As life continues to turn back to normal in the year 1 A.C. (After COVID), baseball will have its normal Hall of Fame ceremony in front of people. But we at IMLD didn't miss a beat, getting in our Hall of Infamy inductions last year and this. There are still no shortages of people and events that are infamous and deserve their own spotlight. Without further adieu, here are my hardball Hall of Infamy inductees for 2021.
- Albert Belle - Outfielder - Indians, mostly. Infamous for: A host of incidents that completely obscured his immense hitting talent. Belle is in a way the prime example of why so many of us sports fans don't regard the MVP or Hall of Fame opinions of sportswriters very highly. Sure, his career was too short to be Hall of Fame worthy due to a degenerative hip that cut his career at eleven years. But in 1995, Belle had an all-time slugging season, becoming the only man to go 50-50 in home runs and doubles for the eventual American League champion Cleveland Indians. A shoo-in for league MVP, right? Not so fast. The writers voted Mo Vaughn of the Red Sox as the MVP despite Belle having more of every major offensive category than Vaughn except steals. (They tied in RBI.) It was widely thought that Vaughn got the vote due to the surliness of Belle with the media, not because they actually thought he was better than Belle. So what had ol' Joey Belle done to make people despise him so? Well, there was a run-in with a heckler at LSU before he even made it to the majors, there was getting sent to rehab by the Tribe in 1990 for boozing, there was the high comedy of recruiting teammate Jason Grimsley to crawl through the catacombs of Comiskey Park to steal the corked bat that the umpires had confiscated and trying to switch it with a regular bat, there was cussing out Hannah Storm when she tried to interview him in the dugout during the '95 World Series, there were numerous tales of his temper tantrums, there was the time poor little Fernando Viña tried to tag him and Belle almost murdered him with a forearm shiver...the list is endless. Belle found time to try to run down kids who egged his house on Halloween in '95 as well. In retirement, he was convicted of stalking a former girlfriend, and in 2018 he caught a DUI/indecent exposure arrest, though the charges were dropped. I was thrilled when Belle came to my White Sox in 1997 to serve as Frank Thomas's protection in the order. It says so much about how hated Belle was that he is not remembered well for his two years in Chicago even though in that time he had a 27-game hitting streak in '97 and a monster season in '98, setting franchise records with 49 HRs and 152 RBI. But the man was impossible to root for, even on my favorite team. He wasn't just surly, he was angry in a sociopathic manner, and the fact that he put together a .933 career OPS and over 40 WAR will not be what comes to mind when his name is mentioned. Albert Belle will always be synonymous with "batshit crazy," and his fiery run is the definition of infamous.
- Yuri Sucart - A-Rod's Fake Dominican Cousin. The career of Alex Rodriguez is forever tainted by his failed steroid test and yearlong suspension for HGH and testosterone. The failed steroid test was never supposed to be public knowledge. In 2003, MLB took anonymous tests of every ballplayer in order to see if there was enough of a league-wide roids problem to mandate regular testing, because looking at Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa wasn't evidence enough. The test results were secret until the list was seized by the feds as part of the BALCO sting. A-Rod had told anyone who asked, most notably Katie Couric in an interview, that he never used performance-enhancing drugs. But in early 2009, when the 104 names of the guys who tested positive became public, Rodriguez had to find a way to pivot and spin the situation. So he explained that, yes, he did feel pressure to perform up to his contract and he did use some stuff back in '03. He also found time to bus-toss his cousin Yuri Sucart. In a wild press conference, Rodriguez claimed that a cousin bought a drug over-the-counter in the Dominican called "boli," and despite not knowing exactly what the stuff was, Alex said he injected it twice a month for six months! Everyone at the same time called "Bullshit" on the idea that a top-notch athlete making millions upon millions of dollars would blindly inject some unknown drug from his Dominican cousin. The scapegoating worked to an extent, though, as Sucart was banned from baseball clubhouses and was treated by the media like a dangerous steroid-peddling bad guy. There is a fascinating story from 2014 on Deadspin back when the site did good work. It describes the nature of Sucart's relationship with A-Rod. Let's just say that Sucart was a perfect fall guy. He had legal issues, he had financial issues, and he had a lifestyle thanks to A-Rod that he could not possibly have maintained if he sang about his famous cousin. So he never sang, and eventually, A-Rod would get caught cheating again and couldn't find anyone to blame but himself. So the "fake" in the description of Yuri Sucart is not referring to the kinship--he really is related to Rodriguez's New York people. The "fake" is everything else: A-Rod's loyalty to him was fake, his tale of taking shit that Yuri delivered from the DR was obviously fake, and the whole A-Rod aura was revealed to be a sham. He was the highest paid, the most popular, the best damn player in the world. But Alex Rodriguez is a punchline to this day, and his downfall began when he became a rat who squealed on his cousin Yuri Sucart.
- Lee Elia Wing: Earl Weaver Manager's Corner. And now, as part of the Lee Elia Wing of memorable baseball quotes, I give you this absolutely bonkers insane radio segment featuring a Hall-of-Fame manager sounding very unlike a typical manager. Here is the most un-PC 2:30 you could ever imagine:
- Jim Abbott and Curtis Pride - Inspirational Big-Leaguers. Infamous for: Making it to the major leagues despite some major handicaps. Maybe I was watching the HBO Show "Real Sports" too much in my COVID hibernation, but they sure liked to spotlight people doing amazing things with their bodies while missing some limbs. Between the mountain climbers with mechanical legs and the kid golfer who's now playing baseball too despite having only one hand, people are doing more with less now than ever before. We had heroes in baseball overcoming adversity when we were kids, and they should be saluted as well. The more well-known of these two was Jim Abbott, who famously threw a no-hitter as a member of the Yankees in 1993 against the Indi...sorry, the Guardians. He had a remarkable career for someone born without a right hand. To see him field his position while balancing his glove on his stump was nothing short of extraordinary. And yes, he pitched for my White Sox so I had occasion to see him live, but he was awesome to watch before he got to the South Side. Abbott won 87 games at the major league level and had an ERA of 4.25 while pitching in the Steroid Era. That's something for a man with both hands. As for Curtis Pride, he struck a curious figure standing in at the plate with a huge honkin' hearing aid attached to his ear. Pride was an excellent athlete at many sports despite being 95% deaf from birth due to a case of rubella. He was the starting point guard at the College of William and Mary, and before that, he won the 1985 FIFA U-16 soccer championship, scoring the game-winning goal. But baseball was his destiny. He came up in 1993 as a Montreal Expo. His best year was 1996 as a Detroit Tiger, hitting .300 and going double-double in homers and steals. Pride turned in a long if not productive career, playing until 2006 with six different teams. But he and Abbott were proud representatives of the disabled community, and they were symbols of the idea that obstacles are meant to be hurdled and you really can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.
- Milton Bradley - Outfielder - A whole mess of teams. Infamous for: Being an ass everywhere he went. Bradley, like Albert Belle, will be remembered for having a ton of potential that was wasted because neither dealt with adversity well. Bradley's temper may have been hereditary; his father was a Vietnam vet cokehead who beat up Bradley's mother, so violence was a normal atmosphere from jump. He carried that throughout his career, starting with a brawl in the minors after being hit by a pitch. Probably because of his buffoonery, teams couldn't wait to trade him despite his productivity. He only played a couple of years in Montreal, the team that drafted him, before they sent him to Cleveland. It was in Ohio in 2003 where Bradley decided that he didn't feel like accepting a speeding ticket and simply drove off; eventually he was sentenced to three days in jail. The next year, he was shipped off to the Dodgers. That tenure was punctuated by a June 1, 2004 ejection in which Bradley afterwards flung a full bag of baseballs onto the field. In September a home fan threw a plastic bottle at him for botching a ball in the outfield, and Bradley threw it back at the guy. That got Bradley suspended for the rest of the season. Los Angeles sent him to Oakland during Hot Stove 2005. He was good for the A's but they dealt him to the Padres the next summer. The antics took a truly ridiculous turn on Sep. 23, 2007. In the heat of a playoff race, Bradley got so mad at umpire Mike Winters (who had cussed at Bradley earlier) that he tore his own ACL being restrained by his manager Bud Black. The Pads would lose a one-game tiebreaker with the Rockies and miss the playoffs. Bradley moved on to Texas in 2008 and played well enough to make the All-Star game. All's well, right? Eh, no. In June, before the All-Star nod, Bradley heard some negative comments about him made by Royals broadcaster Ryan Lefebvre, and like any professional, decided to run up four flights of stairs to try to confront him before being restrained. In 2009 he made a one-year stop on the North Side, racking up in his brief Cubs tenure a suspension for bumping an ump, an assault on a Gatorade cooler after making an out, and throwing a ball into the stands after making a catch thinking there were three outs (there were only two). His verbal spats with manager Lou Piniella were reportedly legendarily hot, which is not a surprise. The Cubs traded Bradley to Seattle, where his career ended after the Mariners had enough and cut him. If you guessed that this hothead was a ball of fire off the field as well, you would be correct. Bradley racked up domestic violence charges against his first wife like Pac Man going after yellow pellets. Monique Williams would die at age 33 from cirrhosis and cardiac arrest, and if that isn't the logical ending to being involved with Milton Bradley for ten years, I don't know what is. He was charged with battery in 2018 of his second wife Rachel. It was an absolute tornado of anger, frustration, and aggression anytime Milton Bradley appeared. No one earned the reputation of being infamous more than him.
That's this year's baseball inductions. Jay will have the 2021 football inductions in a couple of weeks!
