 19
to 21
No, that’s not how many saves Roy Face had in 1959, it’s,
Baseball... Then and Now
Volume 6, #25, July 22, 2008
News Item: August 15, 1969 - The Montreal Expos release Roy Face,
ending a major league career that helped put Jerome Holtzman in
the Hall of Fame.
Necrology is not usually an edifying subject. Writing obits and
reporting on the passing of former baseball greats normally just
emphasizes the mortality in all of us… something most would
rather not deal with.
Having said that, it is nonetheless worthwhile to note the passing
of Jerome Holtzman, formerly a Chicago baseball writer, author (notably
“No Cheering in the Press Box”) long-time (very long
time, the joke was that he held BBWAA membership card #5) columnist
for The Sporting News, and the Official Historian of Major League
Baseball. Holtzman apparently took this last position very seriously,
to the point where he was more concerned with the “sanctity”
of baseball records than the accuracy thereof. In other words, more
like a sportswriter and less like an historian, he believed history
was history, and couldn’t/shouldn’t be changed. The
case in point came up a couple of decades ago or so, when modern-day
research made some corrections (not changes, corrections) to Honus
Wagner’s batting record (or maybe it was Ty Cobb’s…
actually, it doesn’t really matter who it was, the point is
that some Sabrmetric types dared to fiddle with sacred marks). And,
in a fit of pique that may have later helped convince Bud Selig
that Holtzman would make a good historian for an organization (MLB)
that is pickled, if not paralyzed, by its past, “Jerome Holtzman
has (had) a cow,” as Bill James put it in a memorable essay
from back in his Baseball Abstract days.
Bovine explosions to the contrary, Holtzman was honored by the
Hall of Fame in 1989 with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, more so in
part for his long service to the sport, and for literally creating
the “save” statistic in 1959, a stat that was eventually
adopted by the game's Official Rules Committee in 1969. (Of course,
this means that James should really be recognized by the Hall at
some point for, at the very least, runs created, if not win shares
or game scores or any of the other myriad metrics he has created.)
Holtzman felt, correctly, that ERA (James would later prove statistically
that relievers have an ERA advantage of something like 0.2) and
won-lost records were not an accurate reflection of relievers' effectiveness,
in part in light of Roy Face’s 1959 season, when he went 18-1.
Holtzman, who covered the Cubs that year for the Chicago Daily Times,
was highly suspicious of Face’s “great” year,
and discovered from a colleague’s scorebook that 10 of Face’s
18 wins were “vultured,” that is, he’d either
blown a save or gave up a tying run to become the pitcher of record
in a game the Pirates eventually won. In other words, he had one
of the luckiest, not the greatest, relief seasons in history. (He
only had 10 saves, although he did have an ERA+ of 143).
It is true that Jerome Holtzman deserved to be honored by the Hall
of Fame while he was still alive to smell the roses. He was a pioneer,
an innovator whose work helped to define an important aspect of
the game and a long term contributor to the sport as a media person.
But, what then are we to make of Sherman "Jocko" Maxwell,
who died at the age of 100 just a few hours after the conclusion
of the 2008 Some Star Game? It says here that the Hall of Fame has
dropped the ball on Mr. Maxwell, as surely as it dropped the ball
on Buck O’Neil. For Jocko is just as deserving of Hall of
Fame honors as Jerome Holtzman, or Bill James, for that matter.
There have been 32 baseball broadcasters honored by the Hall of
Fame. Jocko Maxwell wasn’t one of them when he died in his
101st year. And that’s as a shame.
Recall the Hall election of two years ago when a cartload of Negro
League figures were (belatedly) inducted into the Hall. Inducted
posthumously, since all of the individuals on that ballot had, in
most cases, long since passed away, with the exception of O’Neil,
who would die soon thereafter. The fact is that many of those inductees
might not have been so honored if it wasn’t for the pioneering
work of Jocko Maxwell.
Who was Jocko Maxwell, who died on July 16 at a nursing home in
West Chester, Pa.? He was the first African-American sportscaster,
and one of the first chroniclers of the Negro League game. How important
was he? Well, when the Newark Eagles won the 1946 Negro League World
Series, they had four players and a female general manger (Effa
Manley – the only woman inductee in the Hall) who would, after
the recently-referenced election be a part of the Hall of Fame.
Without Maxwell’s contributions to the game, it’s possible
none of them would be in Cooperstown.
Although Sherman made his living as a postal worker in Newark,
he moonlighted at night as a sportscaster. He was also a sportswriter,
submitting stories to the Newark Afro-Americans and the Newark Ledger,
the predecessor of the Newark Star-Ledger, on games played by the
Newark Eagles. Maxwell also founded and managed the Newark Starlings,
a semipro, mixed-race team.
Maxwell began broadcasting in 1929, when commercial radio barely
existed at all, doing a five-minute weekly sports report on WNJR
in Newark at age 22. He also appeared on WHOM in Jersey City, and
WAAT in Newark, and eventually became the public address announcer
for Sunday afternoon Newark Eagles games at old Ruppert Stadium.
(Not the fictional version of Roth’s “The Great American
Novel,” but the real one.) His broadcasting career ended in
1967.
“Jocko was on his own mission,” wrote the Star-Ledger’s
Jerry Izenberg. “He let the world know what was going on in
places like Ruppert Stadium and Forbes Field and Comiskey Park when
the `other’ teams (which meant blacks) took over from the
regular tenants. And in his way, he made the part of America that
would listen know all about these black knights of the open road.
“The first thing about Jocko to know is that there would
be very few records of the Negro Leagues that are accurate, and
there would be almost none, without him.”
Along with the great Negro Leagues writers, Sam Lacy and Wendell
Smith come quickly to mind, Maxwell fulfilled a vital function in
the game’s history, that of publicizing and promoting black
baseball before and after Jackie Robinson. As much as Bill James
deserves the Spink Award for his contributions to the game (and
whether or not you like Sabrmetrics, you cannot deny he has immensely
influenced the game), so to does Jocko Maxwell (and Lacy and Smith,
too) deserve that singular honor. It is indeed unfortunate that
he had to die for his name to be brought forth in memory of his
contributions.
-- John Shiffert
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