Baseball fans opened their newspapers this morning to learn that a federal indictment of Barry Bonds on charges of perjury or tax evasion or both is imminent. Bonds' attorneys will fight until his last dollar is gone, mucking up the sports pages with legal jargon and spoiling the innocence of T-ballers across the nation.
"Daddy," little Timmy asks. "What's a plea bargain?"
And all the while, the guilty go free. You know who I'm talking about. The team that, for forty-three years, has disgraced major league baseball by donning clothes that no self-respecting professional athlete should wear, even behind closed doors.
I am referring to the Oakland A's, and their green, gold and white uniforms.
Oakland was famously described by expatriate poet Gertrude Stein with the put-down "There's no there there." After a cup of coffee in the major leagues of literature, Stein has been sent back to the minors, but her aesthetic judgment is still solid, at least when it comes to the A's uniforms. There's no there there, only a why, or maybe a whatthehell.
For the record, the A's have been around for 105 years, and have worn the green and gold for less than half of that period. In 1963, Charles O. Finley, the owner of the then-Kansas City Athletics, decided to change the team's colors to Kelly Green, Fort Knox (or Finley) Gold and Wedding Gown White. Four years later, he went further, replacing the standard black polish on the team's cleats with white. That color combo remains in effect today, making the A's look like a bowling team that took a wrong turn on their way back to the bar and wandered out into the bright light of day.
Finley was responsible for other dubious innovations, all adopted in an effort to boost attendance for a losing team in a small market. He installed a mechanical rabbit named "Harvey" (after the imaginary rabbit in the Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name) behind home plate to deliver new balls to the ump. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of major league stadiums that currently feature the rabbit-o-matic ball service--if you're a one-armed man.
He put goats beyond the outfield fence in left field at Kansas City's Memorial Stadium to eat the grass. He adopted a live mule--"Charlie-O"--as a mascot, and once brought it into the press room to annoy reporters after it had recently been fed. In order to keep FoxSports.com free of inappropriate content, I will leave the rest of this incident to your imaginations.
Finley eventually moved the team to Oakland and turned it around, producing three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974. He sold the team in 1981, but his legacy of lunacy lives on in those green and gold uniforms. The team's mascot appears on the sleeves of their jerseys as a green elephant, thereby obscuring a part of baseball history.
The Athletics' original mascot--a white elephant--is pictured above. The team acquired that nickname when John McGraw remarked that John Shibe and Connie Mack "had a White Elephant on their hands" when they bought the Philadelphia Athletics with the intention of competing against the Phillies, their cross-town rivals in the National League. A white elephant, for those unfamiliar with a slang term that has fallen into disuse, refers to an item that once acquired is hard to get rid of. (Tag sales were often referred to as "white elephant" sales by shoppers from generations past.)
Finley's color scheme violates aesthetic principles that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. As Aristotle noted in his Poetics, "It is essential when choosing the clothing to be worn by a group of athletes that one not make them appear as if they are a slow-pitch softball team. Also, no vertical-striped socks like the AFL Denver Broncos."
So consider this a call to re-examine baseball's priorities. Performance-enhancing drugs may represent the ugly side of a baseball player's will to win, but at least you can't see them when you turn on your TV. The A's uniforms have got to go.
KEOKUK, Iowa. Elwood "Bud" Zaremba, pioneering knuckle-ball pitcher, died in his sleep in a nursing home here Sunday night after a brief illness.
Zaremba played with five major league teams over a 17-year career during which he gained a reputation as a solid middle-reliever and a practical joker par excellence.
"Bud was always up to something," said Red Rodney, his manager when Zaremba was with the AA Sault Ste. Marie Frost Heaves. "One time he beat me home from the ballpark and got into bed with my wife to pretend they were having an affair. I had to stop for gas and a quart of milk and got back a little late and, well, let's just say nature took its course." Rodney's wife had twins as a result of the gag gone awry, but his manager never begrudged Zaremba the indulgence. "I raised those kids like they were my own--Bud was such a fun guy to be with."
On another occasion Zaremba gave umpire Jim Barnes a "hotfoot", a trick that involved sticking a wooden match between the sole and leather of someone's shoe, and then lighting it. Barnes' pants caught on fire, causing third degree burns over most of his right leg and an end to his career as an umpire.
"That was just Bud being Bud as they'd say nowadays," Barnes said from his wheelchair. "Some people thought he was mean, but he was really just a cut-up."
Zaremba's career paralleled that of Moe Drabowsky, another pitcher of his era who liked to pull zany pranks on his teammates. "If Drabowsky was the Bob Hope of baseball practical jokes, Bud Zaremba was the Lenny Bruce, because his jokes would really sting you," said baseball historian Peter Arsdale of Iowa State University. "Moe would put a snake in your shoes, but Bud once put a live alligator in the back seat of an opposing pitcher's car. The guy lost half his hand, and was subsequently referred to as Leonard 'Two Fingers' Curley."
Zaremba didn't leave his sense of whimsy in the dugout either. "One time I went out to the mound and called for an intentional walk," Red Rodney recalled. "Bud said 'Why waste my energy on three extra pitches? I'll just hit him.'" Zaremba eventually perfected a pitch he called a knuckle "slurve", a fast-dipping pitch that didn't sting but rarely missed, and he often used it in lieu of an intentional walk.
Zaremba holds one major league record that is unlikely to be broken. Every team he played on subsequently moved to another city, changed its name or both. He spent his rookie year with the St. Louis Browns, now the Baltimore Orioles; four years with the Milwaukee Braves, who moved to Atlanta; four with the Kansas City Athletics, who moved to Oakland, and seven with the second coming of the Washington Senators, who became the Texas Rangers. In his final season, 1969, he appeared in 23 games for the Seattle Pilots, who a year later became the Milwaukee Brewers.
"I don't know that Bud had anything to do with it," Arsdale notes, "but after you'd played with him for awhile, most people wanted to get out of town."
Funeral arrangements will be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Institute for the Study of BIHT, beanball-induced head trauma.
COOPERSTOWN, New York. Baseball's Hall of Fame has a Veterans' Committee and separate admission rules for Negro League and Women's League players, but those initiatives pale beside the latest concept on the museum's drawing board; a wing dedicated to players whose record-breaking stats were fueled by steroids and other chemical enhancements.
"Mark McGwire is first in the pipeline, and Palmiero isn't far behind," said Richard "Bud" Ehrlich, the HOF official who is organizing the construction of the laboratory-like wing that will pay tribute to both steroid-stuffed players like Barry Bonds and the scientists who made them great. "We view it is a great educational tool for kids who are interested in both baseball and science."
Nicknamed "Asterisk Alley" by reporters who toured the glass and steel structure, the new exhibit space will be open to any player whose career numbers were materially enhanced by a substance that does not occur in nature, excluding hot dogs.
McGwire had 583 career home runs, and his power hitting is believed to have benefitted from his use of androstenedione, a steroid hormone. After hitting 49 home runs in 1987, his rookie year with the Oakland A's, McGwire's production declined until he bottomed out with only 22 round-trippers in 1991. Following that season he embarked on a "weight lifting" program and rebounded to 42 home runs in 1992. "Andro" produces abnormal levels of breast tissue in men, a phenomenon that weight lifters refer to as "########".
"I don't deserve an asterisk after my name," McGwire said when informed he might be relegated to the new facility as he squeezed into a size D-cup man-siere. "Maybe an ampersand or a question mark, but an asterisk? No way."
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
