Wednesday, May 15, 2013
MLB.COM: Longtime Royals radio voice Fred White dies
(mlb.mlb.com)
posted 1 week ago by The Non-Catching Molina (sjs1959) to broadcasting, fred white, royals
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9 comment(s)
RIP Fred White
Fred White, a Royals radio voice for 25 years, died Wednesday due to complications from melanoma, a day after announcing his retirement following a 40-year relationship with the club.
White teamed with Denny Matthews on broadcasts from 1973-98, and since had served as the team’s director of broadcast services and the Royals Alumni.
His retirement was due to health issues, and he died in hospice care.
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1. Good cripple hitter posted on July 29, 2011 at 09:34 PM # hit 0 | hit 0The Tribune? Seriously? There is no way the belong on an all time list of bad owners.
Other than bullfighting, how many are there, exactly?
Sounds pretty good to me.
And Andrew Friedman.
Actually, an enormous percentage of the worst owners ever were probably in the 1800s.
I knew the Trib would be on the list before I even opened this thread, but I'm with you. I don't see how they belong there, and the evidence presented is pretty weak tea. If nothing else, they left the franchise in much better shape than they found it.
I couldn't remember his name, but that was the first person other than Loria that I thought of (along with Bill Bidwell but he's football)
Pretty crappy list.
Their third baseman, Joe Dugan had been recently acquired from the Red Sox as well as their shortstop, Everett Scott and their catcher Wally Schang. And, then there was Ruth.
Without Frazee there's no start of the yankee dynasty.
Christ, the Red Sox had him and ten years after he was gone, dumb drunk bigot Yawkey.
When I remember how Bill Veeck organized his disco-burning event at Comiskey Park, I refuse to take ANYTHING he said seriously. He couldn't consistently beat Webb and Topping on the field, so he figured he could smear them.
Without Arnold Johnson, it doesn't continue. He should be #1 (IMHO), and he didn't even make the list.
Edited for cApitAlization
Topping and Webb may well fry in hell as human beings, but while they owned the team the Yankees won 15 pennants and 10 World Series in 20 years. I'll take tradeoffs like that, even if Bill Veeck was my alltime favorite owner and even if it took a decade of purgatory to revive the franchise after they left.
Well, I'm rather surprised at your lack of principle here. You might consider, moreover, that that doesn't refute the contentions--and those are some pretty awful charges leveled. The Yankees may have won; fine. That was then. That doesn't mean they still do what they are charged with doing. That doesn't mean they didn't gut their team and sell out their league for construction contracts. They acted in ways that were self-serving personally, that did not serve the Yankee organization or the American League. If you're satisfied with them winning while draining the tanks and running on empty, good. There is another way of looking at that, though, that isn't quite so narrow.
you had three young successful pitchers in Stottlemyre, Bouton and Downing. Keane had just won the world series in St Louis. But these guys aged quickly or had injuries misdiagnosed (Maris). Plus did CBS put a premium on winning? Did the Yankees ever make any big trades with CBS ownership? They did draft Munson instead of Valentine so kudos for that.
If you are going to leave out the 19th century owners, what about some more modern guys, like those who owned the hapless Cleveland Nap-less Naps in the 1960s, 70s and 80s? The 1964 team had some good young pitchers in Tiant, McDowell and John. But if you are making a list, the names of Stouffer and Mileti don't resonate like Frazee or Schott (although Mileti deserves praise for giving Frank Robinson a chance to manage. It took the NFL 15 years to hire a black manager, and that was by Rozelle's worst enemy).
This, of course, should read "didn't do what they are charged with doing."
Well, I'm rather surprised at your lack of principle here. You might consider, moreover, that that doesn't refute the contentions--and those are some pretty awful charges leveled. The Yankees may have won; fine. That was then. That doesn't mean they still do what they are charged with doing. That doesn't mean they didn't gut their team and sell out their league for construction contracts. They acted in ways that were self-serving personally, that did not serve the Yankee organization or the American League. If you're satisfied with them winning while draining the tanks and running on empty, good. There is another way of looking at that, though, that isn't quite so narrow.
I guess I can walk and chew gum at the same time, and I guess I can grant every point you and Bill Veeck make about Webb's and Topping's character and still not consign them to a list of the "10 worst" owners in history. With such a rich pool of lowlifes and losers to choose among, I'd think that Da Winnahs would have to be closer to five tool "worsts", and not just among the worst in terms of morals.
Look, I wish that my alltime favorite owner Bill Veeck had been wealthy enough to buy the Yankees in 1945, and been healthy enough to hang onto them until the day he died, because in that case the Yanks would have had on-the-field success (by not ignoring black players) while not creeping out much of the civilized world. But sorry, 15 pennants and 10 sets of rings in a mere 20 years elevate you well above the likes of Frazee, Short and Gerry Nugent in terms of "worst baseball owner".
Now if you want to divide the list into two separate categories of "most lowlife" and "most hapless", then maybe you've got a point about the first of these. But from what I'm reading out of the article, "the worst" is more of a combination package, and by that standard Webb and Topping are nowhere near the bottom.
You said it, brother. If Yawkey hadn't have been Yawkey, Weiss couldn't have been Weiss. And if Bill Veeck had had the money at his disposal that either of those two had, neither of them would have been running into Mr. Sportshirt in the Cooperstown plaque room.
Of course as a native-born fan of Satan's Pajamas since 1950, I'm kind of glad he didn't, but that's another story.
When you're a furniture salesman who ends up as president/owner of the team by marrying the secretary to the current owner, and she inherits half the team (does that seem odd to anyone else?) when the owner dies, and then you get the other half when the owner's wife dies - you better have agreat plan to deal with your utter lack of money.
Probably too high on the list, just due to lacking evil.
But can you tap dance while singing "Night and Day" like Fred Astaire? If you think that winning is all that matters, that it validates and whitewashes all--even if it comes to compromising the integrity of the business--fine. I don't, and neither did, and do, a lot of other people. No, it doesn't take their trophies and pennants away (just as Rose still has his batting crowns, etc.), but, yes, it does take away from their legacies as owners in their business with a duty to that profession. I see this exactly like those people who clamor for Rose's induction to the HOF, claiming that the only thing that matters,that the only thing that should be considered, when it comes to awards is what he did on the field. I say, and others do, too: bull. To Rose and to Webb and Topping. All red herrings about Yawkey and Veeck to one side, Webb and Topping sold out their team and their league (and ultimately MLB) just as if they had thrown games. Indeed, in the long term, it may have been a lot worse. Keep dancing. And chewing gum.
No, I'm not, and I made that clear with my Rose comparison. Getting an award (good or bad) for something isn't just about superficialities--about numbers. I would think you, of all people, would understand that. A manager, an owner, a teacher, a priest--anyone in any profession--can win whatever, but they don't get awards if they #### on that profession--if they cheat and corrupt their profession.
You're the one that keeps introducing that red herring moral wheeze stuff. I'm telling you it had to do with winning (in the long term) and with the league winning in the long-term. I mentioned nothing about morals--I mentioned gutting their own team, selling out their team and league for personal profit when they found themselves with the whip hand. All the pennants and the rings in the world don't change that--AND their particular dereliction had specifically to do with the game. It's not tangential at all. That makes them the worst owner--it directly has to do with baseball, their team, and their league.
No, I'm not, and I made that clear with my Rose comparison. Getting an award (good or bad) for something isn't just about superficialities--about numbers. I would think you, of all people, would understand that. A manager, an owner, a teacher, a priest--anyone in any profession--can win whatever, but they don't get awards if they #### on that profession--if they cheat and corrupt their profession.
You're the one that keeps introducing that red herring moral wheeze stuff. I'm telling you it had to do with winning (in the long term) and with the league winning in the long-term. I mentioned nothing about morals--I mentioned gutting their own team, selling out their team and league for personal profit when they found themselves with the whip hand. All the pennants and the rings in the world don't change that--AND their particular dereliction had specifically to do with the game. It's not tangential at all. That makes them the worst owner--it directly has to do with baseball, their team, and their league.
Two questions:
How does any of the above NOT relate to the question of morality? Don't you think that Bill Veeck might put what Topping and Webb (and George Weiss) did to him in those terms? Don't you think that there's at least a whiff of moral wheeze in trying to cripple two opposition teams?
But then (second question): How many other owners throughout history have put their own personal profit above that of either their teams, their league, or both? You could stuff an encyclopedia with examples of the former, and it'd take more than a magazine to hold the many tales of the latter.
In terms of how Topping / Webb hurt their own team, they didn't pursue black players with nearly the same degree of enthusiasm (drollery added) that they pursued white players. In that, their lack of enthusiasm was shared (further drollery) by the owners of all but two other franchises (Cleveland and Chicago) in the American League. Spike Briggs and Tom Yawkey trailed W/T in that respect by 3 and 4 years respectively, and Clark Griffith beat them by all of a month.
They also skimped on maintaining the farm system in their last few years, which in great part was responsible for their post-ownership drought. But first, before that happened there was the matter of all that prior success. And second, the CBS/Burke team wasn't exactly breaking the bank to correct their neglect.
In terms of how they hurt the league, you've got two main arguments, both of them fairly good: Baltimore (forcing out Veeck) and Kansas City (the sweetheart arrangement with Johnson). But with your knowledge of baseball history, you surely realize that such shenanigans (Drollery III) weren't invented by Webb and Topping, and that you can cite many other examples with but a bit of digging.
Again, you can put all this together and assign whatever weight you want to all these factors. But "one of the 10 worst owners"? That's stretching it a hell of a lot.
And BTW just to make one minor point clear: I'm not nominating Webb or Topping for the HoF, any more than I'm nominating Pete Rose or Barry Bonds for that highest of baseball honors. But I'm also not saying that either of those two were among the "10 worst" players in baseball history. That's what I mean about walking and chewing gum, or putting a move on Shanghai Lil while hoofing it over a bar counter.
All six of your posts in this thread refer to some dark deeds by Topping and Webb without actually saying what these deeds were. They did what for their own personal profit that other owners wouldn't do? What does "selling out the league" mean? What does "they found themselves with the whip hand" mean? What does it mean to "corrupt their profession"? How does this outweight being possibly the most successful ownership group, in terms of wins, in baseball history?
With respect to the corrupt arrangement with Kansas City, doesn't that actually mean Kansas City had a terrible owner, not that the Yankees did?
That’s how I look at questions like who are the worst owners (or managers or players). That’s why I think Webb and Topping are bad. Continuing my movie analogy, I was going to say that Webb was essentially the Louis B. Mayer of owners, and he Yankees are the MGM baseball, but it’s more like Webb was like the investors and distributors that owned the studios. He didn’t just own the Yankees; he also had a big construction company and he was always using his Yankee leverage to hustle business for that company.
(And to tell you the truth, now that it comes to mind, Branch Rickey wasn’t an unalloyed plus for baseball either—he and his farm system concept were bad for baseball, big time, and that’s a huge negative part of his legacy that’s rarely discussed extensively. Funny how he should break one barrier only to insist on instituting another one. Rickey reminds me of LBJ--such a man of extremes, seemingly people bent on vindicating prior iniquities with grand and grandiose acts of penance.)
Basically, Webb was perfectly willing to use his Yankee leverage and influence to aggrandize his company, even if meant compromising the interests of his league (and to be fair, maybe in his solipsistic self-interest he didn't see the contradiction, probably because he didn't try to see it, though), and ultimately that of the Yankees, too—all that was secondary to his getting those building contracts for his company. His actions in the ‘50’s, culminating in the expansion talks of @1960 resulted in the American League getting short-shrifted at practically every turn when it came to team movements and new team’s expansion territories—either the American League was left with the smaller market or a weaker combine was allowed to gain ownership of a franchise or it entered a large market like LA later than it could have under stricter, even unfair, conditions that the Yankees didn’t back the league in fighting or objecting to.
The American League because of the Yankees ended up moving from St. Louis to Baltimore and from Philadelphia to Kansas City in the early ‘50’s when with some Yankee assertiveness it might gone to Los Angeles or Milwaukee or Houston, the St. Louis franchise because Webb and Topping were engaged in a vicious vendetta to first destroy, then run, Veeck out of baseball and in doing so were perfectly willing to first bankrupt St. Louis then institute a weak ownership that made the franchise precarious in Baltimore. Johnson, their chosen owner for the A’s, who moved it to Kansas City (and everyone knew he was going to do this), when other prospective owners (including Veeck) were more ambitious in their plans, had huge mortgages he owed to Webb and had agreed to give Webb's company the contract to refurbish or build the stadium there.
Similarly, later, a weak ownership was approved for Washington when the Griffiths moved to Minnesota, despite the fact that there were better financed and more knowledgeable options available. The Yankees were always ready to suffocate prospective rivals in the cradle. This was all while they worked against AL people who wanted to go to Milwaukee ahead of the Braves move or to Los Angeles ahead of the Dodgers or even maybe to Houston—although that’s probably more attenuated: Still, he and the Yankees allowed Frick (that suck-up to the NL) to blackball Clint Murchinson and Sid Richardson because of Murchinson’s involvement in “gambling” activities, which, according to Veeck, was strictly about horse track proceeds that went to children’s camp funds--in other words it was silly and trivial, especially when you consider Webb was very much in the gambling business, and had even used players like Mantle and Ford to promote his casinos and stuff long before that debacle with Mantle and Mays in the '70's.
No, the Dodgers got Los Angeles. The Giants went to San Francisco. And St. Louis dragged its ass to Baltimore. Weak owners were installed in Washington and Baltimore, and when the AL finally got to go to LA, that franchise had to go as a vassal state of the O’Malley’s Dodgers, encumbered by all sorts of inhibiting conditions. Webb and the Yankees play a part at every turn practically in the American League always getting the short end of the stick in the ‘50’s and in the later expansion talks. Webb backed Frick (who was a do-nothing commissioner and a sycophant of national league owners, especially of O’Malley) and O’Malley, and blatantly shilled for them, in keeping the Hank Greenberg combine from getting the Los Angeles franchise because Greenberg wouldn’t suck O’Malley’s dick. He did it for the construction contracts (the Dodgers were building and the Angels would be building). Frick had declared both New York and Los Angeles open cities. The American League accepted this docilely because the Yankees didn’t balk, and didn't support the other owners when they objected to something, but O’Malley didn’t reciprocate—why should he when there was so little countervailing force. He, in his lordly fashion, demanded all sorts of concessions from whoever was going to be the new AL franchise owners. Autry and Co. kowtowed.
In fact, Webb’s shenanigans got so rank when it came to running interference for O'Malley and the NL at expense of the Al and the AL franchise in LA at the expansion talks that even Topping (who had flatly told Veeck in 1952-53 that they were out to bust him and run him out of baseball) finally had enough and broke rank, saying if the Yankees were willing to accept that New York was an open city, so should the Dodgers be willing to accept the same about LA. Topping and Webb had some heated exchanges that threatened the partnership—and may have doomed it in the long run, bringing about the sale to CBS. Because the Yankees were not an effective counterweight to the Dodgers, the AL was effectively in a weaker bargaining position. The Yankees, in a short run strategy, were perfectly willing to allow their pond to shrink, as long as they got to be the big fish in that pond, and were allowed certain “fishing” concessions in the other pond.
(Not only that, Jolly Old, but according to Veeck, Yawkey was pretty nice guy--so there.)
Pass.
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