Kuzul

The mainstream media’s fascination with closers reached another level Monday with the announcement that Neftali Feliz of the Texas Rangers has been named American League Rookie of the Year by the voters from the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA).

Everyday player Austin Jackson, center fielder for the Detroit Tigers, finished second, but it wasn’t really close. Feliz nabbed 20 of the 28 first-place votes; the other eight went to Jackson.

The writers were blinded by Feliz’s 40 saves for a division winner. We can debate how important a stat saves really are (and we will), but to deny an everyday position player like Jackson the award was a travesty.

What follows are five reasons this is so.

Begin Slideshow

The No. 11 on the back of the Tigers jersey he wore may as well have stood for No. 1 twice.

The No. 11 was a Detroit baseball staple, worn by a man who was as closely identified with the Tigers organization as any, including fellow Detroiter Willie Horton.

The 11 was also the number of All-Star games he went to, in addition to the World Series and ALCS he appeared in.

Yes sir, the Tigers should retire No. 11, and erect a statue of the man who wore that number proudly.

Why haven’t the Tigers so honored Bill Freehan?

Excuse me—did you think I was speaking of someone else?

In the wake of the sad news of Sparky Anderson’s passing, there’s been a call to retire Sparky’s No. 11. The dispute between Sparky and the Ilitches aside, I can see where a case could be made to formally ensure that no Tiger ever again slips on No. 11, even by accident.

But that number shouldn’t have been available to Sparky to begin with. So says me.

Freehan, a Tiger (and ONLY a Tiger) from 1961-76, was the best catcher of the 1960s—American or National League, Earth or any other planet you got. Period.

The decade wasn’t filled with great backstops, but that’s not Freehan’s fault. You could run Johnny Bench’s career parallel to Bill’s and I’d still take Freehan.

Freehan, defensively, was about as perfect as a catcher could be. He handled nearly 11,000 chances and made 72 errors in 16 seasons, for a lifetime fielding percentage of .993.

Mathematics 101 tells us that Freehan’s fielding pct. means that for every 100 chances handled, Bill screwed up on 0.7 of them.

Freehan was an Adonis behind the plate—6′3″, 200 pounds of sinew and muscle. A player trying to crash through Freehan at the plate was like a car hitting a deer, with the car losing.

They weren’t as anal about keeping stats on catchers throwing out would-be base-stealers in Freehan’s day, but I don’t need numbers to tell me that you ran on Freehan at your own risk. His arm was golden, with a quick-as-a-whip release.

Freehan gets a lot of notoriety—as well he should—for the play he combined with left fielder Horton to make in Game 5 of the 1968 World Series at Tiger Stadium. You know the one.

The St. Louis Cardinals were leading the series, 3-1, and were ahead 3-2 in the fifth inning. Roadrunner Lou Brock was at second base, and then Julian Javier singled. Everyone knew Brock would try to score, and would probably make it, for Brock was a gazelle disguised as a human being.

Horton bobbled the ball briefly after fielding it on one hop, then he fired it homeward.

The throw was dead solid perfect, arriving in Freehan’s glove after a short hop. Brock arrived at virtually the same time, eschewing a slide for an attempt to plow through Freehan.

Lou got this one wrong.

Freehan denied Brock access to the plate, Lou’s cleat missing the dish by mere inches.

Brock was out, the lead stayed at one run, and the Tigers rallied to win the game and eventually the series.

Freehan was a miserable 2-for-24 in the ‘68 World Series, but his pillar of a body kept Brock from scoring a run that might have sent the Cards on their way to a series-clinching victory. It was oh-so-fitting that Freehan caught the final out that made the Tigers world champs.

Freehan could hit, too, with a career batting average of .262 and 200 home runs. At age 22 and in his second full season as Tigers catcher, Freehan batted an even .300 with 18 homers and 80 RBI. Solid, just like his entire career.

As if Freehan didn’t suffer enough physical abuse as a catcher, he also was annually among the American League’s leaders in times hit by a pitch. Freehan was plunked 114 times, with highs of 20 in 1967 and 24 in 1968. He was the league’s milk bottle at that carnival midway game, with the pitchers paying a buck for three throws at him.

All this, and Freehan was a Detroit kid, born and reared. After he stopped playing, he stayed close to home, working as a manufacturer’s rep and then becoming the baseball coach for years at his alma mater, the University of Michigan.

Freehan was the backbone of the Tigers. There was the slugging Willie Horton, the comical Norm Cash, the smooth Al Kaline, the portly Mickey Lolich. With the exception of Lolich, none of them was as durable as Freehan, who’d routinely catch 130+ games a year, before his back started to give out on him in the early 1970s.

Yes sir, I’d say the Tigers should retire No. 11. But I’m willing to compromise and combine Freehan and Sparky in one massive ceremony.

Even though Sparky shouldn’t have been able to wear No. 11 in the first place.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Former big league umpire Al Clark waged a one-man crusade. It was a losing battle but Clark fought it anyway.

Clark’s secret war? He wasn’t about to call George Anderson by his universally-known nickname.

“I refuse,” Clark once said, “to call a grown man Sparky.”

Maybe Clark should have hung around the legendary baseball manager during the off-season, for it was then when Sparky assumed the persona of plain old George Anderson.

There were two Andersons, the white-haired skipper loved to remind folks.

“During the baseball season I’m Sparky,” he used to say. “But back in Thousand Oaks (California, his home), I’m just George.”

George “Sparky” Anderson, one of the great ambassadors baseball has ever known, is dead. He passed away, at age 76, in Thousand Oaks from complications of dementia, according to a statement released by his family.

I hope God isn’t busy for the next couple of days, because he’s going to get an earful.

I hope the Almighty One is ready to hear about how there was no catcher like Johnny Bench, why pain don’t hurt, the art of the intentional walk, why Kirk Gibson was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle, and how Sparky feared his own hanging.

About that last one…

It was sometime in the summer of 1984, that most magical summer if you’re a Tigers fan, and Sparky was bending the ear of some reporters before a game.

“See that flagpole out there?” Sparky said, nodding to the towering pole in deep center field at Tiger Stadium. The reporters looked at it, then looked back at Sparky, because they knew they were about to hear a gem.

“If we don’t win this thing, these fans here are going to string me up that pole.”

Sparky hated 1984. Or, at the very least, he didn’t enjoy it. It was the summer of 35-5 and wire-to-wire and “Dancin’ in the Streets” and “Bless You Boys,” yet Sparky’s stomach was in knots all season.

One thought and one thought only kept running through his restless mind.

What if we lose this?

The Tigers’ lead that year in the AL East rarely dipped below seven games from June on, but that didn’t soothe Sparky. All he could think of was what would happen if his team somehow blew it. And there was no Wild Card to fall back on in 1984.

Well, the Tigers didn’t blow it, obviously. They cruised to a 15-game margin of victory for the division, then burned through the playoffs and World Series, losing just one game. Sparky became the first manager in big league history to win a World Series in each league, having already won two with the Cincinnati Reds.

Ahh, but 1987—now THERE was a year.

Sparky’s boys stumbled to an 11-19 start. All-Star catcher Lance Parrish had fled to Philadelphia via free agency. The team looked bad and the future appeared bleak.

In late-May, Sparky went on the Tigers’ pre-game TV show and declared that his 11-19 squad wasn’t all that bad. In fact, he said, wearing a headset and looking straight into the camera, the Tigers just might surprise us all in the end.

Ha!

That’s Sparky for you, we all said. The same man who called Gibby Mantle and who said Chris Pittaro was so good, Lou Whitaker would have to cede second base and play third.

In early-June, the Tigers signed a former batting champ off the scrap heap.

Bill Madlock was with the Dodgers and looking old. But the Tigers took him off the Dodgers’ hands anyway.

Madlock joined the Tigers and before long, Sparky’s words turned out to be prophetic.

The Tigers went 87-45 over their last 132 games and won the division on the last day of the season—Madlock being a key component to the resurgence.

1987 was, in Sparky’s own words, his most satisfying season of them all. Much more so than 1984, and the ‘87 team didn’t even make it out of the ALCS.

“They gave me all they could give,” Sparky said of his players in the wake of the Tigers’ five-game loss to the Minnesota Twins. “I couldn’t be more proud of them.”

Sparky didn’t want to manage the Tigers, at least not at first.

He was still stinging from his firing at the hands of the Reds after the 1978 season, doing TV work for the California Angels at the beginning of the 1979 season.

The Chicago Cubs contacted Sparky’s agent early in the season and a deal was brokered: Sparky would manage the Cubs, starting in 1980. But it was all a family secret and kept hush-hush.

Meanwhile, Tigers TV announcer George Kell was having a pregame meal in the press box in Anaheim in June 1979. He sat down at a table. Sparky soon joined him.

Before long, Sparky let the cat out of the bag about managing the Cubs in 1980.

Kell finished his meal and made a beeline for Tigers GM Jim Campbell.

“Sparky is managing the Cubs next year,” Kell told Campbell.

This intrigued Campbell, who admired Sparky for years, from both close and afar. The Reds used to visit Tiger Stadium every year for an exhibition for charity.

“Are you sure?” Campbell said.

Kell said he had gotten it from Sparky himself.

Kell suggested to Campbell that maybe Sparky could be had; 1980 was still a long ways away. Plus, the Tigers’ young talent was every bit as good, if not better, than what the Cubs possessed.

Campbell placed a call to Sparky. The manager said thanks but no thanks; he had given the Cubs his word. Campbell called back. Sparky again rebuffed the Tigers GM.

Campbell called a third time.

Slightly exasperated, Sparky said he’d look at the Tigers roster. After doing so, he told Campbell he might come, but not until 1980.

Campbell said, “There’s no way I could look Les Moss in the eye all season, knowing I’m firing him after the last game.” Moss was in his first year as Tigers manager.

Finally, Campbell lowered the boom.

“Would you come now?”

Sparky, in his book They Call Me Sparky, said he admired Campbell’s persistence.

“OK,” Sparky told Campbell. “I’ll come now.”

The news of Sparky’s hiring rocked Detroit. The Tigers hadn’t had a manager with Sparky’s star power since Billy Martin (1971-73), and Billy made news for a lot of the wrong reasons.

Campbell gave Sparky a couple days to get his affairs in order, and Anderson debuted at Tiger Stadium in late-June.

The Tigers, playing reasonably well under Moss, promptly went into a 2-9 funk after Sparky took over.

But there was a whole lot more winning than losing for the Tigers under Sparky. In his 17 years as Tigers manager, the team finished with a losing record just five times.

It wasn’t a rose garden without thorns; Sparky weeded out several good players. His doghouse was almost as famous as his propensity to lift starting pitchers—hence his other nickname, Captain Hook.

Ron LeFlore, Steve Kemp, Jason Thompson, Howard Johnson, Glenn Wilson. All good ballplayers, all run out of town by Sparky, who early in his Detroit career said things would be “his way or the highway.”

Pitchers knew the drill when Sparky came out to get them. You were to do nothing other than place the ball in Sparky’s hand, “like an egg,” the manager said. Then you were to walk off the mound without speaking a word.

Even Jack Morris, who had the countenance of a bear awoken early from hibernation, knew better than to violate that rule.

One pitcher who didn’t get lifted was Milt Wilcox, in Chicago in 1983 on the night he retired the first 26 batters, one out away from a perfect game.

The White Sox’s Jerry Hairston, pinch-hitting, broke it up with a solid single.

As the Tigers headed for their clubhouse after the win, Sparky said to some reporters who were hangers on about the near-perfect game, “That’s too bad. I ain’t never managed one of them before.”

George Anderson was Sparky during the baseball season and that meant a gumball machine of quotes and stories. It meant there would be no dull moments from April through September. It meant that even if the team wasn’t in contention, the manager would keep things interesting.

I learned after a few years to take what Sparky said with a canister of salt. Lots of people never got that, though, and their lives were immeasurably more frustrated and annoyed because of it.

With the Tigers, Sparky took a collection of young, impressionable men who thought they knew a lot and was able to, at the same time, both remind them that they knew precious little, as well as turn them into champions. He also made them into men in the process, even if they didn’t know it at the time.

They know it now. Upon the news yesterday that Sparky had been placed into hospice care, one by one his former players spoke of how much he taught them about baseball and about life.

Pain don’t hurt, Sparky once said.

But his death sure does.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Major League Baseball wants its playoff cake.

And to eat it, too.

Commissioner Bud Selig, The Man Who Destroyed Division Races As We Used to Know Them, is at it again. Selig wants more playoff teams, and he wants them now—as early as next season.

The players union has indicated that more postseason teams in 2012 might be amenable.

“We haven’t abused our allotment,” Selig told reporters this week. “We only have eight out of 30 teams make the playoffs.”

Selig points to the NFL, which has 12 of its 32 teams make the playoffs, and the NHL and NBA, which each allow 16 of their 30 teams into the postseason party. Then he looks at MLB and sees but eight out of 30 teams qualify, and apparently Bud wants some of that playoff action for his sport, too.

This isn’t a debate about whether there should be more playoff teams in baseball. Sadly, Selig and his owners squashed that like a bug when the Wild Card was introduced in 1995, which has since rendered a lot of divisional races as moot as a Brett Favre retirement announcement.

No, the ship has sailed that allowed intelligent discussion about the pros and cons of a Wild Card. It reared its ugly head again this year in the American League East, when what should have been a heart-pounding, nail-biting race between the Yankees and the Rays instead turned meaningless, as both teams made the playoffs.

It’s too late to save the division race as we once knew it.

The focus of the argument now is, if Selig wants more playoffs, then he has to give somewhere else.

Namely, the length of the regular season.

The World Series will once again drift into November this year.

Thank goodness the Texas Rangers are hosts this weekend. MLB is playing with fire.

Heaven forbid the day when the Minnesota Twins and Colorado Rockies meet in the November Classic. Can you throw a curveball with mittens on?

Selig wants more playoffs, but when are you going to play the extra games?

There’s even talk of extending the divisional series to a best-of-seven, too.

Just how many days does Selig think October has, anyway?

Additional playoffs will have to mean either: a) a reduced regular season (thus cutting into each team’s gate); b) starting the season earlier; or c) schedule more honest-to-goodness doubleheaders (NOT the day/night ones, either; I’m talking the old-fashioned Sunday afternoon twinbills).

It’s the lesser of two evils, to begin the season in March as opposed to having the World Series end in mid-November. At least a March start will allow for as many games in the first week or two to be played either indoors or in warm-weather climates.

Have as many Northern-based teams play out west or down south or in Toronto as possible, beginning around March 24 or so. This may mean some teams will play their first 6-10 games on the road, but so be it.

Everyone gets 81 home and 81 away, so it all evens out eventually.

I’m guessing that more playoffs in MLB would mean two more teams in each league qualifying, creating an NFL-like system of six teams in each league participating.

That scenario would likely give the top two divisional winners, by win-loss record, a bye in the first round. Then the other four battle it out—the third divisional winner and the three Wild Cards—with those two winners facing the bye teams.

I’m not wild about any of this. One reason is that getting a bye and waiting a week or so to play your first playoff game seems unnatural, after playing 162 games with little rest.

I can’t help but wonder if this would inadvertently penalize the best teams, who would have to begin the playoffs cold against a team that just got done playing a series.

The only way this scenario could be avoided would be to add four playoff teams to each league, so that no one gets a bye. Now you’d have 16 out of the 30 teams making the playoffs. Kind of makes a 162-game season overkill, to eliminate less than half of the MLB teams.

Can you imagine five Wild Cards per league?

However he chooses to implement it, Selig can’t keep everything else status quo. He can’t start in early-April, play 162 games, extend the DS to a best-of-seven, and add playoff teams. The World Series would bump up against Thanksgiving.

I’d like to see Selig try to convince perennial bottom feeders like the Royals and Pirates that they should give up some home dates in order to make the regular season shorter, so Bud can add playoff teams and lengthen the DSs.

Bud Selig has already destroyed the traditional pennant race. Now he wants to emulate the other three majors and add to his postseason invite list.

I don’t like it, so the least he can do is compromise elsewhere.

Selig wants to have his cake and eat it, too. I hope he chokes on it.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

It’s time for another World Series. Time to take attendance.

In the National League—San Francisco Giants? Check. Lineage of the old New York Giants—the franchise of Ott, Mathewson, Hubbell, Mays, Durocher and Irvin, then later in San Francisco: McCovey, Marichal, Cepeda, all those Alous. Here’s your pass—good luck out there.

Now to the American League.

Hey, is this someone’s idea of a joke? Who goes there? The Texas Rangers?

The Texas Rangers?

I’m not laughing. This may as well be the World Serious. No time for gags.

Texas Rangers, please have a seat. Where are the Yankees, tied up in the back room? Were the Red Sox too busy? Heck, give me the Oakland A’s—or even the Angels of Los Angeles/Anaheim/Southern California. Let’s make it an intra-state Series.

What happened to the Baltimore Orioles? I hear Boog Powell is ready to club another three-run home run while Earl Weaver steals a smoke in the runway.

Really, stop fooling around here. The Texas Rangers? Aren’t they the team that got their asses kicked by a bunch of dime beer-consuming fans in Cleveland back in 1974? Manager Billy Martin was running around the field at Municipal Stadium wielding a bat, trying to keep the drunks off his players.

What’s tradition with the Rangers? They came from Washington—first in war, first in peace, last in the American League. Ted Williams was the Rangers’ first manager; he lasted one season before he realized he didn’t look good in cowboy boots.

The Texas Rangers? In the World Series?

Where’s Allen Funt and that hidden camera? OK, you got me good. I wasn’t ready for that one. Nicely played.

How could the Rangers be in the World Series? Their all-time greatest team includes Buddy Bell and Pete O’Brien. Is this the Rangers’ reward for being the first team to schedule Sunday night games? Hey, it was only because it was too damn hot to play during the daytime—let’s not go overboard here.

Didn’t Nolan Ryan just pitch for them a couple of years ago? He went from the mound on a Friday to the president’s office on Monday, I hear.

The Texas Rangers, showing up to the World Series? To actually play in it?

Is this like when they elected Carrie as Prom Queen? Are they going to dump pig’s blood on them just before the first pitch in Game 1?

No teams named after a whole state should be in the World Series—isn’t that a rule? The Minnesota Twins did it three times and the Arizona Diamondbacks once but I hear someone had some photographs.

The Texas Rangers. They didn’t even win a postseason series until this year. Hell, they hadn’t even won a playoff game at home, period, until this month, and that was in the second round. There ought to be a law against such a fast track to the World Series.

With the Giants all the aforementioned names come to mind. With the Rangers, I keep thinking of Billy Sample and Steve Buechele and Jeff Burroughs. I stop and try again and all I can come up with is Joe Lovitto and Jim Sundberg and Dean Palmer.

Yeah, I know they had the Rodriguezes Pudge and Alex, but they both beat it out of town.

This is the franchise that won 94 games in 1977, but it needed four managers to do it—all managing within a week of each other.

Frank Lucchesi was fired on June 21. Eddie Stanky was brought in and he managed one game on June 22 before he got homesick and quit. The Rangers then turned to coach Connie Ryan and he managed six games. Finally, Billy Hunter took over a week after Lucchesi’s last game and guided the Rangers for the final 93 games. The name plates were made from dry erase board.

Two of the Rangers’ first three managers were Ted Williams and Billy Martin. Whitey Herzog was in between. Three big names, and that was the problem—they were bigger names than their players.

Until the Rangers won the ALCS the other night, the proudest night in franchise history was the night Nolan Ryan beat the stuffing out of young whippersnapper Robin Ventura on the pitching mound, when Ventura charged Ryan after being hit in the back with one of Nolan’s fastballs.

Someone should have told Robin that he got lucky with a medium-speed fastball in the back; if Nolan wanted to, he could have killed him, right there in the batter’s box.

So it’s not a joke then? The Texas Rangers are really here to play in the World Series?

Ohhh…I get it. This year’s Series is going to bleed into November and they needed a warm weather state.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Phineas Taylor Barnum was a born showman. He was placed on this Earth to sell tickets, fill houses and count receipts. He was the Columbus of show business—P.T. discovered acts and freaks—sometimes they were one and the same.

Barnum had a wonderfully simple explanation of how he was able to become a millionaire with traveling shows that featured lizard boys, bearded women and the “Feejee” mermaid (a creature with the head of a monkey and the tail of a fish).

How did ole P.T. do it?

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” he said.

And a whole bunch of them, apparently, paid admission to see Barnum’s shows.

Jim Campbell was as far removed from P.T. Barnum as a human being could get.

Campbell was the Tigers general manager from the early 1960s through 1983. He was a staid man with a bald head and a round face, and he said “Hell” a lot.

“That was a hell of a game.”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“Hell, we’re real happy.”

Campbell was as much of a showman as sardines are a dessert. He wanted his team to make money, make no mistake about it. He just didn’t want any pomp and circumstance in the process.

Campbell once closed the centerfield bleachers at Tiger Stadium for weeks because there were too many beach balls being batted around up there. He abhorred the bashing, rock-and-roll music played at ballparks. Campbell was an organ guy.

Campbell lived and died with his Tigers, 162 times a year. There was a ten-game losing streak that caused him to lose so much weight that he looked like he had a disease.

But there wasn’t any showman in Campbell.

Still, he found himself a sucker anyway.

Forty years ago this month, Bob Short, the owner of the Washington Senators, dialed up Campbell. Several discussions later, Campbell fleeced Short so badly that if it had happened on Wall Street, the SEC would have begun an investigation.

Campbell not only wasn’t a showman, he had a great disdain for the malcontent, for the miscreant. Rocky Colavito, Hollywood handsome and a basher of home runs, once tested Campbell with a contract holdout. Rocky might as well have had a staring contest with a statue.

Campbell won; he signed Colavito but traded him out of Detroit forthwith.

So by October 1970, Campbell had had his fill of one Denny McLain.

Two years prior, Denny was on top of the baseball world. He won the MVP, the Cy Young Award, and 31 games with pretty much only two pitches—a fastball and a curve. But it was a very fast fastball and a very curvaceous curve.

Denny flamed out in the World Series in ‘68, but he came back to co-win another Cy Young in 1969.

But in 1970, Denny started to go sideways.

The warning signs had been there. Even when he had success on the diamond, Denny flaunted team rules. He jetted across the country, playing the organ—during the season. He engaged in shady financial practices, once involving some of his teammates in a failed paint business.

There were whispers—more like shouts—that Denny had also got himself involved with some mobsters. He gambled freely. He commiserated with bookies. Rumor still has it that gangsters stomped on Denny’s foot late in the 1967 season, knocking him out of commission while the Tigers were embroiled in a tense pennant race.

Denny was a free spirit, and he marched to the beat of his own drummer—and Jim Campbell hated that.

In 1970, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended McLain for the first half of the season for the gambling and mobster allegations. Then Denny doused a couple of sportswriters with a bucket of ice water. Later, Kuhn suspended him again for carrying a gun in violation of his probation.

Denny had turned into a full-time pain in the ass and won all of three games in 1970. So when the Senators’ Short showed interest in acquiring McLain, it was all Jim Campbell could do to not choke on his own saliva.

On October 9, 1970, Campbell finalized the deal—one that was so lopsided that Campbell practically stumbled all over himself to phone it into the league offices before Short came to his senses.

For McLain, third baseman Don Wert, pitcher Norm McRae and outfielder Elliott Maddox, Campbell had coerced Short to cough up third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez, shortstop Eddie Brinkman and pitchers Joe Coleman and Jim Hannan.

Campbell had gotten a starting left side of the infield; a young, up-and-coming starting pitcher; and a bullpen arm from the Senators in exchange for McLain, an aging Wert, and two players the Tigers had no intention of developing.

Rodriguez, Brinkman and Coleman were productive Tigers for several years each. Wert went 2-for-40 for the Senators and retired. McRae did nothing; Maddox did slightly more than nothing.

And Denny McLain?

Denny battled manager Ted Williams and his own degradation of skills all summer. He won 10 games and lost 22. A year later, McLain was finished, performing horribly for Atlanta and Oakland before calling it quits. He was 28 years old.

P.T. Barnum was right—there really was a sucker born every minute.

Ironically, Campbell made another move that offseason that seemed counter to his persona.

Campbell fired manager Mayo Smith—he was nothing like he was in 1968, either—and replaced him with the volatile Billy Martin, who wasn’t the type of manager that Campbell normally fancied.

But Campbell felt the 1970 Tigers had laid down so badly for Smith—and he was right—that the players needed a fiery type to jump start them.

It worked, for a time.

Martin performed his magic and furthered his reputation as a manager who could make chicken salad out of chicken feathers. He guided his aging, creaky team to the 1972 American League East Championship, taking them within one run of the World Series.

By the next season, Martin’s bizarre antics wore Campbell and owner John Fetzer thin, so Campbell fired Billy.

The GM wasn’t going to be anyone’s sucker.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

I’m usurping Bud Selig on this one. I’m railroading the legislation through. I’m going to be judge, jury, and party pooper.

I’m starting the new rule, effective with the 2011 MLB playoffs.

NO champagne celebrations after winning divisional series.

That’s it—record it, stenographer. Have it ready for my signature, forthwith. If I have to fly to New York and enter it into law myself, so be it.

There’s nothing right with acting as if you’ve won some sort of championship, when all you’ve done is advance to your league’s finals.

Yet every year since the Wild Card and, by extension, another layer of playoffs was added to MLB’s postseason, we see the winners of the DS carry on to the hilt—the on-field pile, then the champagne-drenched locker room.

Enough.

Can you imagine this kind of behavior in other sports?

Winning a divisional series in baseball is no different than surviving the second round in the NBA or the NHL; in all three instances, it means your team is in the final four. Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s hardly cause to party as if it was 2099.

I’m not a homer here—I treat the Tigers’ locker room party after they eliminated the Yankees in 2006 no differently. It was over the top, just as all the other post-DS celebrations.

It’s funny, but if you look at old films from World Series celebrations of the 1940s and ’50s, they were amusingly muted. The final out is recorded, and maybe the catcher leaps into the arms of the pitcher. In many scenes I’ve witnessed, there is a simple handshake.

A handshake!!

Oh, there might be a few players slapping each other on the back and occasionally hugging, but there wasn’t much to it.

And that was after winning the World Freaking Series.

Yet here we are today, with divisional series winners reacting as if they just found out that their tax rates were slashed to those of poverty level folks.

So what IS the proper way to celebrate a divisional series win?

Just as you do in the aforementioned NHL and NBA, after winning a conference semifinal series.

Some fist and chest bumps, a few slaps on the back, and a proud walk to the locker room, er, clubhouse.

That’s it.

You want to crack open a bottle at your locker? Then it’d better be pop an Aquafina. Or a beer, tops.

No lining the lockers with protective plastic. I don’t want to see one Andre label. Same rule applies as it does for bats: no cork allowed.

You want to kick it after winning the LCS? Be my guest; knock yourself out. You’ve won a pennant, after all. You have my permission.

But I’m taking a hard line on the LDS celebrations, my friend. There’s a new party sheriff in town, and he’s going to be raining on your parade, starting next year.

If only.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Carlos Guillen has been one of the finest Tigers in recent memory.

A great teammate, a perfect gentleman.

They’ve moved Guillen all around the field, the Tigers have, both to create space for other players, and to try to protect his body. The former has worked much better than the latter.

The switch-hitting Guillen isn’t all that effective from the right side of the plate, but he still gives you more flexibility because of batting righty and lefty.

But when the Yankees’ Brett Gardner plowed into second baseman Guillen in August in an attempt to break up a game-ending double play, the resulting damage to Guillen’s knee meant yet another trip to the disabled list.

Guillen’s Tigers season ended that night in mid-August. Another year of playing in only a fraction of the 162 games.

You’d be honored to go to war with Carlos Guillen on your side, except for the fact that when you’d like to do so, he’d probably be laid up in a hospital bed somewhere.

The physical limitations of the soon-to-be-35-year-old Guillen (September 30th) have been painstakingly documented, literally.

Guillen hasn’t played in over 120 games since 2007, when he appeared in 151 contests. He missed 49 games in 2008, and exactly half the season in 2009 (81 games). In 2005 he played in just 87 games.

Guillen has been a great Tiger, but he’s held together with bailing wire and screws and bolts. He’s not a man, he’s a case study. All that’s missing from Carlos is a big, red nose that lights up, electrified tweezers, and a game box.

It will be among the most gut-wrenching decisions the Tigers have ever made, but it’s looking to be time to consider lopping Guillen from the 40-man roster.

Such a move will go down like castor oil and leave the aftertaste of limburger cheese, but how much longer can the Tigers wait for Guillen to return to health?

What good is he if he’s playing in 70, 80 games a year?

Guillen’s latest injury involves the use of microfracture surgery on his knee. It’s not the most trustworthy of procedures, and the rehab time can be well over a year.

Guillen played second base this season, his fifth full-time position with the Tigers, and he’s only been in Detroit for seven years.

But the Tigers, if they choose to bring Guillen back in 2011, are fooling themselves if they think Guillen can be a viable option for them at second base.

The Tigers ought to hide all his gloves and make him one of those designated hitters the American League says you can have. Full-time, for as long as he shall stay healthy.

If not that, then it should be adios.

The Tigers, should they decide to part ways with Guillen, need to be careful how they handle such a cashiering. They could look awfully callous and cold-hearted if they do it wrong.

Timing is everything, they say.

So the Tigers will likely—and probably should, frankly—allow him to recover from the knee injury and see how he fares.

But Guillen is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.

Guillen is a paradox; he’s versatile yet he’s as fragile as a diva’s ego. He’s great in the clubhouse, except that he’s rarely in the clubhouse.

Guillen wears street clothes more than he does a baseball uniform—and that’s in the summertime.

I’ll go eyeball-to-eyeball with you on this one: I wouldn’t want to be GM Dave Dombrowski when he has to call Guillen into his office and deliver the bad news that will likely need to be delivered.

“Carlos, you’ve been great for this organization but our future plans unfortunately don’t include you.”

The Tigers are trying to build something great again with a mix of their kids from Toledo and the veterans who are able to stay together in one piece.

If Guillen is unable to fully come around after this latest injury, then the Tigers will have to pull a Gary Sheffield on him and release him, forthwith.

Carlos Guillen has been a terrific Tiger. But he can’t seem to stay on the field. There’s always something the matter with him.

He’s a great guy but you can’t rely on him. If his body was as trustworthy as his word or his work ethic or his class, Guillen would be Cal Ripken, Jr.

It’s looking like it’s time to make a decision that won’t be very popular. Not at all.

But it will be the right one.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

He is, to me, the only likable Yankee—Curtis Granderson excluded.

There’s no profundity in hating the New York Yankees, I realize that.

A rumpled sportswriter once said that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel; that quote could be updated, and you’d substitute Microsoft or Comcast for U.S. Steel.

So I’m not the Lone Ranger when it comes to being anti-Yankees.

But nor do I think I’m alone in my admiration of Derek Jeter.

Jeter, the most classy of the Yankees. The best of them, too—Alex Rodriguez NOT excluded.

Derek Jeter, the quiet leader of the best team in baseball.

Jeter is today’s Lou Gehrig on the Yankees. You can spot Jeter easily because he’s the calm in the eye of the storm.

Jeter is as smooth as silk and as lethal as a heart attack.

All Jeter does every season is show up, play his 150+ games, score his 100+ runs, smack the baseball around the ballpark at a .300+ clip, and tend to his position like an Irish cop walking a beat in the Bowery.

He’s not there to please the media types, not there to talk of straws stirring the drink. You have to drag interesting quotes out of him like paper jammed in a copy machine.

I’ve almost thought that Derek Jeter is too good for the Yankees, as a person and as a player.

Jeter belongs on a team made up of players who you’d want your daughter to marry.

I don’t like the Yankees, never have, but I sure do like Derek Jeter.

No one has accumulated more base hits in a Yankees uniform than Derek Sanderson Jeter, whose first and middle names are ironic because they make up the name of a hockey player who was the anti-Jeter.

Jeter is 36 and he’ll have 3,000 hits sometime next season. His 2010 batting average isn’t as robust as normal (.262 as of today), but even Mays and Ruth and Williams were entitled to an anomaly season.

Jeter might be, when all is said and done, the greatest of all the Yankees. In fact, it’s damn likely.

So imagine my consternation when classy Derek Jeter was caught with his hand in the cookie jar the other night.

His arm, to be more accurate.

Jeter, in a key divisional game against the Tampa Rays on Wednesday night, feigned being hit by a pitch and was awarded first base.

Say it ain’t so, Derek!

“The bat,” he said after the game when asked what the baseball hit, without apology. “It’s part of the game.”

Well, damn.

It might be part of the game, but I never thought cheating was part of Jeter’s game.

Everyone does it, I know. As if that’s supposed to make it right.

Sign stealing. Spitballs. The hidden ball trick. Cheating, by definition, though some have called it “gamesmanship.”

But sign stealing, to me, is just cracking codes. The spitball doesn’t always work. Neither does the hidden ball trick.

Besides, those are acts designed to take out your opponent, directly.

What Jeter did in Tampa on Wednesday was a blatant attempt to hoodwink an umpire. And it worked.

I hope Tampa manager Joe Maddon was on something when he said afterward, “I thought Derek did a great job, and I applaud it, because I wish our guys would do the same thing.”

As if baseball needed another reason why it should expand its use of video replay.

“Jeter cheater!” the Tampa fans chanted.

Hard to argue with that.

Derek Jeter, the classiest, best Yankee—maybe of all time—engaging in “gamesmanship.”

Jeter the cheater. What’s next?

Dudley Do-Right is going to leave the girl tied to the railroad tracks? Richie Cunningham is going to sneak a smoke behind the garage? Uncle Bill is going to start hitting the kids from “Family Affair”?

“It’s part of the game,” Jeter said.

Here’s what’s truly part of the game: If players like Derek Jeter are doing it, then there’s no hope for baseball integrity.

Say it ain’t so!

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

It was no less than Tom Seaver—”Tom Terrific”—who went to extraordinary lengths to protect his right arm, which he astutely realized was nothing more than his livelihood.

Seaver, while traveling as a player, wouldn’t carry any of his luggage with his right appendage. In fact, he tried mightily to do nothing with his right arm other than hurl baseballs at 90+ mph toward enemy hitters.

Seaver was the prototypical power pitcher of the 1970s—strong leg kick, violent arm action. His right knee would often scrape the dirt of the mound as he delivered the baseball to home plate. Seaver got more strength from his legs than any pitcher I’ve ever seen.

But it was his exemplary right arm that earned him his living, and so Seaver treated it as the mythical goose who laid the golden eggs.

Seaver enjoyed a long, storied career. A sure-fire Hall of Famer, Seaver was. You could see it coming in the late-1960s, when he burst onto the scene, and throughout the ’70s Seaver was among the top two or three pitchers in baseball.

Seaver knew rightly that at any moment, it all could have come crashing down, no matter how much care he took of his right arm.

The pitcher’s arm wasn’t cobbled together by God to withstand the whiplash-like tension that throwing baseballs incur on it. There’s nothing natural about the pitcher’s throwing motion. If a pitcher’s arm could talk, it would need a seven-second delay.

The American worker is all too familiar with layoffs and downsizing. Most of the time, the worker has no control over whether he stays or he goes.

In a profession where control is everything, a pitcher ironically has none of it, either—in the truest sense.

Companies and corporations lay off workers. A pitcher’s arm decides such matters.

How many times have we seen it? One last, violent whipping of the arm, and something goes snap, crackle, or pop and that’s the last we ever see of that hurler on a big league mound.

Every pitcher is one throw away from the end of his career. Not trying to be dramatic—it’s the truth.

In Detroit, we may have seen the last of lefty Bobby Seay and right-hander Joel Zumaya. Maybe not, but maybe. Both of them have serious arm/shoulder issues. Seay is scheduled to have surgery soon that may knock him out for all of 2011—after missing all of 2010.

It could also knock him out, period.

Zumaya’s injury-pocked career has been frightfully documented. When last seen, Zumaya was rolling around on the grass at Target Field in Minneapolis, in tears due to a broken elbow—an elbow literally broken by throwing a pitch.

Dave Dravecky’s left arm just about snapped off as he delivered a pitch, leading to the arm eventually being amputated.

Amputated!

The young phenom Stephen Strasburg’s career hangs in the balance today, his golden right arm in disrepair.

Strasburg, the biggest thing to hit a pitcher’s mound in years, is 22 years old and will have to undergo Tommy John surgery. If all goes well, Strasburg has a shot of pitching sometime in 2012.

If it doesn’t.

People often ask: What did they call Tommy John surgery before Tommy John came along?

It’s a trick question.

Unlike Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which had a medical name prior to Gehrig’s diagnosis, Tommy John surgery had no name because Tommy John was the first professional athlete to undergo it.

The surgery works thusly: a ligament in the medial elbow is replaced with a tendon from elsewhere in the body (often from the forearm, hamstring, knee, or foot of the patient).

You can imagine how groundbreaking this was when Dr. Frank Jobe famously performed the operation on the Dodgers’ John in 1974. And you can imagine how amazing it was when John returned to form and was pitching again in the big leagues in 1976. Even more astounding was that John pitched until he was 46 years old.

So there’s certainly hope for Strasburg, and baseball, which needs a kid of his freakish ability on an MLB roster.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a professional pitcher and feeling a “twinge” in my elbow or shoulder, or anywhere on my arm for that matter.

I can see why Seaver went to such great lengths to protect his golden egg-laying goose.

Still, it can all end so quickly, without any warning.

I don’t ever begrudge the big league pitcher his large salary. You could be out of the game in your 20s, just like that.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com