Cooperstown Confidential (8 page)

Hornsby, Durocher, and Dean were all known to be men of somewhat dubious character. Hank Greenberg, on the other hand, was regarded as a model citizen. He was one of the first players to join the military, even before the United States joined World War II. After the war, he was among the few stars to stick up for Jackie Robinson. A generation later, he went to Congress to testify on behalf of Curt Flood, who was challenging the right of own ers to keep players under lifetime contracts—a highly controversial demand at the time. But despite his many virtues, Greenberg was a man of his time and place. When he broke in with the Tigers, Prohibition-era Detroit was a wide-open city, handily located on the Canadian border. Or ganized crime in the city was still dominated by the Purple Gang, a collection of Jewish rumrunners, gunmen, and thugs. The Purples were active in the sporting life of the city, and of course they made a point of befriending the new Jewish first baseman. Nothing much was written about this at the time, although his connections were an open secret in the delis of Detroit.

Greenberg joined the army in 1941 and was sent to Fort Custer, Michigan, for infantry training. His officers naturally wanted him to play ball for the fort team, but Greenberg declined. “I left a $55,000 contract, $11,000 a month, to sign up for the army for $21 a month and I’m not going to waste [my free time] playing baseball,” he later explained.

Greenberg waived his no-free-baseball policy only once—after receiving an offer he felt he couldn’t refuse. “I got a special request, an unusual request,” he writes in his autobiography.

I was asked by a friend of mine in Detroit named Abe Bernstein, to play
in a game. Bernstein, I had been told, was head of the Purple Gang . . .
Well, it seems that Abe Bernstein’s brother Joe was convicted of killing
someone; he was given a life sentence and sent up to Jackson Prison.
And he was spending his off-time training canaries. So Abe asked me, as
a special favor, if I would play an exhibition game between the Fort
Custer team and the prison team. He prevailed upon me because he said
the warden was a great baseball fan and if I played he thought he would
help his brother. So I consented.

Greenberg played for the prison team against his army buddies that day and went three for three. The Bernstein brothers had delivered a future Hall of Famer to the warden. Presumably, everybody was happy.

Joe DiMaggio was the other great ethnic baseball hero of the thirties and forties. His connections to the Sicilian Mafia were a matter of New York gossip and speculation for de cades. In 2000, biographer Richard Ben Cramer took them public. According to Cramer, mobster Joe Adonis—Leo Durocher’s pal—regularly supplied DiMaggio with hookers in every American League city (there was no interleague play in those days).

“No writer wanted to put that kind of thing in the paper,” writes Cramer. “You’d be finished—washed up with DiMag, probably non grata with the rest of the Yanks—and maybe with the mob, too.”

Cramer reports that Frank Costello—a head of the National Crime Syndicate who was forced into retirement after surviving a botched assassination attempt in 1956—was a par ticular friend of the Yankee Clipper. Costello set up a secret mob-financed trust fund for DiMaggio at New York’s Bowery Bank. There is no evidence that he had to throw ballgames or do anything illegal for the money. All he had to do was frequent nightclubs owned by Costello and his associates and let other wise guys draw their own conclusions.

“Joe let those thousands and tens of thousands pile up, untouched and for the most part unmonitored,” writes Cramer. “He didn’t want to know more than he needed to . . . he could have men sit with him, take him around, buy for him, do for him . . . he could have any woman he fancied—fresh or famous—and no questions asked . . . he could have all the money he needed, and a tidy pile left over, growing in a dark place. He understood: we would give him anything—if he would always be the hero we required.”

There is an argument to be made that the world needs heroes. Are the kids of America better off knowing that Major League Baseball players (or other athletes) drive drunk, abuse drugs, cheat on their wives, consort with gamblers, and generally act like other rich young men their age? And, if the Character Clause is a deception, isn’t it a gentle one? After all, it hasn’t kept most of the rogues out of Cooperstown. There were bad popes, too, but they don’t keep their likenesses out of the Vatican gallery.

There
is
something to be said for hypocrisy: at the very least, it implies standards. A lot of the conventions of any society are based on unspoken and unacknowledged truths. If we could go back and unlearn that George Washington owned slaves, or that Henry Ford was a fascist, or that Winston Churchill fought World War II drunk, maybe we’d be happier for it.

But I doubt we would be better off.

Waking up is painful. For many years, the fans of the Minnesota Twins loved Kirby Puckett. He was a hometown hero—until he left the game and the worshipful local sports media, and became the focus of attention of reporters whose beat includes the police blotter.

Puckett is in the Hall of Fame, and he belongs there. He was a terrific center fielder who won six Gold Gloves, hit .318 lifetime, and led the Minnesota Twins, a small-market underdog, to two World Series championships in twelve years. And he did it with a smile. He founded charitable organizations. He was polite to the fans. He even made writers feel important. “When you talked to Kirby, he gave you the feeling that he knew there was a real person sitting across the table from him,” a defender of Puckett’s said. “He knew your name and what you said to him the last time you met. He cared what you thought, too. Not a lot of superstars are like that, even the ones who try to be nice.”

In the spring of 1996, Kirby Puckett woke up blind in his right eye. He had glaucoma, and there was nothing that could cure it. He was forced to retire at the peak of his career. “Kirby Puckett’s going to be all right,” he said (of himself). “Don’t worry about me. I’ll show up and I’ll have a smile on my face.” When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, in 2001, he seemed to be the very embodiment of the Character Clause.

In March 2003,
Sports Illustrated
ran a cover story entitled “The Secret Life of Kirby Puckett.” The magazine reported that Puckett had been arrested for sexually assaulting a woman in a suburban Minneapolis restaurant (he was eventually acquitted), calling the charge “the latest in a pattern of alleged sexual indiscretions and violent acts.”

A woman named Laura Nygren told
SI
that she had been Puck-ett’s mistress before his storybook marriage, and again, later, after it ended. Puckett, she said, had cheated on her as well as on his wife. Not only that: she had obtained a temporary restraining order against him after he threatened her.

The magazine also reported that shortly before Puckett was inducted into the Hall of Fame, a Twins employee threatened to file a sexual harassment suit naming Puckett (among others). The suit was settled out of court.

It got worse. Puckett’s ex-wife, Tonya, had reported him to the police for threatening her life. She claimed he had once tried to strangle her with an electrical cord, locked her in the basement, and put a cocked gun to her head while she was holding their young daughter.

Kirby Puckett was not only a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame; he was also a member of something called the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame. But his mistress told
SI
that his good deeds were a sham. She recalled an incident when Puckett had to leave for the hospital to visit a sick child. “You get to make the kid’s day, that must make you feel good,” she said.

“I don’t give a shit,” he replied. “It’s just another kid who’s sick.”

Minneapolis is basically a small town. The reporters who covered the Twins weren’t shocked by these revelations, especially after Puckett’s name had begun showing up on the police blotter. But it took a national publication to make the story public.

There are a few crimes that journalists will not forgive, and one is being made to look ridiculous. Kirby Puckett was already in the Hall of Fame when the story of his secret life hit, and it is lucky for him that Cooperstown has no mechanism for removing and re-mortalizing its members.

Steve Garvey wasn’t so lucky. Like Puckett, he was an imperfect man who made fools of a lot of writers. Unlike Puckett, he got caught when the writers could still do something about it.

I met Garvey in Cooperstown during Induction Week 2007. He was there to cheer on his former teammate Tony Gwynn and to do some campaigning for himself. His fifteen years of BBWAA eligibility were up, but he still hoped that he might have a shot with the Veterans Committee, and he knew Gwynn, who would be joining that committee, would lobby for him.

Once Garvey was considered a BBWAA shoo-in. In 1986, the
Sporting News
asked major-league managers, “Which players in your league, if they were to retire tomorrow, already have accomplished enough to merit selection to the Hall of Fame?” The managers selected ten. One of them was Steve Garvey. But it didn’t work out that way.

Garvey thinks he has been unjustly excluded and, over Saturday morning coffee and muffins at Schneider’s Bakery on Main Street, he made the case. “In my first year of eligibility the Dodgers were so sure I’d get in that they were going to hold a luncheon for me at Cooperstown,” he said. “But the writers only gave me forty percent. I guess you could argue that I didn’t have first-ballot stats, but my career stacks up pretty well against some of the guys who did get in. If you look at my numbers, nobody’s out who’s done what I’ve done.”

That’s true. Garvey’s career matches up against that of a number of Hall of Famers. He was a superb defensive first baseman who once played a record 193 games without an error. Ten times in his nineteen-year career he was chosen for the National League All-Star team. In 1974, he was the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Garvey hit a lifetime .294. Five times he drove in more than 100 runs in a season. And he was even better when it counted most. In 222 postseason at-bats, he hit .338, including a .417 perfor mance against the Yankees in the 1981 World Series.

Not only that: Garvey, a former Dodgers spring training batboy, was famous for playing the game “the right way.” He set a National League record by playing 1,207 consecutive games. He won the Roberto Clemente Award for combining good play with strong ser vice to the community. He won the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, which goes to the player who best exemplifies character and integrity on and off the field. He served on charitable boards, raised money to fight diseases, went to mass on Sunday, and was generally a happy warrior. When he was traded by the Dodgers to the San Diego Padres in 1983, he took out a full-page newspaper ad to thank the Los Angeles fans for their support. In 1985, in the midst of a cocaine scandal that “shook” baseball (don’t they all), Garvey pushed for a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy. “I’m most concerned about influencing the next generation of fans. If we allow players to take drugs and then come back, what does that tell the kids?”

Admiring teammates nicknamed him “The Senator,” and Garvey sometimes seemed like a movie star playing a baseball star. His wife Cyndy was a beautiful and glamorous Los Angeles tele vi sion celebrity. If there had been a Hall of Fame for people who looked like they belong in a Hall of Fame, Garvey would have been a first-ballot choice.

But the press-perfect Senator had a weakness. Garvey, it turned out, wasn’t the ideal husband. In fact, he got hit with two paternity suits by two different women who weren’t his wife. Cyndy divorced him and wrote a book about it, a vindictive account in which she characterized Garvey as a “sociopath” and said that she had to get psychological help because of all the suffering he had put her through. In San Diego, fans put mocking bumper stickers on their cars: STEVE GARVEY IS NOT MY PADRE.

Who knows what goes on in celebrity marriage, or any marriage for that matter? Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio—Cooperstown is full of guys who were hard on their wives and wound up in divorce court. But Garvey was different. The writers had bought and burnished his Mr. Clean act, and they felt like suckers. The Hall of Fame vote offered them a shot at payback.

At sixty, Steve Garvey still looks like a senator—square-jawed, clear-eyed, and coiffed, John Edwards with shoulders. He has spent many years trying to rehabilitate his image (Garvey’s, that is; Edwards is a lost cause). As we spoke, two teenage boys came up to our table and asked for autographs. This is bad form during Induction Weekend, and Garvey would have been within his rights to refuse. Instead, he picked up a pen and signed. As the kids were leaving he said, “Those boys could sell those autographs right now. But I’m not going to turn down kids. I have to assume that they’re doing it because they like me.”

A few minutes later, a pretty woman walked into Schneider’s and gaily waved at Garvey. “That’s Wade Boggs’s wife, Debbie,” he said in what sounded like a wistful tone. About the same time Garvey was being hit with paternity suits, Boggs had been sued by his former mistress, Margo Adams, for palimony. Adams was with Boggs for two years or four, depending on whose story you believed. She traveled with the Red Sox on the road, sometimes at team expense, while Boggs kept his lawful wife at home with the kids. When the affair broke apart, Adams filed a multi million-dollar lawsuit and peddled her tale of adultery and betrayal on
The Phil Donahue Show
and in
Pent house
magazine.