Cleaning out the Inbox: Baseball Passings

       I continue catching up at TRS with another tribute post.

Goodbye to Carl Erskine at the age of 97.

Erskine played for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers from 1948-59, winning two World Series titles.

Erskine won twenty games for Brooklyn in 1953 and struck our fourteen Yankees in game three of that season's World Series to set the record (since broken by Sandy Koufax) for strikeouts in a World Series game.

Erskine threw no-hitters in 1952 and 1956, which places him with Sandy Koufax as the only Dodger pitchers to throw multiple no-hitters.

Erskine was the sole remaining Dodger from the famed "Boys of Summer" Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s at the time of his passing.

Goodbye to Whitey Herzog at the age of  92.

A journeyman outfielder for eight seasons, it was as a manager that Whitey Herzog made his reputation, winning three division titles with the Royals from 1976-78 and after accepting the manager and general manager roles for the Cardinals in 1980, revamped the entire organization into a perennial contender through the 1980s.

Voted into the Hall of Fame, Herzog won the 1982 World Series and arguably was robbed of the 1985 title by the brutal call in game six by Don Denkinger that decided the game and cost the Cardinals a chance to clinch the series.

Herzog employed a style known as "Whitey Ball" with the Royals and Cardinals, using fast players with the ability to put the ball in play in vast stadiums with hard artificial turf, along with a willingness to platoon and use role players to their potential that allowed those teams to take advantage of their home park.

Goodbye to Ken Holtzman at the age of 78.

The lefthander pitched for four teams in his career, all contenders, winning three World Series with the Oakland Athletics.

Holtzman won seventeen games or more six times with a high of 21 for Oakland in 1973, and threw two no-hitters, both with the Cubs in 1969 and 1971.

Holtzman is the winningest Jewish pitcher in major league history as his 174 wins is nine more than Sandy Koufax.

 Goodbye to Fritz Peterson at the age of 82.

Peterson was a twenty-game winner for a mediocre Yankees team in 1970 but is more remembered for his off-the-field affairs, most notably his wife-swapping with teammate Mike Kekich in 1973, along with his elaborate practical jokes which were written about in books by Jim Bouton (Ball Four) and Sparky Lyle (The Bronx Zoo).

Peterson led the American League in walks per nine innings from 1968-72, which had only been accomplished previously by Cy Young, and won fourteen games or more on five occasions, four with New York and once with Cleveland. 

Goodbye to Jerry Grote at the age of 81.

The long-time catcher for the Miracle Mets and their terrific pitching staff, Grote was one of the best-throwing catchers in the game and one of the top defenders behind the plate.

Grote played in four World Series, two each with the Mets and Dodgers, and made the All-Star team twice in his sixteen-season career.

Goodbye to Larry Brown at the age of 84.

Brown played for four teams but spent most of his career with the Cleveland Indians as a light-hitting infielder for nine of his twelve seasons.

Browns is remembered for his frightening 1966 collision with Leon Wagner in Yankee Stadium with both chasing a fly ball Brown suffered a fractured skull, broken nose, and both cheekbones.

Cleaning out the Inbox

    The inbox hasn't been overflowing in recent weeks even though it has been a while since I have cleaned it, so consider this an effort to keep things in order and not too full.

The Athletic writes of the soon-to-be-defunct Longhorn Network from its controversial beginning to a quiet ending at the end of the 2024 spring sports season.

Originally envisioned as a joint network between Texas and Texas A&M, the Aggies turned down the offer to be involved and chose to join the SEC.

The other members of the Big 12 thought the network would give Texas an advantage but it didn't pan out to be the money maker that Texas and ESPN thought it could develop.

The Longhorn Network will be absorbed into the SEC Network next year when Texas (and Oklahoma) make their move from the Big 12 to the SEC.

The Athletic appears with two more articles from their series that listed several articles about college football's realignment and how it has affected different schools in various ways.

Arguably, and that is being very kind, the worst decision by a conference over the thirty years since the beginning of conference shuffling has been the Big Ten's selection of Rutgers to join their league.

The Athletic's article states that not only is Rutgers to the Big Ten the worst move in that time but that it is even worse than most fans believe that it is!

The Rutgers athletic department runs at massive financial losses each year, the football program has a conference winning percentage of under .200 since arriving in the conference, and they have finished last in the Director's Cup, a competition that measures a school's performance in all sports, in the league in four of the last six years and have never finished above tenth place.

Add to that. the flawed premise that started Rutgers's entry that they would deliver the New York City market hasn't paid off and it's easy to see why the Big Ten might feel that they didn't get what they paid for.

The final article compares the struggles of the four former Southwest Conference schools that didn't make the Big 12 cut when the SWC was raided out of business to those of the four remaining Pac 12 schools following their own conference defections.

The SWC "leftovers" (Houston, Rice, SMU, TCU) as the article calls them each have their own hard road since the dissolution, and learning from their experience could help California, Oregon State, Stanford, and Washington State as they prepare for their own decisions on their future beyond the PAC 12.

The New York Times writes that the final remaining living player of the Brooklyn Dodgers' famous "Boys of Summer" Carl Erskine was recently awarded the Buck O'Neil award from the Baseball Hall of Fame for lifetime humanitarian achievement.

The ninety-six-year-old Erskine threw two no-hitters for the Dodgers, won 122 games, and his fourteen strikeouts in game three of the 1953 World Series set a then-series record.

SpaceNews makes the case that the first manned mission in the eventual return to the moon should be a return to the original landing spot- The Sea of Tranquility.

The NASA plan is to make several landings near the South Pole of the moon but this argument states that the Tranquility location has a lower risk for the initial return and it would be an opportunity to see the effect of fifty lunar years on the remaining items left from the Apollo 11 mission, as well as securing the site as a historical site.

I don't think it has much of a chance of being selected but I can see the logic in the debate.