In a major-league playing career that ran from 1969 to 1990, he played in 2,517 games.
He totaled 9,397 at bats, scored 1,077 runs, got 2,715 hits (496 were doubles and 49 were triples).
Those 2,715 ranked him 66th on big-league baseball's all-time list.
This player smashed 174 homers and drove in 1,208 runs while batting .289.
In addition, he swiped 183 sacks and just about had as many walks as strikeouts. (He drew 450 bases on balls while whiffing 453 times!)
This star led the NL in two-base hits twice, getting 35 in 1981 (his All-Star campaign)
and 38 a couple of years later.
As a first baseman (he broke in as an outfielder), he led his league in assists four times (1982, 1983, 1985, and 1986); his 1,351 helps at first base got him 19th place on the all-time list.
He played in two World Series.
Think of all the Baseball Hall of Famers who never got a chance to taste postseason action...let alone play on the team that won the Fall Classic.
And in 1980, when he was with the Chicago Cubs (the team that got him from the squad he broke in with, the Los Angeles Dodgers), he led all National League batters by hitting .324 (to go with his 41 two-baggers, 10 home runs, and 68 RBIs).
That's how I choose to remember Bill Buckner, who passed away three days ago.
Starting tonight, at 8:00 PM Eastern time, 7:00 PM Central time, etc., people all over the world (not just Americans and Canadians) will be able to turn on their TV sets, mobile devices, computers, and so on, and experience something unprecedented:
They'll be able to watch live coverage of a World Series involving baseball's Chicago Cubs.
Last Saturday night, Joe Maddon's club beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 5-0, to win this year's National League Championship Series, four games to two
...and, at long last, snare the team's first NL flag since 1945. (That year's World Series- won by the Detroit Tigers, four games to three- could've been the first time a television network brought viewers a Fall Classic...if a date almost four years earlier hadn't gained infamy and, among other things, halted the progress American TV had been making.)
Well now, here in 2016, the Cubs- after losing National League pennant series in 1984, 1989, 2003, and 2015- have to push the American League's best team, the Cleveland Indians, out of the way to grab major league baseball's biggest prize for the first time since 1908.
In 1908, you couldn't even turn on your radio and thrill to the Cubbies' four-games-to-one triumph over that earlier edition of the Tigers. America's first radio station- KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA- was twelve years away from signing on for the first time. (To follow MLB back then, you had to trust your local newspaper.)
Speaking of trust...I had more faith in Terry Francona's team to get to this year's World Series than was the case with Chicago's NL squad.
Francona, after serving as the Philadelphia Phillies' field manager from 1997 to 2000 (285-363 and Philly good for no better than third in the NL East in 1998 and 1999), got the Boston Red Sox' job in 2004...and took them right to the top of the sport, guiding his new team to that famous four-game WS sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to end that 86-year drought between World Series titles.
Boston proved it all was no fluke by going back to the Fall Classic in 2007, when the Red Sox swept the Colorado Rockies...one of the fourteen teams formed in the majors after the Cubs appeared in what turned out to be the Cubs' final World Series of the 20th Century.
The Red Sox were Francona's gig through 2011 (he left Beantown 744-552 and with those two Commissioner's Trophies); two years later, the Indians hired him...and he was named AL Manager of the Year after he guided Cleveland [the team he played on in 1988; his dad, John (better known as "Tito"), was with the Tribe from 1959 to 1964] to one of the two AL wild-card slots.
And so, while the 2016 Indians were sailing past the Toronto Blue Jays, four games to one (the clincher was a 3-0 win), to get their first AL championship since 1997, I kept looking at this year's NLCS- and how the Cubs blew NLCS leads in 1984 and 2003- and thinking: "I hope the Cubs win it...but I've got the feeling Dave Roberts' club's gonna pull it off."
The Dodgers didn't pull it off.
This time, the team with MLB's second-oldest current park (the oldest facility in the NL by 47 years) came through.
Maddon, like Francona, knows a thing or two about transforming a hard-luck baseball team.
After two interim spots with the California/Anaheim Angels (1996 and 1999; combined mark: 27-24), Maddon got hired by the then Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2006. Two years later, that club knocked the Devil out of its nickname, changed its team colors, and...won it all in the AL. (Okay, the 2008 Fall Classic didn't work out for the Blue and Gold; the Phils stopped them, four games to one.)
But Maddon won the 2008 AL Manager of the Year award, duplicated that in 2011, and left the Tampa-St. Pete area with a record of 754-705 in nine seasons in charge of the local American League team- the only winning record by a Tampa Bay skipper thus far.
Tom Ricketts and his team's general manager, Theo Epstein (the same Theo Epstein who helped the Red Sox get the 2004 and 2007 World Series titles as their GM), took a look at Maddon's record...and had him catch a plane to Chicago in time for the 2015 campaign.
Joe guided the Cubbies to a wild-card spot in his new league, an NL Division Series triumph over the Cards, and...was named NL Manager of the Year last year.
And now, the Chicago Cubs are getting ready to take on a team that hasn't won a Fall Classic since 1948 (just the second WS berth ever for the Tribe; the first was in 1920)...and since 1948, got to the Series just three other times in the 20th Century: 1954, 1995, and, of course, 1997.
Anyway...it should be an interesting World Series for 2016.
Okay...that's a real understatement.
Especially if you're a Cubs fan.
One of my favorite activities is downloading YouTube videos; most of the more than 1,800 showings I've captured have had to do either with music or sports.
Because of www.youtube.com, I've been able to find a short, two-part video about the first game of the 1950 World Series (between the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies). What happened was someone's home footage of the pregame preparations and of some of the action made it onto the Website.
One thing about YouTube and its counterparts is that you get to make comments about the videos you're seeing. Part 1 of this two-part video (shot at Philadelphia's old Shibe Park) provoked several comments from YouTube visitors; the last comment posted struck a real nerve with me:
"The country was so much better then."
The first thing I thought when I read this comment was: "Better for whom?"
Yes...I know the divorce rate here in the United States was nowhere near what it became in the 1980s, let alone what it is here in the 2010s. (In 1950, this country's divorce rate- rising since the 1920s, at that- was just over 2.0%; by 1981, it had risen to 5.3%. In 2010- the most recent year for divorce stats here in America, according to the 2013 World Almanac- it was 3.6%.)
I truly believe that what the person who thought America was so much better in 1950 than when he or she posted this comment (2011) was lamenting was that the face of the nation isn't the same in this day and age as it was during the middle of the 20th Century.
Matter of fact, the 1950 Fall Classic (the Yanks won it, 4-0) was the final one where neither of the teams had African-American players. (The Phils had a utility infielder named Ralph "Putsy" Caballero. Okay, he batted just .187 in 1950 and had no homers or RBIs. But at least Caballero got to play in the World Series, appearing in three of the games...although his lone at-bat didn't work out.)
Philadelphia had won just one National League flag coming into the 1950 "Whiz Kids" campaign (and that earlier pennant came in 1915...but the Boston Red Sox socked it to the Phils, 4-1). After Eddie Sawyer's club became the Yankees' second straight Series victims, Philly didn't make it back to the World Series until 1980.
Dallas Green's Phillies snared the World Series title that year.
The 1980 Phils made it to the top not only because of Pete Rose, NL MVP Mike Schmidt, and NL Cy Young Award winner Steve Carlton...but also because of teammates such as Bake McBride (his .309 batting average led Philly's regulars), Lonnie Smith (the reserve outfielder whose 33 stolen bases led the club), Manny Trillo, and Garry Maddox.
By then, Richie Ashburn (one of Schmidt's and Carlton's fellow Baseball Hall of Famers) was the color commentator on the Phillies' broadcast team. Thirty years earlier, he'd helped the Whiz Kids dethrone the old Brooklyn Dodgers by batting .303 and leading the Senior Circuit with 14 triples.
After the 1980 "Wheeze Kids" won it all at the expense of the Kansas City Royals (one of ten teams formed during the Phils' thirty-year wait between NL championships), someone asked Ashburn why the 1950 club couldn't stop the Bronx Bombers.
Richie said: "We were too damn White."
He had a point.
Me, I believe the country- for all its current troubles- is better off now than it was during the first year of the Korean War (a war that officially began five years after World War 2 officially ended) because more groups of people are having their say about where the Red, White, and Blue should go.
I guess the YouTube visitor who liked how America went in 1950 misses the days when only the oldest of Caucasian men were the only ones allowed to be heard...let alone allowed to be taken seriously.
This also meant you didn't take Caucasian women seriously, either. [Not even US Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME), who, four months before said World Series began, gave a speech denouncing the tactics of her fellow Senate Republican, Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy.]
Even then, especially then, America's top spokespeople loudly proclaimed that the country's very name meant freedom.
Never mind that the United States was still heavily under apartheid (okay, segregation) back then.
That's right: Five years after passing up twelve other lands to become the world's leading military power, America had to answer one big question on the minds and lips of many people in many other countries: "If you've got such a free country, then why can't certain people in your country vote...despite the fact that they're citizens of your country nonetheless?"
How simple could the answer have been?
I mean, dig it...you CAN'T keep groups of people in the background for years...decades...centuries...without them wanting to rise up and move to the foreground. That's human nature!
At any rate, the country's leaders in all sorts of fields (not just government) just weren't ready to give an answer. They knew it would mean egg on their faces.
Speaking of simple...what if the person who showed he or she liked the US of A better in 1950 than in 2011 (or 2012 or 2013) had typed in "simpler" and not "better?"
