Providing Game With Comic Relief : Some Players’ Antics Enliven the Long Baseball Season

Baseball’s old time professionals sniff at the young moderns and claim they don’t have the ability, desire or zaniness of the stars of the 1920s.

They list guys like Rube Waddell (who wrestled alligators), Lefty Gomez (who stopped a game to watch a plane fly over Yankee Stadium) and Dazzy Vance (who wintered in the back of a saloon when he pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers) and say they just ain’t making young players that zany.

Not so. The old timers might be right about their first two points but they’re wrong about the third. The young guys are just as screwy and fun-loving as the guys who went before them.

Jose Cardenal used to store his Afro comb along with balls and hats in the ivy that covers the walls of Wrigley Field--until the day that the late Phil Wrigley, the Cubs’ eccentric owner, learned about it. Wrigley always considered the physical appearance of his ballpark more important than the quality of his team and ordered Cardenal to cease or be fined.

No one is considered zanier than Bill Lee, called “Spaceman” by teammates when he was pitching for the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos. Lee was quick to expound on any subject under the sun and showed none of the traditional respect accorded managers, general managers and owners.

Lee referred to the New York Yankees of the mid-1970s as “Billy Martin’s Brown Shirts” and constantly needled club owner George Steinbrenner.

“I was dumped by Billy’s Brown Shirts,” he once said when blocked by third baseman Graig Nettles. “They’ve been robotized by Herman Goering the Second.”

Danny Gardella, who in 1946 initiated an attack on baseball’s reserve clause that brought sweeping changes to baseball 30 years later when the wartime outfielder was all but forgotten, was another modern zany.

Gardella played only 169 games in the major leagues but became an historic figure when his $300,000 suit against baseball’s reserve clause reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Gardella settled out of court for $60,000, thereby postponing for more than a quarter of a century further action wiping out the reserve clause.

Gardella was known for practical jokes that included leaving suicide notes for roommates amid indications he had jumped out of hotel room windows and suspending himself by his arms from railroad trestles while trains passed overhead.

Few stars of the past could equal the good-natured, fun-loving zaniness of Mark “The Bird” Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers.

Mark drew big crowds as a rookie with his gyrations, smoothing the mound on his hands and knees, acting as a cheerleader when teammates made outstanding plays and tipping his cap to the cheers of the crowds.

His sore arm and subsequent misfortunes probably prevented him from being a Hall of Famer similar to Dizzy Dean, the St. Louis Cardinal Gas House Gang pitcher of the 1930s--a star respected for both his playing ability and good-natured attitude.

Graig Nettles, noted for his sharp wit with both the New York Yankees and San Diego Padres, got some of his own medicine when he told teammate Barry Foote he didn’t understand his duties as captain of the Yankees.

“It’s simple,” said Foote, “You’re No. 2 in the universe behind Steinbrenner. You’re like the captain of a ship. You can now forgive sins and perform weddings.”

Without such tension-relieving, carefree moments, neither the moderns nor the old-timers could make it through the long season.