It's time for our annual ceremonies to immortalize people, places, things, and quotes that will not get the attention they deserve from baseball and football. The IMLD Hall of Fame/Hall of Infamy welcomes new members, and this year, I have the honor of doing the baseball inductions. No room full of writers voting on this Hall, though. Just the five that I think deserve to be put in this go-around. Without further adieu, on with my selections for the 2019 MLB Hall of Infamy!
- Bill Buckner - 1B - Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox, primarily. Infamous for: This booting of a grounder in the World Series that you may or may not have seen. This Bill Buckner entry into our Hall may be the one that has to be revamped someday due to our rule of not inducting a player who's a member of the actual Hall of Fame. I can see in the future a veterans committee taking pity on Buckner and putting him into the real Hall, and his numbers wouldn't make it seem ridiculous. In 22 years, he batted .289 and tallied 2,715 knocks, 1,077 runs, and 1,208 runs batted in. He won the National League batting title with the Cubs in 1980, hitting .324. Jason and I, being native Chicagoans, were very familiar with Buckner long before his name became a curse word in Boston. He was the primary 1B for the Cubs before Leon Durham took over in that magical 1984 season. Everyone knows what happened after Buckner was dealt to the Red Sox: A hobbled Buckner couldn't scoop up a Mookie Wilson grounder in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, allowing the home team New York Mets to break an extra-innings tie and force a Game 7, which the Mets also won. Had Boston found a way to win Game 6, or even the next night, that would have been the first World title for the Red Sox since 1918, so when they lost, naturally, Buckner became a legendary scapegoat for years. The ice thawed when Boston finally started bringing home titles in 2004, and eventually Buckner came to Fenway Park to throw out a first pitch and receive a long and loud ovation. Buckner died May 27 this year of Lewy Body Dementia at age 69. It's no stretch to say that Buckner's error is perhaps the most infamous play in baseball history. No other miscue can match Buckner's in game importance or visibility. Every baseball fan has seen that ball roll slowly through that man's legs at some point. Bill Buckner's name will forever live in infamy because of it, and the shame of it is, it completely overshadowed a darn good career, not to mention his entire life.
- Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry - P and OF - New York Mets, mostly. Infamous for: Being poster children for wasting talent while getting wasted. Speaking of those '86 Mets, the two most talented members of that squad were Gooden, who had won the 1985 Cy Young Award with 24 wins, a filthy 1.53 ERA and 268 strikeouts, earning him the nickname "Doctor K," and Strawberry, who was in the middle of an eight-year string of All-Star seasons, giving the lanky outfielder the moniker "The Straw That Stirs The Drink." How good were these two? In Gooden, you had the 1984 Rookie of the Year who would have four seasons in the Top 5 in Cy Young votes, and Straw was the 1983 Rookie of the Year who would have two Top-3 MVP campaigns. What the hell happened? Well, they were playing in New York in the 1980s, and there aren't many other opportunities in history more prime for a celebrity to find whatever narcotic he or she wanted. Gooden first entered rehab in April 1987. He was only 22. He had multiple arrests and suspensions after that, although he did reclaim some glory throwing a no-hitter for the eventual World champion 1996 New York Yankees. But he was never anywhere close to the same pitcher as Doc in the '80s. Gooden continues to fight his demons, getting caught with cocaine during one arrest this past June and then arrested for DWI earlier this week. Strawberry, meanwhile, had well-documented episodes in his Mets days of partying and carousing, but he held off issues with the league until his suspension in 1995 for a positive cocaine test. He came back to contribute to three Yankees World championship squads mostly as a platoon DH. But he also never got back to those Mets glory years, and he's also famously been in and out of legal trouble while struggling with addiction. Straw and Doc have even been at each other publicly through the years over who should and shouldn't be talking about the other's drug problems. It's been a very slow and sad breakdown for two stars who looked like they would be all-time greats when their careers began, but as the late Rick James would say, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug."
- Jim Joyce and Armando Galarraga - Ump and Detroit Tigers P. Infamous for: Providing a jumpstart for instant replay in baseball. I don't care what kind of spin anyone puts on it, the Jim Joyce safe call to ruin Armando Galarraga's perfect game had to be a major inflection point for the cause of putting video replay into America's pasttime. Sure, there were egregious missed calls before that, but in 2010, home runs were already being reviewed, and the technology was far enough along that this terrible call must have made implementing full replay obvious to many baseball people. Galarraga was one out from completing a perfecto against the Indians when he induced a grounder from Jason Donald that 1B Miguel Cabrera fielded and tossed to the covering Galarraga, who got to the bag on a bang-bang play. Joyce, the 1B umpire, called Donald safe, but he looked out in live action, and replays showed that he was clearly out, costing Galarraga a chance at immortality. Galarraga could only smirk at the blown call, an amazingly calm reaction to getting royally screwed, and Joyce was in tears after the game because he saw the replay that showed him fucking up. The call so defined the two men's careers afterwards that they actually wrote a book together in 2012 called Nobody's Perfect. And this wasn't a CB Bucknor or Angel Hernandez situation--this wasn't a guy awful at his job messing up again. Joyce was considered at the time the best ump in the game. So when you hear the old heads argue against the robot umps or replay by shrieking some nonsense about the human element, remember: It's the human element that made a good ump in Jim Joyce synonymous with awful judgment calls, and it stole money and history from a kid in Galarraga who never again had a night like this.
- Joaquin Andujar - P - Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals, mostly. Infamous for: Having a temper and beaning your ass if he felt like it. When Jas and I were growing up watching baseball in the '80s in Chicago, it seemed like there were three Latin pitchers who would have no problem plunking you if they wanted to: The Yankees' Pascual Perez, the Reds' Mario Soto, and the Cardinals' Joaquin Andujar. Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens had the reputation for being what Hawk Harrelson might call "carmine derrieres," or red-asses who would headhunt for whatever reason, but those three had enough wildness and lack of control of their pitches that I really did fear for whoever faced them. But only one of those guys got into a confrontation with Jason's Hall of Infamy umpire Don Denkinger. In that infamous 1985 World Series, Denkinger blew a call at first base in Game 6 (that looked eerily like the Jim Joyce blown call) that screwed the Cards and helped the Kansas City Royals rally in the 9th and force a Game 7. In that game, the Royals ripped Cards starter John Tudor and the relief corps, and Andujar was brought in to pitch in the blowout. The home plate ump for Game 7 was...wait for it...Don Denkinger. And when he called an Andujar pitch a ball that should have been a strike, Andujar exploded and got ejected. He then demolished a toilet in the Kansas City clubhouse, resulting in a max fine and ten-game suspension for the start of the '86 season. Andujar never needed much prodding to get angry, though: In 13 years of pitching, he drilled a whopping 51 guys, an average of almost four per year. He managed to be an All-Star pitcher in '84 and '85 while leading the league in hit batters each year. He may be a St. Louis legend for blowing up at Denkinger when the entire team and city wanted to, but he is infamous here for terrorizing little 8-year-old me and Jason anytime he stalked the mound.
- The 2005 Congressional Steroid Hearing. Infamous for: Providing a platform for a whole bunch of baseball players to make asses of themselves. On March 17, 2005, a House reform committee summoned several MLB players, mostly active except for Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, who couldn't say enough times, "I'm retired," as if that excused anything he did. They were summoned to answer for the loud rumors of rampant steroid use in the game, helpfully put on paper for everyone to see when Canseco wrote a tell-all book describing his steroid use and that of other players, some of whom he claimed to personally inject. The "distinguished" list of players in attendance and their most memorable quotes can be heard during our podcast episode. The upshot of the hearing is that no one came out of it looking good, or as we say in 2019, it was "bad optics" all around. The Representatives looked silly for focusing so hard on something so trivial in the world and making empty threats to intervene in baseball drug testing, and the players mostly came off guilty as sin because none of them wanted to say what was really happening for fear of ratting out teammates or themselves. It all resulted in a whole lot of nothing and is generally regarded as a joke and a waste of everybody's time, and if you think there was a lesson to be learned not to waste taxpayer time and money on something obvious to all but the most ignorant, I will refer you to the events of just this past Wednesday and I will leave it at that. But at least from this 2005 steroid hearing, we were gifted some infamous lines.
You can find In Much Less Detail: The Podcast most anywhere you search for podcasts, and again, to hear these inductions, this episode is linked right here:
