Shameless hucksters spread false love and insidiously filtered information with glad-handing impunity: it's the rotten underside of "all-American apple pie," congealing into ever-more involuted, rat-maze-infused entrails of manipulation.
Cults of personality are the bane of our post-postmodern world, and while Joe Posnanski's is certainly more benign than what America is contending with as we struggle to survive the first quarter of what might yet be the last century of man on earth, he is not helping anyone with his increasingly invasive blather.
There's just so much of it...in the age of AI anxiety, one has to wonder if Joe the Poser has been cloned in a secret Silicon Valley experiment that jumped the shark, escaped the lab and is now devouring virtual acreage at a rate startlingly accelerated beyond even the sinister encroachment witnessed in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (Joe Pod-nanski??)
Joe's increasingly breathless, tone-deaf accounts of baseball leave all of us on the brink of asphyxiation. One can only hope that this monstrously prodigious burst of enervating energy is the precursor of an explosion that will scatter his turbid texts permanently to the winds.
There is not a single fact that he cannot somehow twist into something monstrous: His most recent (earlier today) is immensely instructive: the Midwestern man tilting windmills at two of baseball's storied franchises, revealing the true, utterly predictable inner bile of those who use sports to absolve the chasms in their own psyche. Joe takes the time today to revel in the current misfortunes of the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals, finding (as always) a slender thread with which to permit himself to overcook his verbal stew and sling the pot around the room, leaving a mess for someone else to clean up.
He "doesn't want to know" that the two teams might have been in last place at the same time in some other past; he feels justified in reveling in a moment of vengeful glee, to mark it as one more manifestation of his reptile brain taking over everything (just as he's doing with his increasingly insipid, self-indulgent, trumpeted-to-the-skies version of the Hall of Fame--just another book project, no doubt).
Some time ago, before all of this ego metastasized, Joe might have been interested to know that, in fact, there was at least one previous time when the Cardinals and the Yankees were in last place on the same day. As it turns out, 2023 happens to be the 50th anniversary year of this event...
...which occurred on April 25, 1973--a season where the two teams had strangely parallel roller-coaster paths in their journeys to nowhere.
The Yankees fell to 6-10 for the year, which landed them in sixth (last) place in the AL East that day.
That evening, in St. Louis, the Cardinals hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers--off to a middling start, but with a lineup of young hitters that would soon become a catalyst for a team that would win four pennants over the next nine seasons. The Cards were off to their worst start in recent memory, but they were optimistic that Scipio Spinks, the young pitcher they'd acquired as part of the previous season's fire sale, would build on his promising rookie campaign and turn into the next Bob Gibson.
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| The hijinks were sadly short-lived for Scipio Spinks (and his monkey...) |
...only to see the game tied up again in the top of the eighth when Cards' shortstop Ray Busse made his third error of the game, allowing the tying run to score. The game went into extra-innings (no "ghost runner" in or out of sight back in those days...) and the Dodgers scored against former teammate Alan Foster in the eleventh, eventually winning the game, 5-3.
The Cardinals continued scraping the bottom with a startling 2-13 record, en route to an ignominious 5-20 start for the '73 season, still their worst ever.
BUT strange turnabouts abound in baseball, and both the Yankees and the Cardinals would find themselves in first place in their divisions by August 1st.
As you might imagine, the Yankees got there first, due to the fact that their record after 25 games in '73 was 11-14, not 5-20! For much of the first half, the AL East was a tightly jumbled race: on May 23rd, when the Yankees finally reached .500 (20-20), they also (briefly) moved into a tie for first place. June would be their best month--a 19-10 record, and by early July they had a four-game lead.
However--the Baltimore Orioles would stage a return to form in the second half of the '73 season, leaving the Yankees and all of their other AL East opponents in the dust. Anchored by the ace pitching of Jim Palmer and Mike Cuellar (a combined 22-7 mark in the second half), the O's took control and won in a cakewalk (whatever that means...). The Yanks' 2-9 West Coast road trip late in August erased any doubt: they would finish 80-82 on the year. (The next season things got stranger still: they found themselves playing in Shea Stadium.)
THE Cardinals took longer to get well, not reaching .500 until late June (33-33). After a 3-15 record in April, they went 53-33 from May 1st to the end of July, and by August 6th they were eleven games over .500 with a five-game lead in (what was then) the NL East.
It was a maddening season to watch. Long-time friend and colleague Brock Hanke remembers it as being the strangest phenomenon he'd ever seen. He also recalled a bizarre incident that fit in with the entire "aura" of the year.
"It was Bake McBride's first major-league at bat," he recalls (late July). "McBride was a legendary speedster in the minors: he had the nickname of 'The Fulton Flash.' He hit a grounder to the right of the second baseman, who fielded it, turned, and threw to first noticeably late--but the ump, not believing what he'd just seen, called McBride out. I don't think he'd ever seen anyone run that fast."
And that summed up the strange 1973 season in St. Louis, when there was not nearly so much discussion of what has since become known as "The Cardinal Way" (and has become sand in the armpits for many). Gibson would return in the final week of the season, pitch heroically on a not-quite healed cartilage injury, and pick up a win that kept the Cards' minuscule pennant-race chances alive. (In retrospect, it was ill-advised: Gibson aggravated the injury by doing so, and was 14-23 for the rest of his career). St. Louis won their last five games of the '73 season--and, after all that up-and-down motion, finished 81-81. (They were beaten out by the New York Mets, who'd been in last place on Labor Day.)
ALL of this is a reminder that snapshots are just that--only a single image, a tiny fleck of data from which to make sweeping, oracular pronouncements. The "post neo-sabe" world of baseball media, led by ever-more unbridled practitioners on all levels of "discourse" (Joe the P. and the man we call the Tango Love Pie), simply continue to escalate their efforts to control the vertical and the horizontal of baseball "wisdom" via tools and a new brand of increasingly aberrant stats that have been consistently oversold. In Joe's case, his need to hit folks when they're down belies what is relentlessly advertised as a "sunny disposition"--a not-so-brilliant disguise that has long since worn thin but that all too many are simply letting slide.
