Dodgers Reliever Was Fine Fungo Hitter
ALSO: BONDS, CLEMENS TO GET ANOTHER CRACK AT HALL OF FAME?
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Reader Reaction
SUNDAY NIGHT FEEDBACK
I just finished reading the piece on Sunday night baseball [HTP, Jan. 14]. The logo is hilarious! Great piece of writing.
I enjoy Sunday night baseball as a pleasurable wrap-up to the weekend before Monday abruptly arrives. But I can appreciate your point as well. Always good to have food for thought!
— Tom (Pat) Mahady
LUCKY LEW
I enjoyed the piece about [Lew] Burdette, especially the Sammy Davis story. Worth a laugh!
Seriously, though, re: his HoF credentials, Bill James includes Lew in a chapter of the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (2004), called "Lucky Bastards." He puts Burdette No. 2 on his list of luckiest pitchers of all-time (p. 475), arguing that his won/loss record should have been 170-177 based on his batting lineup support and ERA (not much under league average). BTW, Lew wasn't just suspected of throwing a spitter but admitted after he retired that he did.
Just another viewpoint. It's what makes baseball great.
— Andrew C. Sharp
NEGRO LEAGUES LOCKER ROOM
From HTP: “Negro Leagues teams that played at Yankee Stadium when the Yankees were on the road had to dress in visitors’ dressing rooms.”
I don’t think this is unusual or connotes racism. You’d never allow another team, of any color, to use your clubhouse.
— Howie Siegel
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Andruw Jones won more Gold Gloves (10) than anyone else on the Hall of Fame ballot except for Omar Vizquel . . .
An overturned call helped Oakland’s Sean Manaea no-hit the Red Sox on April 21, 2018 . . .
Duane Kuiper homered once in 3,379 at-bats – the worst ratio in baseball history . . .
Otis Nixon stole an NL-record six bases for the Braves v. the Expos on June 16, 1991 . .
Two homers by reliever Dixie Howell, who pitched 3 2/3 innings, enabled the White Sox to win an 8-6 game against the Senators on June 16, 1957 . . .
No Pirate ever threw a no-hitter at Forbes Field . . .
Wes Ferrell of the 1931 Indians hit more home runs in a season (9) than any other pitcher.
Leading Off
Ed Roebuck Left Lasting Legacy With Fungo Skills
By Andrew Sharp
Relief pitcher Ed Roebuck, who pitched for the Dodgers, Senators and Phillies from 1955 to 1966, was one of the game’s greatest fungo hitters. He became so good at making contact with the long skinny fungo bats that he was called upon in 1962 to help determine how high to make the roof of the Astrodome in Houston.
Once he made the majors with the Dodgers, Roebuck began to practice hitting long fungo flies in whatever direction he chose. He first began to try it after the Braves’ Joe Adcock had blasted a homer off him that went over the roof at Ebbets Field, Larry Merchant of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1964. The next day, Roebuck, with his fungo bat, duplicated Adcock’s feat.
As the Dodgers traveled to the other National League cities, Roebuck would try to launch balls as far as he could. “He drove one over the distant right field roof at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field,” Merchant wrote. “He got one over the scoreboard at Connie Mack Stadium” in Philadelphia. “And of course, he had to put one in the bleachers at the Polo Grounds” in New York.
But D.C. Stadium in Washington frustrated Roebuck. “There’s no way you can hit one out of that park,” he told Merchant. “My best shot is high in the upper deck” – an area that Frank Howard’s blasts visited often after Roebuck had moved on. Before an April 1999 exhibition game in D.C., Mark McGwire hit a fair ball in batting practice that hit the facing of the left field roof.
Roebuck had another complaint about fungo hitting in Washington. “In L.A. I could usually sneak a few balls after a workout…. But this club … well, we’ve got a budget on baseballs. I can’t get the practice I need on hitting for distance,” he said.
In 1964 at the Senators’ camp in Pompano Beach, Florida, Roebuck also was stymied. “The wind blows so much at Pompano that you can’t hit them real long…. I definitely didn’t have a good spring” fungo hitting, he told Merchant.
The Nats had traded infielder Marv Breeding to the Dodgers for Roebuck at the deadline in 1963 and used him in 26 games over 57.1 innings in August and September. On a team that lost 106 games, Roebuck was 2-1 with four saves and a 3.30 earned run average. After two appearances in 1964, the Phillies purchased Roebuck, who went on to have one of his best seasons: 5-3 with a 2.21 ERA and 12 saves in 60 games.
In 1962, before the architects decided how high to make the roof of what became the Astrodome, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was consulted. He enlisted his team’s super fungo hitter, Roebuck, to put on a demonstration. “On the breakfast line at Vero (Beach, the Dodgers’ Florida spring training camp), O’Malley approached me and asked me how high I could hit a fungo. I said, ‘I guess about 200 feet in the air, sir.’”
Then, when Roebuck was with Philadelphia in 1964, he was asked by the then-Colt .45s to try to hit the roof of the new doomed stadium under construction in Houston. “Considered the greatest fungo hitter extant, (Roebuck) swung himself arm weary,” wrote Bob Stevens of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1964, but “never did reach the 208-foot-high center roof.”
“But he came within 15 or 20 feet of it,” Bill Giles of the Colt .45s told Stevens, “and did slam a couple of balls off the lower roof curve in foul territory.”
Right-hander Roebuck came up with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955, earning a ring as a rookie when the Dodgers won their only world championship. He pitched two scoreless innings in Game 6. He appeared again against the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, pitching in three games. The only run he yielded came on a tape-measure homer by Mickey Mantle. Overall in the two series, Roebuck pitched well, walking nobody and fanning five (including Mantle twice).
After a strong season in 1958, Roebuck developed a sore arm. The right-handed batter had always been a decent hitter, so the Dodgers let him go to the team’s AAA affiliate in St. Paul to play first base. Overcoming his arm trouble, Roebuck ended up throwing 196 innings as a starter.
Back with the Dodgers, he pitched well in 1960 and 1962, overcoming more arm trouble in 1961. Off to a bad start in 1963, he asked to be traded to – believe it or not – Washington. The reasons were clear: Former teammate Gil Hodges had taken over as manager and one Roebuck’s closest friends, Don Zimmer, was now with the Senators.
Roebuck earned a second World Series ring in 2004 as a scout for the Boston Red Sox, the year before he retired.
“The nice thing about being a fungo hitter, although the pay is low,” Roebuck joked to Merchant back in 1964, “is that you can go on doing it forever. It is practically slump-proof.”
Ed Roebuck, a man who clearly enjoyed the game, died in 2018 at age 86 at his longtime home in Lakewood, California.
Andrew Sharp is a retired journalist and SABR member who blogs about D.C. baseball for washingtnbaseballhistory.com. His e.mail address is andrewcsharp@yahoo.com.
Cleaning Up
Bonds and Clemens Could Get Second Shot At Cooperstown Later This Year
By Dan Schlossberg
Rejection by the baseball writers next week is not necessarily the end of line for Hall of Fame wannabes Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa.
All are in their 10th and final year on the ballot of the Baseball Writers Association of America but also figure to be on the ballot of the Today’s Game Era Committee when it votes at the San Diego Winter Meetings in December.
Say what?
The 16-member committee, which meets twice every five years, will consider candidates who made their biggest impact since 1988 and did not play after 2007. Those candidates can include managers, general managers, and umpires.
Both the regular and the eras committee elections require 75 per cent of the vote for election. That means 12 votes from a group of electors likely to include incumbent Hall of Famers, historians, writers, and executives.
Not only is the group unlikely to favor the enshrinement of players steeped in controversy but also is limited to a 10-man ballot to be selected in advance by another panel.
And there’s the rub: more than two-dozen solid Cooperstown contenders will bid for spots on the Today’s Game ballot.
Possibilities, in addition to the Big Four from the regular vote, are Fred McGriff, Kenny Lofton, Albert Belle, Will Clark, Joe Carter, and suspected steroids abusers Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, plus pitchers Orel Hershiser, Bret Saberhagen, David Cone, Kevin Brown, plus reliever John Franco.
Not to be overlooked are managers Bruce Bochy, Dave Johnson, Lou Piniella, and Jim Leyland; owner George Steinbrenner; and umpire Joe West.
Narrowing those names down to 10 will be a tall order. If left to me, the ballot would consist of (in alphabetical order) Belle, Bochy, Bonds, Carter, Clemens, Hershiser, McGriff, McGwire, Piniella, and West.
When the same committee convenes in 2024, Jeff Kent and Gary Sheffield figure to make the ballot — unless either or both surprises in subsequent writers’ votes.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is weekend editor of Here’s The Pitch, national baseball writer for forbes.com, and contributor to Latino Sports, Sports Collectors Digest, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, and Ball Nine, among others. His e.mail is ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Chris Taylor went 8-for-72 in the last five weeks of the 2021 season, then got nine hits in his first 17 at-bats of the NLCS . . .
The 2021 Dodgers were the first team to win seven postseason elimination games in a two-year span . . .
In Game 2 of the 1971 World Series, the Orioles got a record seven hits from former MVPs Boog Powell, Frank Robinson, and Brooks Robinson . . .
Warren Spahn’s Hall of Fame induction in 1982 was delayed after his brother-in-law suffered a seizure during his speech . . .
The Warren Spahn Award, since 1999 given each year in Guthrie, OK to the game’s best left-handed pitcher, has never gone to a member of the Braves . . .
Roland Hemond made 183 trades involving 654 players from 1970-85 with the White Sox and 1988-95 with the Orioles . . .
Ian Anderson, the Atlanta rookie who pitched five hitless innings in Game 3 of the 2021 World Series against the Astros, wasn’t born when Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz combined for six Cy Young Awards.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Brian Harl [bchrom831@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.