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July 2008
A strategic retreat on Teixeira
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We all know why the Braves traded Mark Teixeira (and just when I was finally gettin’ the hang of spelling his Portuguese name). Surrender. White flag.
They just give up. And it’s just the first of August. The Giants once were down 13 games on Aug. 12 and won the pennant, but they had Larry Jansen and Sal Maglie pitching, and Bobby Thomson to hit the “shot heard ‘round the world.”
Nobody ever heard, or wrote, of such wretched terms as “buyer” or “seller” in those times. You put your team together in the spring and you went to the post with it. It seems players were more durable in those days, or at least fearful, that if they gave in to an ache or pain for a day or two, they might lose their job.
Oh, the Braves were looking mint-fresh in the spring. Tom Glavine was back, was joining up with John Smoltz and Tim Hudson, with Mike Hampton in the wings. A staff a bit long in the tooth, but they knew how to win, as the saying goes. At this curve in the road, they have won 16 games between them, 11 of them Hudson’s. Smoltz is gone for the year. Glavine has learned what it’s like to “play” from the disabled list. Hampton’s second start of the season came Thursday night.
John Schuerholz’s last big move as general manager was the trade for Teixeira while the Braves still had an oar in the water last season. They still finished third, bearing out, to a point, what a columnist who follows the Angels just said, “He’s [Teixeira] no superstar.” I don’t know that Teixeira has ever been seriously elevated to that rarefied state. After five seasons in Texas and halves of two with the Braves, he has yet to play a postseason game. Yet, it is said that in order to keep him next season, the Angels are going to have to obligate themselves for $20 million. I’ve even heard that Frank Wren made him an “aggressive” offer, said to have been $18 million last spring.
Now, question of mine, why the Angels were willing to make the gamble of trading Casey Kotchman to get him. For the first time as an Angel, Kotchman is playing a full season in good health. His offensive numbers are just a bit lower than Teixeira’s. He was once Minor League Player of the Year. He’s every bit Teixeira’s equal on defense. He grew up in a baseball family. His father is an Angels scout and has managed some farm teams in their system.
More than that, the Angels have an 11 1/2-game lead in the American League West. Are they going for the kill? What more are they looking for?
From my friendly correspondent in Orange County, I get this explanation. “It’s the postseason,” he said. “They’re tired of losing in the first round. And they want the home-field advantage. They like Teixeira’s experience, and his power, and though down the road Kotchman may turn out to be just as good, they’re trading for now.”
Conclusion is that down the road the Braves will be just as prosperous with Kotchman at first base as they might have been with Teixeira, and at a lot more reasonable price. He isn’t due to hit the high salary scale until 2011, and the Braves can dwell happily with him until then. They hadn’t been making hay with Teixeira anyway, and if he really meant what he said — “I thought I’d be here for the rest of my career” — Frank Wren would have been happy to have accommodated him at his price. Frank’s, not Mark’s.
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Island has been obscured by dream of Hilton Head
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hilton Head Island, S.C. — It began as an island, and the island is still here, but you wouldn’t believe all the other neighbors who have attached themselves. Like barnacles. Ten, 12, 15 miles off the actual island they include themselves under the Hilton Head canopy. It’s good for the image, and I don’t know that the island folk bear any resentment.
Welcome to the club. The more, the merrier. Join in and spread the word.
Hilton Head, the island itself, is shaped like an old tennis shoe with holes in it. Those would be harbors and sounds and creeks and inlets. Hardly a foot of acreage has not been put to use. It didn’t happen overnight, but once the developers and risk-takers began to take hold, Hilton Head Island burst into bloomtown. They came from all over and staked out their claim, sometimes quite adequately financed, and sometimes fly-by-nighters. Some thrived, some survived, some bit the dust and some spent time looking at life through bars.
When I first landed on Hilton Head, the William Hilton Inn had just been completed, the first luxury — shall we say — hostelry on the island. There was a small motel with 14 rooms up the beach, the Sea Crest. That was it. You should see the Sea Crest today, in fact, both of them. They are towers of condominiums by the sea. In the island’s developing struggles I was offered the chance to buy a beachfront lot for half price. That would have been $4,500. I said thanks, but I couldn’t take the risk. Today it would no less than three or four million bucks.
There was one golf course. Sea Pines they called it, I think. Today there are 14 or 15 and several more, if you include all those off the island that have adapted themselves to Hilton Head. The island has its own PGA Tour event, and the field, coming directly after the Masters, usually attracts marquee names. And so has the tournament itself, which has had a handful of titled sponsors itself, but one has stuck with it through the years — The Heritage. The course on which the tournament is played was designed by Jack Nicklaus, in company with Pete Dye. Ironically, Arnold Palmer won the first, but Nicklaus made up for the intrusion. He won three of the first five.
In another way Hilton Head has distinguished itself, I’m told. It gave birth to the nation’s first roundabout; you know, one of those British circular intersections with no traffic light, in which it’s every driver for theirself, as Dizzy Dean would have said it. Even when the William Hilton Inn and Sea Crest were the only public housing on the island, it was laid out at what is known as Coligny Circle, and it’s still in place today, but not long for this world, rumor has it.
I have no idea what the year-round population of the island is, but one resident has estimated it at 20,000. Once there was a wildlife preserve in the middle of the island, a symbol of the motivation of the visionary whose idea this whole project was. There always is one, there has to be. One person who has dreams that only he can dream, and who fights off those who scoff, and who eventually puts it all together. That was Charles Fraser, a general’s son, physically unimposing but mentally at the top of the heap. He created Sea Pines, and other developers came billowing in behind him like the “Sooners Rush.”
Several made it, some didn’t, but in the real estate melee that resulted, Hilton Head became one of the South’s most appealing destinations. Among those who eventually tripped and fell on their own swords was Charles Fraser himself, but his dream lives on in his absence. He died in a boating accident a few years ago, just in his mid-years.
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Woods, not drama, out at Birkdale
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rarely ever do so many fetching subjects rear their heads at the British Open, especially with Tiger Woods not even in town, and the only romantic interest on hand a 53-year-old who hasn’t played the tour in five years. Greg Norman is still in honeymoon stage, and his bride, Chris Evert, is oftimes within camera range. Royal Birkdale is one of three locations outside Scotland regularly visited by the British Open — Royal Lytham & St. Annes and Royal St. George the other two — and to some of us, not highly popular.
Let it not be ignored that in the minds of some, Royal Birkdale is known as “the fairest Open course of them all,” though I would humbly disagree. On my scale, I’d give the “fairest” edge to Muirfield, not just on the quality of pure architecture, but scenic pleasure and spectatorship. Birkdale nestles into the dunes shielding it from the furies of the Irish Sea, and there have been plenty of those this week. Walking it is for the athletic. A stretch of dunes rises between the course and the sea, and this serves also as one of the main arteries of spectators, who perch along the top of it like birds on a wire. You have to be part mountain goat and part Sherpa to navigate this dunesy course.
Before play began, the air was filled with apologetic references to Tiger Woods, the most publicized missing person since Amelia Earhart. After the shot-making began, and one player after another took turns on the screen, Woods gradually became a subject that gradually dwindled away. There has been, in my time, no Open with more headliners taking bows in the hearts and on the minds of television, and the persons scrambling about the dunes.
First out of the chute came Rocco Mediate — he just won’t go away — following up his U.S. Open heartbreak, then the AT&T at Bethesda, charging into the lead, looking surprised, almost apologetic, as is habit. Then Tom Watson calmly came along, but the headlines were reserved for the bridegroom, Norman. This was headline magazine stuff, the world’s onetime No. 1 player, now wed to the world’s onetime No. 1 tennis player, playing 20 years younger than his 53 years.
If that wasn’t enough, just hang around. Norman was only warming up. At a point in the second day, he took the lead by himself. After two rounds, he is at even par, which is 70. The Colombian Camilo Villegas, came along with the round of the championship, a 65, so near the top of the leaderboard we had two players a generation apart. Villegas is 26.
The course was extracting its pint of blood. The wind howled in gusts. The rain came down sideways. The sand was heavy. The bunkers attracted golf balls as if magnetized. It was an ugly day for outdoor exercise. Tiger was on nobody’s mind. Just getting inside, signing a scorecard and drying out was.
It has been 11 years since the Open stopped at Birkdale. It may be “royal,” but the clubhouse looks like something transplanted from Miami Beach. Royal Birkdale is located in the town of Southport, a beach port a few decades behind in modern conveniences. Accomodations are sparse and sparser. One year I was booked in a room that overlooked the Stakley Truck Rental lot. The luxury meal was a Big Mac at McDonald’s with Tim Simpson and Andy Bean. Another year my accommodations were at the home of a policewoman. I arrived at 10 a.m. after an all-night flight. She didn’t get home until six. Oh, yes, I could tell you some tales about other commodious Open experiences.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I love the Open. I love it best in Scotland, though. Enduring the hardships only makes you appreciate the luxuries of home, even if the price of fuel is high and the dollar is worth about half a Euro. Moving into the weekend of play at Royal Birkdale, without the hovering threat of Tiger, makes it all the more enthralling. Who knows, Villegas might win it. Mediate might. Graeme McDowell or K.J. Choi might. I’m pretty certain Greg Norman won’t.
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Curry had itch to coach again
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At various intersections in Bill Curry’s developing life, when he needed counsel, he turned to Bobby Dodd. Curry had been recruited by Dodd at Georgia Tech, and though that was no great coup first off, it had developed as such. Curry would become an all-star center, captain of the team and the kind of leader coaches turn to, and so it was that coach and player had a special relationship.
“I told Coach Dodd I wanted to get married,” Curry said. Dodd approved.
Near graduation time, Curry came to Dodd again. “This time I told him I wanted to be a football coach. He nearly exploded. ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got a degree from Georgia Tech. You’re capable of being an executive. Go get a job running an airline or something.’ As you can see, that time I didn’t take his advice.”
Then came the consultation that Curry feared most of all. He had been offered the job as head coach at Alabama — Alabama! — at one time Georgia Tech’s most violent rival. Curry was surprised.
“You’ve got to go,” Dodd told him. “You’ll never have a chance like that here. I love Georgia Tech, but I love you more.”
There the story began to develop horns. Many of the old Alabama guard considered Curry an intruder. To say that the Roll Tide congregation didn’t press him warmly to their bosom is severe understatement. Even winning an SEC championship — and in the course of it, the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award — never calmed the waters. He still couldn’t beat Auburn, and he still bore the scent of Georgia Tech, and when the Kentucky job became open after some recruiting shenanigans, that offered the perfect escape from Tuscaloosa, a convenient solution for both the Crimson Tide and the harried Currys.
They still pumped up the footballs and basketballs with a different grade of air at Kentucky. Football ate with the servants. Curry never had a winning season, and there were other complications. While we stood together at the British Open one summer, one of his players was shot dead on a porch where he lived back in Lexington. Curry’s days at UK were already numbered, and it was a little later that he walked away from coaching, presumably for the last time.
He had known the highs and lows of football, and had sipped the nectar of it. It must not be forgotten that he was a 20th-round — rock bottom — draft choice of the Green Bay Packers, played 10 seasons in the NFL, one as president of the Players Association — not one of the more joy-filled gigs of his life — snapped the ball in three Super Bowl games, returned to Green Bay as an assistant, whereupon he was called home to Grant Field to take over a sickly program in 1980. The turnaround wasn’t the snap it might have seemed from his cockeyed upside-down position as a ball-snapper. His first two teams won a total of two games, but the major moment was a monumental tie with Notre Dame, then the No. 1-ranked team in the country. One of his teams won a bowl game and twice he beat ranked Georgia teams, but then came the Dodd equivalent of, “Get out of town before they get after you,” and he was off to Alabama.
In between Kentucky and today, Curry has worked in television, prominent on the public speaking circuit, been an educator, lived here and in North Carolina, never really dropped anchor in any field or location. George Plimpton, who did an inside look at Curry while he was a coach at Green Bay, agreed with Dodd on this level: “I always thought he should go into another line of work, like communications or politics. He is articulate, thoughtful and observant,” all of this from Plimpton’s book, “One More July.”
Curry remained, however, the restless voyager. He doesn’t say this in a precise manner, but inside there appears to have been an emotional tug of war going from the time he last hung up his whistle. “I thought a long time I’d like to coach again, but that would be unfair to Carolyn. We had grandchildren here, this was home and where she liked to be. I could hear her say, ‘Fine. Go ahead. I’ll miss you.’ “
When Mary McElroy, the athletics director at Georgia State University, called one day, he was surprised when she told him, Georgia State is about to field a football team. Fine, Curry thought, and he encouraged her.
“A huge campus in a major city with a large student body, over 100,000 alumni in this area alone, already a conference member in basketball and other sports — why, it was a natural, I told her. ‘I’ve got some good prospects for you,’ I said, thinking she was calling me about recommending a coach.’”
“No, not that,” she said. “We’d like you to be our coach.”
Dan Reeves had been called on as a consultant, “and he says we need a college guy, and you’re that guy,” McElroy said.
“I was shocked,” Curry said. “I told her I’ll call you back.”
Carolyn had to be consulted. “Oh, wonderful,” she said. “You found something you know how to do, and we don’t have to leave town.”
Curry was talking from his “headquarters,” a handy-dandy office in the athletics department. He is surrounded by veterans of the sports-intelligence trade. Charlie Taylor was Falcons information director for years. Allison George did years of service on the same level at Georgia Tech. A staff of coaching assistants is yet to be hired, if Curry can find business time away from the interviewing callers.
Where he has coached before, an athletics department has been in play for years; here, he starts at ground zero, though he suggests that the situation he walked into at Georgia Tech with Homer Rice in 1980 was barely a shade higher. At least there was a stadium, full-time facilities, a seasoned backup of alumni and student body, and a history in the game. At GSU, it’s like building an athletics program from the jockstrap up.
Where does the money come from? “There are over 100,000 alumni within a phone call, the student body has voted to share their extracurricular fee, and from this base we shall build,” Curry said.
The first class of recruits arrives next February. GSU is already a member of the Colonial Athletic Association, which means a schedule is there for the making, with such teams as Delaware, James Madison, Massachusetts and a membership aged in football, and a schedule to be filled for a season opening in 2010. But we get ahead of ourselves. Give the coach some time so he can get on with his groundwork.
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Braves need the break — and so do fans
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
So help me, but this is the gol-dangedest Braves season I’ve ever sat in on. And I’ve seen them all since Bobby Bragan bottle-fed the weanling franchise in 1966. Nobody cared too much about how well they played. Just put on the uniform and call them major league. Winning right off wasn’t urgent in those days. “Atlanta Braves,” what a mellow ring it had to it!
Twenty-five years trudged by before they finally got a nip of Fall ecstasy. They didn’t win their first World Series, but, fa, la, la, there would be more down the road. They did finally win one, and the search goes on for another. It won’t be this year. That became more apparent with each passing day of spring training, and has become moreso of late. Spring training was mislabeled. It developed into a form of spring sickbay, and the casualties multiplied, as did the losses, with every turn of the calendar.
It was easy to flow along, banking on all that pitching gold. Look at them, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine. Nearly every time you see their names, Hall of Fame is required attachment. And Mike Hampton would be back — at last. Added up, the three of them had won 648 major league games. At the stage of this season, Smoltz and Glavine have won five collectively. Hampton has yet to deliver an official pitch, and he has company on the disabled roster. Smoltz is through for the year.
Little help has been mined out of the farm system. The lineup is being filled out with other teams’ backups, and in most cases, rejects. Corky Miller, the backup catcher with a lifetime batting average of .196, was dropped by the Red Sox. Ruben Gotay was cut by the Mets. Greg Norton was released by Seattle. Omar Infante came in a trade with the Cubs, who had picked him up in a trade with the Tigers. After Jorge Campillo was dropped by the Mariners, he has been able to make a place for himself as an accidental starter. The bullpen has been inhabited in part by pitchers traded away by other clubs, Royce Ring and Jeff Ridgway mainly because they’re left-handed. And the pitcher with the most stylish earned run average, Buddy Carlyle, still can’t work his way out of long relief.
Peter Moylan, the semi-submarine righthander from Down Under, found out in spring training that he, too, was in need of elbow surgery. There went the lowest earned run average on the ‘07 staff. He becomes another non-working part of the team’s travel entourage. In the nearly three years that Hampton has been a road guest of the Braves, his travel expenses might have been enough to afford another worthy reliever.
You have been kept thoroughly informed, I’d suppose, on the trials and tribulations of Jeff Francoeur, which have consumed more newsprint than the war in Iraq. Sadly, this blundersome case has reflected glowingly on neither party. That Francoeur chose to find relief for his hitting wounds on a minor league staff than in his own clubhouse is another reflection. No, it wasn’t handled with major league cunning on either part, making the point that it never should have become the front-page bluster that it did.
This is a ball team in a state of disarray, pure and simple. Bobby Cox is not having his best year, and at times, appears to be in a state of resignation. Such a team as this will do that to a man who is accustomed to being out front and on top of his game. The All-Star Game holiday couldn’t come at a better time.
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Favre gets past issues of passion and pride
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (Offered at your own price):
• Ah, here it is right before my eyes, explains everything about Brett Favre and why he couldn’t possibly be thinking of un-retiring and returning to the Packers. “He has lost his passion for the game,” the story says. “I have way too much pride,” he also says, to think of not doing the things expected of him. Right out of the AJC sports section, dated last March 7.
• Are they kidding us? This Brent Lillibridge, the shortstop the Braves just sent back to Richmond, is 24 years old? And weighs 192 pounds? Looks like the senior class mascot to me. The press guide says he’ll be 25 in September.
• Well, there’s nothing as wise and error-free as afterthought. Just ask Jeff Francoeur. In March 2007, the Braves offered Brian McCann and Francoeur long-term, multi-million dollar contracts, running to 2012, with an option for an extra year. McCann took it. Francoeur gambled on his future and turned it down, holding out until he becomes eligible for arbitration. McCann looking good, Francoeur back on the farm, trying to find out what got away after two seasons of 100-plus runs batted in. This is heart-breaking stuff.
• Errie Ball, 94, last living member of the first Masters field in 1934, has been invited as a special guest to the Tour Championship at East Lake in September. As an added thought, why not invite him to strike a ceremonial first drive, sort of fill in for Tiger Woods’ absence? Don’t laugh, he still gives lessons at his club in Florida.
• Have you been missing the “Bearing Point” cap and “Ford” shirt that Phil Mickelson wore in tournaments? They have been replaced by other sponsors, and by checking the stock quotations, you’ll see why. Last time I looked, Bearing Point was selling for 80 cents a share and Ford was dipping into unexplored territory.
• In the spring I had a hunch about the Pirates as a National League darkhorse, with McLouth and Nady and Bay and Sanchez beating the offensive drums. They did appear in need of more strong starting pitcher, and I hadn’t counted on Matt Capps losing his closing touch, or Sanchez flunking at the plate. (Remember, he led the league in hitting two seasons ago.) So they’re still a darkhorse.
• You must have seen that Aaron Baddeley television commercial, with all those babes hanging out of his racy convertible. It’s something the young Aussie wishes he’d never done. “I regret that commercial,” he said. “It’s not even close to representing who I am as a person.”
• In-house stuff: Would you believe that the publisher of Sporting News was once a copyboy in our sports department? Oh, a copy boy was a guy who came running when one of our harried editors cried out, “Copy!” He ran errands and such, and Ed has done rather smartly at whatever he took on.
• Here’s one that hits the spot, straight out of Tiger Woods’ mouth: “If I was running golf, it would be all persimmon [heads] and balata [balls.]” In other words, back to the old days, restoring the glory of some of the classic old courses.
• It is quite probable that the two most enduring pitchers in the major leagues are now Phillies, Jamie Moyer and Rudy Seanez. Moyer begin his career in 1984, Seanez in 1986. Moyer is 45, Seanez will be 40 in September. Moyer is the oldest starter since Phil Niekro.
• It slipped under the radar, that the Braves severed their strength and conditioning coach, Frank Fultz, but at the same time, made it clear that his departure was in no way connected to all the crashing bodies and suffering arms around him. Just a case of bad timing and cranky relationships.
• And how can a player who has spent five to 10 years in the Japanese major league be classed as a “rookie” in the USA? … Selah.
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Braves have bargain of the year in Campillo
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You can put away the speed gun. Forget all the fireball jargon. Just hand him the ball and tell him to pitch. Now you’re talking. He’ll take care of the rest. He has been doing it for years, eight seasons in a row in Mexico City. That’s Triple-A by USA standards, but the road trips aren’t for tourists. Bus rides over crooked mountain roads and through the gulches and along the rivers, and games in ball parks with lights so dim you could hardly read the signs on the fences. And you’re Mexican and they’re Mexican, so there’s no language barrier.
First thing you want to know, reading the “career highlights” of Jorge Campillo is this: Why, when the Braves signed him in 1996, did they “loan” him to the Mexico City Tigres? That’s what it says in the Braves press guide. It was more a sentence than a loan. Jorge was stuck there for eight seasons. Eight, as in the figure 8. That’s high altitude, thin air, and curve balls don’t break much in Mexico City.
He started, worked out of the bullpen. Anything, just call Jorge. Then in the off-season he pitched in the Winter League. One year he won 10 games for Culiacan. That’s when the Mariners bought him, and when his arm caved in. After elbow surgery, he had the lowest earned-run average in the Pacific Coast League, and to show their appreciation, the Mariners gave him his outright release. Ah, enter stage right, John Coppolella. A Notre Dame grad, former employee of the Yankees, now on Frank Wren’s staff with the Braves.
Coppolella had seen Campillo pitch against the Yankees, and it was he (Coppolella), Wren said, who put all the numbers together and recommended that the Braves sign him. Campillo had an agent, a fellow named Jaime Torres, who had a stable of Latin-American clients.
“We got together with Jaime Torres at the winter meetings in Nashville,” Coppolella said, “and we signed him. It wasn’t just me. Matt Price and Ronnie Richardson were a part of it. Frankly, I had no clue. I thought that he would help us at Richmond. We were in a bad way in Triple-A. I had no idea it would turn out like this. I’d tried to get Brian Cashman interested in him when I was with the Yankees, but nobody was listening.”
Campillo doesn’t throw hard, usually in the low 80s on the speed gun. He wastes little time around the mound. Has an uncomplicated delivery. Gets the ball, gets the sign, throws the ball. For $410,000, the Braves are getting the bargain of the year, while two multi-millionaire pitchers ride out the season, and another bides his time on the injury list. Oh, I should point out that Campillo knows how to use a bat. He has driven in two runs with his three base hits.
He, Jair Jurrjens and Jo-Jo Reyes have been carrying the pitching load, an amazing turn of events with all the wealth otherwise wasted on a sickly pitching staff. And after all the crooks and turns in his career, Campillo won’t be 29 until August. It leaves you to wonder just what might have happened if the Braves hadn’t been so generous and lent him to Mexico City when he was just a kid.
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