Pistol Pete Reiser was still something of an urban legend when I was growing up. He was going to be Brooklyn's answer to Joe DiMaggio, a five-tool star in centerfield, who burst on the scene in 1940.
Reiser could also play shortstop and third base pretty well. It seemed like there wasn't anything he couldn't do on a ballfield. A St. Louis boy, he'd originally been signed by The Mahatma back when Branch Rickey, the Greatest General Manager What Ever Was, was still running the Cardinals.
Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in one of his periodic fits about trying to liberate the minor leagues, ordered that Reiser had to be cut loose, and Rickey reluctantly handed him over to the Dodgers, though he hated to do so. Once in Brooklyn, Reiser settled into centerfield, and then the magic began.
In his first full season, 1941—that haunted summer before we entered the war—Pistol Pete led the NL in runs, doubles, triples, batting average, slugging, and OPS, and played a reckless, jaw-dropping CF. The sportswriters had him second in the MVP race, behind Brooklyn first sacker Dolph Camilli, a .285 hitter, but there's no accounting for stupid.
Reiser picked up right where he left off in 1942, batting .350 through July 19th, and adding a new weapon—stolen bases—to his game. He swiped a league-leading 20 in 21 attempts, a testament to his speed and know-how. But he never learned to pay much attention to where the walls were at, and in a critical game in St. Louis—not all THAT critical, it was only July 19th and Brooklyn was up 6 on the Cards—Reiser chased an 11th-inning flyball in Sportsman's Park right into the centerfield fence.
"It felt like a hand grenade went off inside my head," Pete said later.
He had a fractured skull. But six days later—less than a week—manager Leo Durocher had him back in the starting lineup.
What could you expect from Durocher? As Dick Young once wrote of him:
"You're on a raft with Leo in the middle of the ocean. Leo falls overboard. You leap in and save him, but a shark comes along and takes your leg. The next day, you and Leo start out even."
Over the years to come, Pete Reiser kept running into walls, and kept getting injured in other ways. He would be hauled off the field a total of nine times. Between all the injuries and three lost war years, Pistol Pete was essentially done by 28, never playing more than 84 games in a year after the 1947 season.
Reiser never blamed anyone but himself. But Rickey did, saying about Leo the swinging dick:
"That character should never have been entrusted with something that fine."
But that was baseball back in the bad old days, right?
The Yankees were a constant culprit, too. Joe DiMaggio was repeatedly butchered by the hacks the Bombers retained as a training staff.
Joe D. missed the first month of his long-awaited Yankees career due to some quack burning his heel with a new-fangled medical device.
The Yankees blamed it...on Joe. Said he had too much sugar in his blood.
Similar malpractice would continue throughout his career. At one point, the Yankees actually had maggots sewn up in his heel, as if he'd just paid a visit to Theodoric, medieval barber of York.
But that was back when we didn't know any better. Right?
Mickey Mantle came up in the spring of 1951 and amazed everyone, particularly with his speed. Clocked at 3.1 seconds going home to first—fastest ever recorded,
to this day.
In the second game of the World Series that year—ironically, on a ball hit by Willie Mays—Mantle's spike caught on a sprinkler head that had been left open, and he blew out a knee. He still had an amazing career...playing on a torn ACL that was never properly repaired.
Many blamed DiMaggio for not having called him off the ball sooner, and The Mick later said that, when he was writhing on the ground in pain, it was the first time Joe had talked to him all year.
No doubt, Joltin' Joe could be a jerk. But where had he learned such callousness? The surprise is that he didn't tell Mantle, "Too much sugar in that knee, kid."
But hey, that was the bad old days again, right? What did we know from open sprinkler heads?
Except that, just 24 years later, Yankees centerfielder Elliott Maddox caught his foot on an open sprinkler head, blew out a knee, and was never close to the same player.
Sure, Maddox wasn't the superstar that Mantle, DiMaggio, and Reiser were. But he was a fine young player who played a terrific centerfield, hit over .300, and had a long career ahead of him. In 1974, he had finished 8th in the AL MVP voting.
But hey, the season he was hurt, 1975, the Yanks had to play in Shea Stadium, and anyway, that was then, this is now. Am I right?
(Maddox didn't quite see things that way, and had the presence of mind to sue the Yankees. I hope he took them for a bundle.)
Now, of course, we know all about how ballplayers have to be brought up, and how we can add five miles-an-hour to their fastballs, and 20 home runs—at record exit velocity—to their swings.
Don't we?
Last night and this morning, the media was all aglow with the news that Jasson Dominguez had come through his first Tommy John surgery—at 20—with flying colors.
O joy.
I admit, I was a Martian Skeptic to start with. But seeing him in action—seeing him play, and seeing his attitude, and even seeing that shy, beatific smile on his face, I was enthralled.
I was filled again with the one emotion you must never, ever have in following Brian Cashman's Yankees: hope.
And sure enough, a minute later it was gone. Dominguez was off to the operating table, with the promise that he will "only" be gone 9-10 months. An entire season—maybe his best season—wiped off the slate. Just like so many seasons have been wiped off so many slates already. And who knows what we'll get after that?
(And who knows what will happen to poor Everyone Pereira, already out indefinitely because he slipped while walking down the dugout steps? Oh, no, it couldn't possibly be that his muscles were tightened to the breaking point by yet another ridiculous, Yankees' workout regimen. Just ask Giancarlo Stanton.)
I was going to run a pic of The Martian in his hospital togs, but I can't bear to. Enjoy this one instead—a pic we'll never see again, a face of pure joy and innocence, before the Yankees' crack staff welcomed him to the big leagues.
Sure, these things can happen to anybody, in any day and age. But it says here that Brian Cashman is not merely a fool, or a shallow, egotistical, self-aggrandizing incompetent, but also an active menace to every player under contract with the Yankees. To allow him to continue even a day longer in any capacity with the team is to throw away a generation's worth of hopes and dreams.
"That character should never have been entrusted with something that fine."
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