It was 1967, the year of the Impossible Dream in Boston, and we were sitting in the right field grandstands watching the Red Sox lose to the Chicago White Sox. Up to the plate came someone named Smoky Burgess, who was pinch-hitting.
Smoky was not a young man — in baseball age, anyway. By then, he was 40 — an age I’d dearly love to be again. But to us, my three friends and me, Smoky was old, fat (at least he looked fat wobbling down the first base line after grounding out; sort of like a bowling ball with legs) and, frankly, ridiculous looking. And it spoke to the low esteem the game had for pinch-hitters. They were the gnarly old coots who held on far too long for the thrill of putting on a uniform every day.
Poor Smoky. He died at the age of 64 — which is younger than I am now. That’s a sobering thought.
I never saw Manny Mota, but he was another one. He broke into the bigs in 1962 with the San Francisco Giants but played most of his career in Pittsburgh and then the Los Angeles Dodgers — a lifetime National Leaguer. He lasted 18 years, a fair amount of that time as a pinch-hitter. He was 42 when he retired, though he looked 82, which is pretty strange considering he’s only 84 now. It’s kind of a given, though, that to young people, anyone over 40 is not only considered old, but looks old too.
There wasn’t much memorable about Mota, except he looked like someone who could roll up to the plate in a wheelchair, get out, stand up, and hit a single up the middle. The other thing memorable about him was the name. It rolled off the tongue. Manny Mota. It was almost — but not quite — as good as Mickey Mantle. There’s a great scene in the movie “Airplane,” where the protagonist envisions hearing the name “Manny Mota,” superbly articulated by the late New York Yankee PA announcer Bob Shepard, as he’s being recruited to pinch-hit for the ailing pilots who had food poisoning after eating bad fish.
And what about Ruben Sierra? This dude played 20 years in the Major Leagues, from 1986 to 2006. But what makes him memorable was that he was on the Yankees from 2003-2005, mainly as a pinch-hitter but sometimes as a DH, and was a maddeningly tough out.
Sierra was only 40 when he retired. But it seemed as if I’d been hearing his name since I was a kid. Even Hazel Mae, one of the many NESN personalities that station has employed over the years, used to call him “one-hundred-year-old Ruben Sierra” when she mentioned his name on her highlight show.
Moving away from pinch-hitters, but staying on the subject of creaky old bones, we have Luke Appling — who was nicknamed “Old Aches and Pains” because he always seemed to have something wrong with him. He hung around in the big leagues until about 1950, when he was 43, and could still knock your head off with a line drive. But his team, the White Sox, was undergoing a youth movement. And ol’ Luke wasn’t a youth.
However, Luke had the last laugh. He was playing in an old-timers game (back when they used to do those things to attract fans) and took Warren Spahn, one of the best lefty pitchers in the history of the game, over the wall for a home run. Luke was 75.
Why is any of this relevant? Because I am old. I am fat. And I am pinch-hitting — pulled out of retirement like Minnie Minoso (another great name) — as sports editor, until the new guy comes on board. And all of these aforementioned examples just prove that we old coots still have some gas left in the tank.