Major-League Smokers And Other Missed Opportunities

Sports Illustrated just published online 25 Things We Miss in Baseball. The list, which includes prosaic things like stirrups, no pepper signs, and high leg kicks, is largely hit-or-miss. I would, though, gladly welcome back into the game Youppi, the Expos mascot of indeterminate origins, and bullpen carts. Ditto balanced schedules and, if I'm being honest, organ music.

More interesting, I think, is the magazine’s companion 1o Things We Don’t Miss in Baseball, particularly numbers 5 and 7—Terrible Uniforms and Players Smoking in the Dugout—which, as a fan, I desperately want to see put back into practice right away, like before the first pitch of tonight’s game. Seriously, who wouldn’t want to see, say, Roy Oswalt taking the mound in this? Or Jamie Moyer lighting up in between innings, like Harvey Haddix did throughout his 13-inning, near-perfect game on May 26, 1959? 

I'm serious. Who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing this every night?

 

Or this?

Hell yeah. In fact, the more I think about these two lists, the more I realize that if I were to put together a Venn Diagram, the Cardinals-era Keith Hernandez, with his stirrups, quality stache, reported philandering, cookie-cutter, faux-grass home park, old-school manager, and, most importantly, his pack of smokes, would be its union. Just one more reason to love Mex. Thanks, SI, for a job well done. 

The Fall of the House of Dykstra

The New Yorker's Ben McGrath offers a pretty damning post mortem on Lenny Dykstra, the former Met hero and latterday contagion of the financial industry who filed for bankruptcy yesterday morning:

His grand plan included a partnership with A.I.G., the soon-to-fail insurance giant; his great champion in the investment world was Jim Cramer, the “Mad Money” host, who was later forced to repent for his irrationally exuberant ways in front of Jon Stewart. But, in retrospect, perhaps the most telling detail about Dykstra’s complicity in the age of magical thinking can be found in the Mitchell Report, baseball’s Book of Atonement for steroids. It describes a meeting that took place nearly ten years ago between Dykstra and Kevin Hallinan, an official in the commissioner’s office: “According to Hallinan, Dykstra said that using steroids eliminated the need for him to work out during the season.

That Dyskstra, a man Keith Hernandez denounced for his off-the-field antics, was celebrated as a stock market whiz by anyone, speaks volumes about how out of hand things got in the financial industry. Now that I think about it, with guys like Dykstra, Bernie Madoff, Joe Cassano and countless others running amok, I'm actually shocked the dollar is still worth the paper it's printed on. If you can stomach it, take a look at the following clip of Bernie Goldberg's Real Sports spot about Dykstra from, I believe, early last spring. It's not pretty.