The Baseball Project, Annotated, "They Played Baseball"

"They Played Baseball"

The Baseball Project is, for lack of a better term, a rock supergroup:

Steve Wynn [The Dream Syndicate, The Miracle 3], Vocals, Guitars, New York Yankees

Mike Mills [R.E.M.], Bass, Vocals, Atlanta Braves

Peter Buck [R.E.M.], Guitars, Banjo, Washington Senators

Scott McCaughey [Young Fresh Fellows], Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards, Bass, Percussion, San Francisco Giants

Linda Pitmon [The Miracle 3, Zuzu’s Petals], Drums, Vocals, Minnesota Twins

100% of their songs are about baseball. Scott McCaughey explains, “We don’t have any rules about what constitutes a baseball song. It can be anything from a character study of an obscure guy from the 1920s, to something that just happened, to something completely ridiculous. They can be fictional songs or non-fictional songs. The great thing with baseball is, we’ll never run out of things to write about!” 

True. Their impending fourth studio album was recorded with Mitch Easter in May of 2022.

Here are the lyrics for one of their most iconic songs. It catalogs thirty of those most colorful and/or vile drunks, criminals, cheaters, drug addicts, and shitbags to ever play the game, with thirty footnotes to augment any backstories you may not already know. And yet, as the chorus states, we will still root for them all because… THEY PLAYED BASEBALL

Cap Anson (1) was a racist,

Sam McDowell (2), a hopeless drunk,

And except for one no-hitter,

Bo Belinsky (3) mostly stunk.

1. Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson played professional baseball for 27 years, mostly with the Chicago White Stockings. Considered the first superstar of the game, Anson is also cited as the “Father of Segregated Baseball.” Numerous anecdotes support the latter moniker. A 1882 exhibition game against the integrated Toledo Blue Stockings was delayed for when Anson refused to let his team take the field against a black player, catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker. When Anson found out his team would forfeit their portion of the gate receipts if they didn’t play, the game was completed without further incident. Scenes like this would repeat through his career, other teams would follow suit, and by the early 1890s, no black players remained in professional baseball. When he retired after the 1897 season at the age of 45, Anson held records for games played, hits, at-bats, doubles, and runs. Elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939, Anson’s Cooperstown plaque and official biography contain no mention of the darker side of his legacy.

2. “Sudden Sam” McDowell was a six-time All-Star with the Cleveland Indians and led the AL in strikeouts five times between 1965 and 1970. In a 1985 Los Angeles Times story, he is quoted as saying, "I was the biggest, most hopeless, and most violent drunk in baseball during my fifteen years in the majors. That is a fair statement, I think, until some other lush comes out of the closet with his own story to tell." In 1982, two-years sober and with a recent degree in Sports Psychology, McDowell earned a counselor certification from the state of Pennsylvania. Sam Malone, alcoholic ex-pitcher on Cheers, is reportedly based on McDowell.

3. Belinsky pitched a no-hitter against the Orioles on May 5, 1962 (his 4th career start). It was the first no-hitter pitched on the West Coast. After the game, Belinsky said, "If I'd known I was gonna pitch a no-hitter today, I would have gotten a haircut." He posted a 28-51 record, a 4.10 ERA, and .5 WAR over his eight years in the big leagues. A product of the Swinging ‘60s, Belinsky embraced his time with the expansion Angels to say the least. He dated Ann-Margret, Tina Louise, and Connie Stevens, was engaged to Mamie Van Doren for a hot minute, and married Jo Collins, Playboy’s 1965 Playmate of the Year. “For both variety and sheer volume of female companions,” sportswriter Myron Cope wrote, “Belinsky is an authentic lion of the boudoir.”

Cap, Sam, and Bo (a portrait from Angels Stadium, artist unknown)

John Rocker (4) was a dumb-ass.

Ty Cobb (5) was filled with bile.

Sammy Sosa (6) had his cork.

Joe Niekro (7) had his file,

Yeah, it’s on file.

4. Rocker pitched six seasons, totaling 88 saves. In the December 27, 1999 issue of Sports Illustrated, Rocker was asked about playing in New York City, “Imagine having to take the 7 train to the ballpark looking like you're riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing.” He also called his teammate Randall Simon a “fat monkey.” In 2011, he admitted to steroid use. His post-baseball career includes playing a killer in the horror-comedy “The Greenskeeper” and a four-episode stint on Survivor in 2014.

5. “When I began playing the game, baseball was about as gentlemanly as a kick in the crotch,” said Cobb, whose greatness as a ballplayer is as documented as his racism. Historians are however re-examining his reputation.

6. 2003 was a rough season for Sosa. After being hit in the helmet by a pitch, going on the DL for toenail surgery, and suffering through a month-long homer-less stretch, Sosa was ejected from a game on June 4, when a broken bat single revealed a corked bat. He claimed it was a batting practice bat used by accident. He served a seven-game suspension.

7. Niekro was ejected from a game on August 4, 1987, for having an emery board and sandpaper in his pocket while pitching for the Twins. Niekro defended himself, "Being a knuckleball pitcher, I sometimes have to file my nails between innings." Opposing Angels Manager Gene Mauch replied, “Those balls weren’t roughed up. Those balls were mutilated.” Niekro served a 10-game suspension. A book chronicling letters between Joe and his brother Phil Niekro during the 1987 season is titled The Niekro Files.

   

   Rocker, Cobb Sosa, Niekro.

But someone loved them all,

Someone loved them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Dick Allen (8) had detractors,

Matt Stairs (9), his ups and downs,

Ron Leflore (10) had Jackson State,

St. Louis had the Browns.

8. Dick Allen (called “Richie” early in his career, later nicknamed “Crash” for wearing a batting helmet in the field) won the NL Rookie of the Year in 1964 (Phillies) and AL MVP in 1972 (White Sox). He led the league in home runs (37), RBI (113), walks (99), on-base percentage (.422), slugging (.603), and OPS (1.023) in that MVP year. By Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric Allen’s Hall of Fame qualifications are just outside of the typical HoFer (ten of the sixteen eligible third basemen ahead of him are in the Hall). He missed being elected to the Hall of Fame by one vote in 2014. Critics cite his short career, reputation for tardiness, and controversial clubhouse persona. Baseball author Bill James said, “Allen never did anything to help his teams win, and in fact spent his entire career doing everything he possibly could to keep his teams from winning.”

   

   Dick Allen gets his own pic for this, the greatest SI cover ever.

9. Stairs played for a record thirteen teams during his career (1992-2011) and was released nine times. His best season was for the Athletics in 1998 (38 home runs, 3.4 WAR). He holds the MLB record with 23 career pinch-hit home runs and was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

10. LeFlore was discovered in 1973 by Billy Martin while playing baseball in the State Prison of Southern Michigan (commonly called Jackson State). He was doing time for armed robbery. He went on to play six seasons for the Tigers, Expos, and White Sox, finishing with a career .288 batting average and 455 stolen bases. In 1999, he was brought in to celebrate the final game at Tiger Stadium, after living many years in Florida. He was promptly arrested for unpaid child support.

11. The St. Louis Browns are renowned for being the worst MLB franchise ever, with just eleven winning seasons out of fifty, and only one pennant (1944). Famous Browns players include Hall of Famers Rogers Hornsby and George Sisler, MLB’s only one-armed player Pete Gray, and 3-foot 7-inch 65-pound pinch-hitter Eddie Gaedel (one plate appearance, 1 BB). The team moved to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles.

    

    Stairs, LeFlore, & Gaedel

Durocher (12) had his lip,

Bob Welch (13) his grapey wine.

Piniella (14) had his temper,

Mendoza (15) had his line,

Oh, and it’s a fine line.

12. “Leo the Lip” Durocher, a Hall of Fame manager with 2,009 career wins, coined the phrase “Nice guys finish last” (originally “Look at them. The nice guys are all over there… in seventh place,” referring the 1946 New York Giants). When Durocher wanted a player knocked down he would yell, “Stick it in his ear!” In the spring of 1947, when Jackie Robinson was about the break the color line, he said, "I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded."

13. Welch pitched for the Dodger and Athletics, was a two-time All-Star, was on three World Series Championship teams, and won the 1990 Cy Young Award with a record of 27-6. Welch became the first active professional athlete to admit alcoholism in his 1981 book Five O’Clock Comes Early. He died from an accidental fall in his home at age 57. There’s no evidence Bob is related to the Welch grape juice family.

14. “Sweet Lou” Piniella was a player (1964-1984) and manager (1,835 wins, 14th all-time), so named for his smooth swing and hot temper. He was the first batter in Kansas City Royals history (1969) and an All-Star (1972). Piniella is third all-time in manager ejections with 65. He was famous for kicking dirt on umpires, throwing his hat, and pulling bases up and tossing them.

15. Mario Mendoza was a defensive specialist from 1974 to 1982 for the Pirates, Mariners, and Rangers. The “Mendoza Line” is generally accepted as .200, but Mendoza finished with a career .215 batting average. The phrase was coined in an interview with George Brett in 1980, picked up by ESPN’s Chris Berman, and has become a baseball idiom ever since.

    

    Durocher, Welch, Piniella, & Mendoza

But someone loved them all,

Someone loved them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Yeah, we cheered for them all,

We cheered for them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Scott Spiezio (16) went psycho,

Milton Bradley (17) couldn’t take the stress,

LaMarr Hoyt (18) was a coke dealer,

Poor Steve Howe (19) was just a mess.

16. Spiezio played twelve seasons for the Angels, Mariners, and Cardinals, and is mostly known as a utility infielder with a dyed-red soul patch. He tied the record for RBI in a single postseason when he had 19 in 2002. In August, 2007, Spiezio entered treatment for substance abuse. In December, 2007, he pleaded guilty to a DUI, hit-and-run, and aggravated assault. Spiezio was reportedly tased after breaking a neighbor’s window and resisting arrest in April, 2015, at his Ottawa, Illinois, apartment complex.

17. Bradley’s MLB career lasted twelve years with eight teams. In 2002, Bradley was stopped for speeding, fled, eventually pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three days in prison. In 2004, a fan threw a bottle at Bradley after an error. Bradley cursed the fan and threw the bottle back into the stands. He was ejected, fined, and suspended for the rest of the season. In 2013, Bradley was sentenced to a 32-month jail sentence for multiple counts of domestic violence, including assault with a deadly weapon (a baseball bat). The appellate court judge stated that Bradley's request for leniency was "breathtaking, frankly, in how callous" it was. While on probation in 2018, Bradley was charged with assaulting his second wife and sentenced to 36 months of probation with 52 weeks of domestic violence counseling.

18. Hoyt won the AL Cy Young Award in 1983 for the Chicago White Sox, going 24-10, with a 3.66 ERA. Between February, 1986, and December, 1987, Hoyt was arrested for drug possession five times, the last incident possession with intent to distribute. Hoyt served a seven-month sentence.

19. Howe won Rookie of the Year in 1980 and saved the final game of the 1981 World Series for the Dodgers. Over his seventeen-year MLB career, Howe was suspended seven times for alcohol and cocaine abuse. His 1989 autobiography, Between the Lines: One Athlete’s struggle to Escape the Nightmare of addiction, attributed his recovery to evangelical Christianity. Howe died in a Coachella, California, car accident in 2006 at age 48. Toxicology reports indicated he had methamphetamine in his system.

    

    Spiezio, Bradley, Hoyt, & Howe

Barry Bonds (20) had a swollen head,

César Cedeño (21) may have killed,

When Jose Canseco (22) reached deck 5,

I admit to being thrilled.

20. Bonds famously set the single season home run record with 73 in 2001. Ten years later, a former Giants clubhouse manager testified that Bonds’ cap size increased from 7¼ to 7⅜ inches for the 2002 season, despite the fact that Bonds was now shaving his head. Use of human growth hormone is commonly thought to cause enlarged head size. Of all the Barry Bonds, fun facts, this one is my favorite: Total intentional walks: Barry Bonds: 688; Tampa Bay Rays franchise: 662 (as of September, 2022).

21. Cedeño played from 1970 to 1989 for the Astros, Reds, Cardinals, and Dodgers. He was a four-time All-Star and five-time Gold Glove Award winner with 976 RBI and 550 steals. In 1973, he was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, spent twenty days in jail, and was fined $100 after his gun discharged, killing his girlfriend in a Dominican Republic hotel room.

22. Canseco is the only player to have launched three home runs into the fifth deck of the Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome), the most famous coming during Game 5 of the 1989 ALCS. “Sure I tampered with my body chemistry- and I emerged more than human. It's only a matter of time before an entire race of people are raised on steroids, and who knows what they'll be able to accomplish? Live to 150 years old, remain sexually potent into your nineties, interbreed with dolphins and whales, there's literally no limit to what steroids can do for a person. Do you know what it means to feel like God?” He said in his biography, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and how Baseball Got Big.

    

    Bonds, Cedeno, & Canseco

Brooklyn called their own team The Bums (23)

Mantle had his bum knees (24)

The White Sox threw the Series (25)

Lou Gehrig got his own disease (26)

His own dang disease

23. The 1930s era Brooklyn Dodgers became commonly known as “Dem Bums” after sports cartoonist Willard Mullin heard his cab driver ask, “So how did those bums do today?” and published an exaggerated sketch of legendary clown Emmett Kelly with the moniker as the caption. It was so embraced that decades later several Dodger media guides featured Mullin’s illustrations.

    

    24. In Game two of the 1951 World Series, Mantle (in his rookie season) suffered a knee injury avoiding Joe DiMaggio (in his final season) on a fly ball. Mantle biographer Jane Leavy posited that the damage- torn meniscus, anterior cruciate ligament, and medial collateral ligament- was never truly diagnosed or repaired. Mantle is nonetheless considered one of the greatest players ever with 536 home runs, three AL MVP awards, and the 1956 triple crown.

    25. Eight White Sox players were accused of intentionally losing games in the 1919 World Series. All were acquitted in court, but were banned for life from professional baseball. Eliot Asinof’s book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series is the best-known history of the scandal, as is the John Sayles movie of the same name. The details of this game-changing incident continue to be unearth and interpreted.

    26. Henry Louis Gehrig played seventeen seasons for the Yankees, was a seven-time All-Star, two-time MVP, member of six World Series Championship teams, and finished with a .340 average, 493 home runs, and 1,995 RBI. Known as “The Iron Horse”, he played in 2,130 consecutive games (over fourteen years). Gehrig's streak ended on May 2, 1939, when he voluntarily took himself out of the lineup because his play was hampered by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a neuromuscular disorder commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease. Gehrig was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1939. He died two years later, at age 37.

And we cheered for them all,

We cheered for them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Now Mark Reynolds (27) has his strikeouts,

Delmon Young (28) could be a boor,

Ryan Braun’s confessing (29),

And A-Rod, well he’s a, he thinks he’s a centaur (30).

27. Reynolds played for eight teams after he broke in with the Diamondbacks in 2007. Reynolds retired in April of 2020, ending his career with a .236 average, 298 home runs, and 6.8 WAR (impressive since he was worth -12 defensive WAR). Reynolds set the single-season strikeout record in 2009 (223) that still stands (as of 2022) and led the league in strikeouts four consecutive seasons (2008-2011).

28. Before Young made to the majors, in 2006, he was suspended for fifty games after a third-strike call, when he underhanded his bat and hit a AAA umpire. In 2007, at 21 years old, Young finished second for AL Rookie of the Year with the Devil Rays. In 2012, he was the ALCS MVP with the Tigers. In April that year, he was suspended (seven games) for yelling an anti-Semitic slur while intoxicated in New York City. He pleaded guilty to aggravated harassment, was sentenced to ten days community service, and ordered to attend a program at the Museum of Tolerance. He hasn’t played in the US since 2015; spending 2019 and 2020 playing in Australia, compiling an OPS over 1.000.

29. Braun tested positive for PEDs in October 2011, the year he won the NL MVP, and was implicated in the Biogenesis steroid scandal in early 2013. MLB suspended Braun for the remaining 65 games of the regular season and the postseason. After a month of claiming innocence, Braun confessed to taking a cream and a lozenge containing banned substances in 2011, "I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions." ESPN reported that Braun elected to strike a deal after being presented with the evidence against him.

30. In 2009, US Weekly reported that Rodriguez had portraits of himself as a centaur hanging over his bed. "He was so vain," the Magazine quoted a Rodriguez ex-fling. "He had not one, but two painted portraits of himself as a centaur. You know, the half man, half horse figure? It was ridiculous." In 2012 Rodriguez told the New York Daily News, “No, I do not have a painting of my upper body on a Minotaur [sic]. I don't know where they get that stuff.” I’ve never been more disappointed.

    

    Reynolds, Young, Braun, & A-Rod

No need to idolize them,

Or cut them too much slack.

You take the bad times with the best

And keep on coming back.

I’ll keep coming back.

But someone loved them all,

Someone loved them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Yeah, we cheered for them all,

We cheered for them all,

’Cause they played baseball.

Article has been updated, but was originally published in Zisk Magazine, The Baseball Magazine For People Who Hate Baseball Magazines.