’88 Cubs “on television. Once. With that Maddux pitching. Good-looking pitcher. They’ve got a good-looking young club. Some of those guys can play.”

Pete Rose and Durocher talked in the Reds clubhouse.

Charlie Hustle said: “He’s the greatest. He gave an hour’s talk last year in Santa Maria (Calif.). I had goose bumps. And I had to follow him. They gave him a Cadillac.”

Durocher confirmed what Rose said and added that the Cadillac had a sticker price of $37,750.

“Everything on it, from bumper to bumper. And in my color. Medium blue. And that wasn’t the half of it. They even paid the taxes. It only cost me $42 for the license plates. And the fellows said, ‘If you come back in 1939, we’ll give you another one.”

Ernie Banks said of meeting Durocher, his manager for the game: “Sure, I saw him. He said, ‘Nice to see you, how things going?’

“He’s my friend.”

The preceding was derived from a Jerome Holtzman article in the Chicago Tribune. A month earlier, the Dallas Morning News covered the June 25, 1988 Equitable Old Timers Game at Arlington Stadium. A few excerpts:

The players assembled for the Equitable Old Timers’ Game at Arlington Stadium on Saturday came for different reasons; some for money, some for camaraderie. They told stories. A couple complained about old timers throwing curves. Most were a little nostalgic, such as it is.

They came in all ages, sizes and degrees of talent. Bob Feller, 69, dressed next to Mark Fidrych, 33. Johnny Logan and Eddie Mathews, teammates on the 1957 world champion Milwaukee Braves, huddled in one corner, a bare-chested Mathews pointing to a bruise on his right bicep. Ten feet away, Walker was giving batting tips to Rangers manager Bobby Valentine.

Two elements go into the making of a successful Old Timers’ game , former Ranger Al Oliver said: No one gets hurt, and no one gets embarrassed.

Most say they have nothing to prove, but some know of players who did. Johnny Mize remembered seeing Ty Cobb in an Old Timers ‘ game once. The word on Cobb was that he would do anything to get on base.

Cobb told the catcher to back up from the plate because he hadn’t swung the bat in a while, and he didn’t want to hurt him with a wild swing. The catcher scooted back; Cobb put down a bunt.

“He was probably 70 years old and still trying to get on base,’ Mize said.

Mize has no such inclination. Like former Yankee teammate Joe DiMaggio, he goes to the games only for the reunions and to take a bow.

“I’ve had two knees replaced, and I had to see how it would feel if I hit the ball off the end of the bat,’ he said. “DiMaggio’s 74, and he’s a year younger than me. We’ve been in this game since 19-and-30. Fifty-eight years. There weren’t any agents then. No banks, either.’

Johnny Vander Meer, who 50 years ago gained fame by throwing no-hitters in consecutive starts, said the competitiveness lingers in some.

“A lot of pitchers still get that feeling inside,’ he said. “We wouldn’t give our wives a hit. They want to hit them out; we want to get them out. Everybody wants to look good, but when you get to be my age it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.’

Bob Feller says his wife, Ann, wants him to bear down and strike out everyone. But he says he understands the show. He long has been part of it, going back to his barnstorming days in the late 1940s with Satchel Paige. Feller organized everything. Made sure everyone got paid. Worked as the traveling secretary.

He was a charter member of the Equitable Old Timers ‘ tour, which began in 1986. He plays in about a dozen games a year, along with such regulars on the circuit as Mize, Warren Spahn, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Joe Torre and Enos Slaughter.

Feller also performs exhibitions in minor league parks, sometimes as many as 60 a year. He will be in Tacoma, Wash., on Monday, Spokane, Wash., on Tuesday, Calgary, Alberta, on Wednesday and at another Equitable game next weekend in Toronto.

He remembers Willie Stargell facing him in a game in Washington right after Stargell retired in 1982. Two men were on, two out. Stargell took a strike and then hit a ball that “went 10 feet foul, but about 480 feet.’

“I come back with the overhand curve,’ Feller said. “He misses, gives me a dirty look, and we all go home.’

Fidrych looks the same as he did when he won 19 games as a rookie for the Detroit Tigers in 1976. His weight is holding at 175. The curls still spill out of his cap, pulled tight against his forehead. He still talks to the ball and pats the mound, his trademarks in five years before arm problems ended one of baseball ‘s most popular careers.

He owns a farm and a 10-wheel truck and hauls gravel in Massachussetts. But he makes two or three Old Timers ‘ games a year, just for fun.

“I like it,’ he said. “It’s good just to get out, to put the uniform on again, to see the ballparks. Just the feeling you have to put on the “uni.’ I have my life at home now, and it’s nice . . . ‘

His voice trailed off, and he looked toward a corner of the clubhouse.

“But it would nice to still be playing,’ he said, softly.

Edd Roush, Oldest Survivor of the Black Sox World Series and the Federal League

Late in the 1980s, when he was in his mid-nineties, Edd Roush stood as the last surviving player of the Black Sox World Series of 1919. He was still full of opinions, full of curmudgeonly charm, full of thoughts about the long-distant past. Speaking in the last year of his life (he died in 1988), Roush was adamant that the White Sox “threw the first ballgame. But they didn’t get their money after the first ballgame, so they went out and tried to win.” He said lots of players threw games in the ’10s, including some of his teammates.

Still, he said this about would-be fixers: “They knew better than to ask me. I would have knocked the hell out of them. And they knew that, too.”

At 94, Roush was also the last surviving Federal League ballplayer. He’d suffered two mild strokes and a heart attack, and he had this to say about modern baseball:

“Two-thirds of them playing today, if they had played back in my day, we’d have killed every one of them. They threw at you in those days, and they didn’t throw over the top of your head, either.

“Back when I played, if the three outfielders, the third baseman and first baseman didn’t hit .300, they didn’t last very long. Today if one of them hits .300, they’re lucky. Anybody who wants to see them play today is nuts.”

Roush summered in Oakland City, Indiana, and wintered in Bradenton, Florida. He had high blood pressure and a partial loss of hearing. He acknowledged: “I’m 94. So what? Something has to happen.”

And he had this to say about baseball: “That thing was a business with me. It wasn’t no fun. I’ll tell you that right quick. I played that game to win, and when you play to win, you don’t play for fun.

“When I was a kid, yeah, it was a lot of fun playing. It was a lot of fun playing in the minor leagues. But when you got in the major leagues, the damn thing was a business. It was then. I don’t know what the hell it is now.”

He told this anecdote from his final season: “The last year I played, we were so far in last place, you couldn’t even see the top. We were playing the Cubs. I come up with two men out. The pitcher kept shaking his head. I said, ‘Here comes the duster,’ so down I went.

“I said to the catcher, ‘You’re going to get somebody hurt with those dusters.’ He didn’t say anything. The pitcher shook his head again, and down I went. I walked halfway out there and said, ‘You won’t have enough ballplayers to finish this game if I get to them.’

“I hit the ball on the ground and got to first base the same time the ball did. (Charlie) Grimm was playing first base. I didn’t step on the base; I stepped right on Grimm’s ankle. I intended to break his leg. So, here they come. Finally (Cubs manager Rogers) Hornsby says, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I think Roush broke my leg,’ Grimm said. I said, ‘I’ll break all your legs if your pitcher keeps throwing at me.’

Then Hornsby said, “‘I’ve played against him for years, and I played with him one year. You guys get back on the bench and quit throwing at this guy. He’ll take us all out of here.’”

“You know, we beat them five straight and beat them out of the pennant, just because that pitcher wanted to go home and say, ‘I knocked Roush down twice.’”

Roush had this to say about spring training too: “Why would I want to go down there and run around every day? It only took me one day to get in shape, and it didn’t even take that. A few swings of the bat and I was ready to start. It was a waste of time to go down there. For what?”

And this to say about Jim Thorpe: “Jim Thorpe was the fastest running man I ever saw. I think he’s the fastest anybody else ever saw. I was pretty fast myself. I’d go out and run with him. I’d run as fast as I could, and he’d just be trotting along. I said, ‘Jim, anybody ever make you run your best?’ He said, ‘I never saw anybody I couldn’t look back at.’ “

And this to say about hitting the dead ball: “I always tried to hit the ball on the line. You couldn’t hit the dead ball anyplace. I caught many of ‘em out there in center field that were lopsided. You’d just push it back together and throw it back in.”

And he said this about the Hall of Fame: “What in the hell is it after you get in there? You got all these guys in there who can’t play ball to start with. It didn’t mean nothing to me. I played ball to win and make money, the hell with the rest of it.”

The reporter interviewing him noticed this, though: “But then you look at his left hand, and there’s that ring.” There was the toughness and the hard-edged attitude, but Roush was clearly at least sentimental about being a Hall of Famer.

Shane Halter and Scott Sheldon

In 2000, both of these men had a game in which they played all nine positions, Halter on October 1 for the Tigers, and Sheldon on September 6 for the Rangers. Some excerpts from a Houston Chronicle account of Halter’s feat:

DETROIT – Shane Halter did just about everything on a wild final day of the season at Comerica Park.

Halter became the fourth major-leaguer to play all nine positions in a game, went 4-for-5 at the plate and capped his adventure by scoring the winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning to lift the Detroit Tigers over the Minnesota Twins 12-11 on Sunday.

“You think about getting the opportunity to play all nine positions. What’s outstanding is to get the win on top of it – at home, come from behind,” Halter said. “Some things happened today that were awesome, and hopefully they can carry into next year, and we can continue the things we did the second half of the season.”

Halter, who had done everything but pitch for the Tigers this year, became the second person to play all nine positions in a game this season. Texas’ Scott Sheldon did it Sept. 6 against the Chicago White Sox.

The only other players ever to do it were Bert Campaneris of the Kansas City Athletics in 1965 and the Twins’ Cesar Tovar in 1968.

Halter’s position switches and the back-and-forth flow of the game caused Detroit manager Phil Garner and Minnesota’s Tom Kelly to use 42 players combined, tying an AL record.

Halter walked Matt LeCroy, the only batter he faced, in the eighth.

“I’ve never faced a position player as a pitcher, not even in the minors,” LeCroy said. “I was more nervous facing him than one of their regular pitchers.”

Tom Gage of The Detroit News had a hometown account of the game:

The Tigers’ season ended Sunday with a rollicking 12-11 victory over the Minnesota Twins. Manager Phil Garner called it the most fun game he’s ever managed.

First of all, there was Shane Halter, who became the first Tiger to play all nine positions in one game and the fourth major-leaguer to do it.

“But I bet he’s the first ever to play all nine and get four hits in the same game,” said Brad Ausmus, who played first and third in addition to his regular duties behind the plate, as Halter made his rounds.

“I don’t ever want to make a travesty of the game on my watch,” Garner said, “but I don’t think this did. I could tell that the fans were really getting into it from about the third inning on.”

Halter started the game at first base, then went to third in the second inning. After that he moved to right, center, left, shortstop, catcher, pitcher and second. As a pitcher, he walked the batter he faced, catcher Matt LeCroy, in the eighth.

“I definitely spiked some pitches,” Halter said about throwing the ball in the dirt a couple of times.

As for Sheldon’s game, the Florida Times Union reported it like this:

CHICAGO — Scott Sheldon couldn’t believe it when he saw Texas Rangers catcher Randy Knorr shake his head, signaling Sheldon to pretend he was brushing off a sign.

What was Knorr thinking? They didn’t have any signs. Heck, Sheldon barely had any pitches! He’s a utility infielder. The closest he’d ever gotten to pitching before was an inning or two in the annual University of Houston alumni game.

So Sheldon just threw the ball, his almost-slow-motion changeup good enough for a strikeout. Then he moved to third base — and into baseball’s record books.

Sheldon, who’d played only 22 games in the majors before this season, became the third player in baseball history to play all nine positions Wednesday night. It was the only highlight for the Rangers in a 13-1 drubbing by the Chicago White Sox.

“I had a blast,” Sheldon said. “It went by so fast, but there are so many memories I’ll take from this.”

Frank Thomas and Magglio Ordonez homered as the White Sox scored seven runs in the first inning.

“After it got to be 10-1 . . . I thought it was the perfect night to do it,” Texas manager Johnny Oates said.

After playing eight positions in a spring training game — Sheldon didn’t pitch — Oates decided he was going to give Sheldon a shot at the real thing during the regular season.

He called Sheldon over in the third inning and told him to go for it.

“He deserves it,” Oates said. “For a guy that doesn’t have a lot of major league service, he can say how many thousands of men have played professional baseball and only three have done it?

“It’s something to be proud of.”

He entered the game as a catcher in the fourth and moved to first in the fifth. Sheldon played second base and shortstop in the sixth, moved to right field to start the seventh, before moving to center with one out. He started out the eighth in left, then came on in relief with one out and struck out Liefer. His final position was third base.

The decision by Oates to make a dull Texas season a little more interesting went largely unnoticed by the crowd of 15,622, which annoyed the Rangers manager.

“No one in the stands realized that history was being made,” Oates said. “There was no announcement, nothing.”

Sheldon was just relieved that it was over and no damage was done.

“It’s so hard to keep your mind on one position,” he said. “You’re trying to figure out where you’re going to move and what you’re responsibilities are there. You’ve got 1,000 things going through your mind.”

And the Houston Chronicle had its own report on the game:

“I don’t know so much the history of it,” Sheldon said after Texas’ 13-1 loss to the Chicago White Sox. “To know only two other guys have done it, that kind of doesn’t sink in.”

Sheldon had only one ball hit at him all night, and he didn’t make any errors. He struck out the only batter he faced, getting pinch hitter Jeff Liefer to whiff on a changeup clocked at 67 mph.

“Did we get an out? Thank you,” Sheldon said, smiling, when someone made fun of his pitching skills. “I wasn’t trying to throw hard. I was just trying to throw strikes and get out of there.”

Though Liefer knew Sheldon had been moving around the field, he never thought he’d see him on the mound.

Sheldon is a utility player by trade, having started at four different positions so far this year and having made two appearances as a catcher.

After he played Sheldon at eight spots in a game against Texas’ Class AAA club in spring training – Sheldon didn’t pitch – Oates decided he would try it during the regular season.

Oates originally targeted the Rangers’ next homestand to do it. But after the White Sox scored 10 runs in the first two innings, he figured this was as good a game as any.