Sight Unseen -- Blind Woman Throws First Pitch at Dodger Stadium

Lorri Bernson delivers the first pitch as her guide dog, Carter looks

on prior to the Dodgers-Padres game at Dodgers Stadium on Monday,

Aug. 29, 2011. Many local guide dogs in training were on hand to

watch the event. (Andy Holzman/Daily News Staff Photographer)

by Dennis McCarthy

L.A. Daily News

August 30, 2011

Lorri Bernson was having a bad case of game day jitters on Monday.

In a few hours, the 48-year-old Encino woman would be walking out to the mound at Dodger Stadium - accompanied by her guide dog, Carter - to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.

She's been practicing with friends at Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Park - listening for the catcher's voice and the sound of the ball hitting leather to judge the distance and arc of her throw.

It's tough enough for sighted people to make the throw from the front of the mound to home plate. Imagine not being able to see home plate at all.

But Bernson knew she'd have some help out there. Carter would be at her side to nudge her in the right direction if she got turned around.



Guide dogs in training line up along the first base line as Lorri

Bernson delivers the first pitch with her guide dog, Carter prior

to the Dodgers-Padres game at Dodgers Stadium on Monday,

Aug. 29, 2011. (Andy Holzman/Daily News Staff Photographer)

Monday was a big night for Guide Dogs of America, the Sylmar-based nonprofit organization that teams up 50 dogs a year with people who have lost their sight.

Bernson lost her sight to diabetes in 1995, and came here in 2002 to train with her first guide dog, Nigel, a golden retriever she retired last year at age 10.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, but it was time," Bernson says. "He was slowing down, losing his reflexes and quickness to respond.

"He did his job for eight years. He protected and loved me."

She often gets asked if Nigel - now back living with the couple who trained him as a puppy - ever saved her life?

"Every day I walked out of my apartment," Bernson answers. That's how important guide dogs are to the blind.

When Ned Colletti, the Dodger's general manager, visited the Sylmar facility late in 2009, Bernson asked him if the Dodgers might be interested in sponsoring her and her new guide dog as they went through training together.

It wasn't cheap - about $40,000 for a dog bred to be trained as a guide dog, along with room and board for a month together at the facility and miscellaneous training costs.

"I was looking to donate to a group that makes an impact on lives and that's what Guide Dogs of America does," Colletti says.

"I have it written in my contract that I get to donate to the charity of my choice every year and the Dodgers will match it.

"Carter was our first and we had our second dog graduate in April. My goal is a third one by the end of the year."

So, officially, Carter is the first, real-life Dodger dog, says Bernson, trying to find a laugh to cure her game day jitters.

"At first I thought I'd have Carter take the ball in his mouth and bring it to the catcher," she say. "But that's not what guide dogs do. It would have sent the wrong message."

So, she would throw out the first pitch. It was in the dirt, a little wide. But it was close.

Lorri Bernson pets her guide dog Carter prior to throwing out the

first pitch at the Dodgers-Padres game at Dodgers Stadium on Monday,

Aug. 29, 2011. (Andy Holzman/Daily News Staff Photographer)

Mike Flanagan Brought Unique Perspective to the Top of the Mound

Mike Flanagan, a former Cy Young winner and

part of the Baltimore Orioles’ 1983 World Series

championship team, has died. He was 59.

By Thomas Boswell

Washington Post,

August 25, 2011

Mike Flanagan was the best student of people, the toughest pitch-hurt competitor, the most unselfish teammate and the best world-leery wit of any Oriole of his time. Nobody was like him — at all.

A few years ago, the O's honored former manager Earl Weaver with a plaque that's on the wall, waist-high, in their dugout. "Oh, life size," Flanagan quipped.

When he was a kid pitcher who allowed too many steals, Flanny threw a sideline session as Weaver watched. Suddenly Earl began running, yelling, "I just stole second on you."

"How'd you ever get on base?" Flanagan replied.

That is the best-known version of Flanagan: the droll New Hampshire stoic, watching bemused, waiting with a needle that he never dug too deep. But there were several other Flannys, all worth valuing now in the wake of his death Wednesday at age 59.

Once, when no Oriole would say a good word for smart, angry, drug-plagued teammate Alan Wiggins, Flanagan analyzed, rather than judged.

"I always tend to give people two or three more chances than they deserve. That might help you in the long run because they give you more chances, too," he said. "Maybe Alan gave everybody two or three less chances than they deserved. So they gave him no chances at all."

That was Flanagan, too.

In 1983, Flanny pitched with a four-pound brace on his knee. The league knew he was, once again, sacrificing another notch off the power arm that won him the 1979 Cy Young Award. But as he had in several seasons, he wanted to help the O's while other, slower-healing pitchers waited until they could stand the pain. Flanagan's tough-it-out code, the product of being a third-generation pro pitcher, probably turned a potentially stellar career into a merely very good one: 167-143. But it brought vast dividends of respect.

That year on the O's beat, I waited for somebody to bunt for a hit against Flanagan while he was wearing that brace. Nobody did, not even with a pennant at stake. It was beneath the dignity of the game to exploit him — because he wouldn't throw at hitters, because he never took his spitball out of the bullpen and because, in his prime, he loved the challenge of attacking the strengths of the greatest hitters, such as Jim Rice.

That, also, was Flanagan.

During the bleakest years of Peter Angelos's tenure as Orioles owner, few respected baseball executives would come to Baltimore. But Flanagan was always an Oriole first, all else a distant second. He befriended Angelos, tried to understand him, influence him for the best and explain him to others. As executive vice president of baseball operations from 2005 to '08, he was the public face of the franchise.

It didn't work. Just as he abused his arm for Weaver and the team, Flanagan sacrificed some of his reputation as an exec by being identified with Angelos. After Andy MacPhail became general manager, there was no logical place for Flanagan. He called friends throughout baseball to pick brains about jobs in other front offices. None apparently materialized.

After serving in more Orioles roles than any Baltimore player, including two stints as pitching coach, Flanagan went back to the TV broadcast booth to explain the latest 95-loss year — insightfully, generously and sardonically.

Flanagan was respected, beloved and seen as an exemplar of the best in the word "pro," because he was so completely guided by his own internal compass of values. Ballplayers have just as much difficulty figuring out who they are as everybody else — maybe more, at times, because their stardom lets them delay maturation. Wise beyond years, Flanagan knew himself.

For example, when he was the reigning Cy Young winner, he showed me how to cheat. He scuffed one side of a ball, just two marks with a coat hanger in his locker. He played catch with Dennis Martinez to show how, effortlessly, he suddenly had four new pitches.

"It's the same principle as a flat-sided Wiffle ball," he said. "You hold the ball with the scuffed side opposite to the direction you want it to break. It takes no talent whatsoever."

Why don't you do it?

"My real stuff's still too good," said Flanagan, who won 23 games with the best left-handed curveball in the American League and a fastball in the 90s.

Then, seriously, he said: "I can understand why they do it and I can't swear that I won't ever do it, but I still hate it. [Once] when I was hurt, I got to the point where I actually took the mound thinking I'd cheat that day. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. I thought, 'If you'll do this now, just to have a little better chance to win, what won't you do eventually?'

"I guess I just felt too conspicuous out there."

Conspicuous to whom?

"Myself, I guess."

Flanagan always called his job description "fool on the hill" and wore a T-shirt under his uniform that said "Dead Goat Saloon." Even as a player, you'd see him reading serious novels. Once, asked what he would have done if he were not a baseball player, he referred back to the old John Belushi skit on "Saturday Night Live" and said, "I think I'd have made an excellent Killer Bee."

Flanagan was a first port of call for Orioles with problems because he had had his share. "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars — on stars where no human race is," New Hampshire's Robert Frost wrote. "I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places."

Sometimes, Flanagan wore a black suit in summer, and his humor bore the etymology of the root word that described it: "mordant." But what those who knew him best will recall — first and erasing all else — were his eyes crinkling to a slit with laughter and, behind those eyes, a bone-deep desire to give, even for things not asked, while taking little.

After years of frustration, when the O's won the '83 World Series, Flanagan said, "Now we got what we all wanted: a highlight film with a happy ending."

This week, we don't get the happy ending, but we can keep our highlights, our memories, of the life and the man, which still shine brighter than any trophy.

A’s Await Film, But Without the Ending They Wanted

[Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press]

The Oakland teams Billy Beane built a

decade ago went toe to toe with the Yankees

and the Red Sox in the postseason.

By Tyler Kepner, New York Times

August 23, 2011

The Oakland Athletics close their home schedule Sept. 22, and the next day they open their run in theaters everywhere. The movie version of “Moneyball,” about the rise of the A’s under Billy Beane, will depict a moment in time that is much different from today. Its inspiration will watch in that context.

“I’ve seen a couple of cuts, and there is a bit of nostalgia about it,” Beane said on the phone this week. “I forgot some of the guys on that team. It’s been a while.”

[Melinda Sue Gordon/Columbia Pictures]

Brad Pitt, left, with the actor Jonah Hill, plays

Athletics General Manager Billy Beane in “Moneyball,”

the new film based on Michael Lewis's book.

Beane is still the Athletics’ general manager, and he speaks somewhat reluctantly about the movie, other than to acknowledge there are worse things in life than having Brad Pitt play you on film. He says he does not want to distract from his job, which has become far more challenging than it was from 2000 through 2003, when the A’s made the playoffs each season.

The version that held on for a 6-5 win arrived at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night is still 15 games out of first place in the American League West. Competitive for two months, the A’s collapsed under the weight of injuries to their rotation. This will almost surely be their fifth season in a row without reaching the postseason.

“Billy was on to something, and it worked pretty well, so much so that other teams caught onto it,” said Craig Breslow, the Yale-educated Oakland reliever who has read the Michael Lewis book that inspired the movie.

“For a while, it was a market inefficiency. Certain players were undervalued, and Billy could identify them, the guys who projected well. Now, we’re obviously not going to be able to outbid some of the other teams that are using those same metrics. Now guys that hit home runs and get on base a lot cost $20 million a year. Where’s the next place to look?”

That is the question Beane struggles to solve. The subtitle of Lewis’s masterpiece was “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and in Oakland’s case, the game is even less fair than it was before.

Since the 2002 season depicted in the book, every team that has wanted a new stadium has gotten or is getting one, except the Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays. The A’s are blocked from moving to San Jose because of the San Francisco Giants’ territorial rights; the planned Cisco Field in Fremont, Calif., fell through; and there seems to be no viable option for staying in Oakland.

It makes one wonder if Beane, signed through 2014, would be intrigued by another general manager’s job, like the one now open with the Chicago Cubs.

“You’re never going to have equilibrium in terms of revenues everywhere,” Beane said. “But, listen, we’re all competitive, so it certainly gets frustrating. Just being able to carve out a future for the franchise has been most frustrating. Because of the venue situation, it’s hard to put together a business plan beyond the next fiscal year.”

Of course, the A’s have faced a cash-flow problem for years. In the first scene depicted in a “Moneyball” trailer, Pitt-as-Beane revels in it. “There are rich teams, there are poor teams,” he says, before admonishing his staff. “We’ve got to think different.”

By challenging traditional scouting methods and recognizing the value of digging deeper into statistics, the 2002 A’s found useful players to surround a nucleus of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Miguel Tejada and Barry Zito. They won 103 games and the A.L. West.

Beane was sharp enough to apply some of the premises percolating for years in the minds of analysts like Bill James — and Lewis was perceptive enough to notice. Beane has been criticized for cooperating with Lewis, for spilling his secrets. But there was probably no stopping the information revolution in baseball. Executives were bound to get wiser.

“There are a lot of smart guys running teams now, and a lot of the guys who are smart also have a lot of money,” Beane said. “That’s a pretty tough combination to go against. We’ve all started valuing the same things.

“Clubs like us and Minnesota used to place really high value on young, inexperienced players. Now teams at the top of the food chain are doing the same thing, and it’s really hard to find trade partners. So it usually comes down to money. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is actually greater today. The window for small-market clubs is shorter and shorter.”

The A’s finished .500 last season, anchored by their rotation. But free-agent hitters like Adrian Beltre and Lance Berkman declined Beane’s offers, and through Monday, Oakland’s offense had outscored only one other A.L. team, Seattle. Injuries claimed starters Brett Anderson and Dallas Braden months ago.

So the A’s forge on, desperate for direction. With more money to spend on collecting and analyzing data, Beane said, perhaps the A’s could spot and exploit the next undervalued commodity. Instead, they are reduced to taking fliers. They spent $10 million last season for Ben Sheets, hoping he could find his inner ace. He blew out his elbow. In 2008, they spent $4.25 million on Michael Ynoa, a 16-year-old pitcher from the Dominican Republic. He pitched nine innings in rookie ball before having reconstructive elbow surgery.

“Sometimes, you’re relegated to buying that lottery ticket,” Beane said. “Anybody will tell you that the lottery is not a great way to invest your money. But sometimes, you don’t have a lot of options.”

Frustrating View of Game Day

                                                       (Tadej Znidarcic for The New York Times)

Members of the Uganda team were among those

who went to a video hall in the Nsambya section of

Kampala to watch the Saudi Arabia-Canada game.

By Bandele Adeyemi

New York Times

August 19, 2011

KAMPALA, Uganda — Forty people — coaches, well-wishers and players past, present and future — gathered Friday in a dark video hall in Nsambya, a poor working-class neighborhood here to watch the Little League World Series game between Canada and Saudi Arabia.

 

It was a game that, three weeks earlier, appeared to be the likely destination of the city's Rev. John Foundation Little League team. But there were problems with visa applications, and the State Department denied the players travel documents to the United States. Saudi Arabia, the team they had beaten to advance to the World Series, took their place in the tournament at South Williamsport, Pa. 



(Tom E. Puskar/Associated Press)

Uganda had visa problems and

was replaced in the Little League

World Series by Saudi Arabia,

which lost to Canada.

I want the Saudi Arabia team to win," said Felix Barugahare, 11, a member of the Ugandan team. "They are in our league, and they represent us."

 

Felix and his teammates Augustus Owinyi, 12, and David Arago, 13, were among those who jammed into the hall — a small structure reinforced by wooden poles, sheet metal and cardboard boxes on an unpaved street lined by open gutters.

 

It is one of the few places in Nsambya with electricity, and its 17-inch television provides the only sports entertainment. The players sat without a trace of tension, occasionally smiling and cheering as the Saudis rallied to take the lead in a game they went on to lose, 6-5.

 

(Tadej Znidarcic for The New York Times)

Uganda Coach George Mukhobe,

stands in front of the video hall

where players watched the

Little League World Series.

"It hurts knowing that should have been us," Kirya Arone Jacob, a coach with the team, said as he watched. "But I know we'll have another chance."

 

Coach George Mukhobe took it harder.

 

"I keep wondering why things are happening to us this way," he said. "Is it because we are black? Is it because we are poor?"

 

He added: "You know, some people told me: 'Let's take the gloves, the bats, and burn them. The Americans brought the game to us and now they're stopping us.' "

 

But Mukhobe let cooler heads prevail. He said he went on a mission to motivate his players.

 

In the days after they were denied visas, some of the children were too distraught to practice. Augustus, a first baseman, was among them.

 

"I felt very bad," he said. "Some of us cried. I cried. I wanted to go and represent Uganda."

 

Augustus returned after a week, motivated by soothing words from his coaches.

 

David said he returned to practice immediately, at the urging of his family.

 

"They said to keep playing, that there would be another chance," he said.

 

Richard Stanley of Staten Island, a part-owner of the Yankee's Class AAA Trenton Thunder, introduced Little League to Uganda eight years ago and has continued to lend financial support to the growth of baseball. He said success by Saudi Arabia would reflect well on Uganda.

 

"I would wish that they do put on a good performance, because it will also give Uganda credibility regarding its talent level," Stanley said in an e-mail.

 

Jacob, meanwhile, predicted before the game that the Ugandan team would yet reach the World Series.

 

"Right now we are practicing and preparing kids for next year," he said. "We won't give up."

 

Paul Post contributed reporting from Glens Falls, N.Y.

Bill Bergen’s Awesome Record of Baseball Futility

                                                              National Baseball Hall of Fame

The Brooklyn Superbas playing the Chicago Cubs at

Washington Park in Brooklyn in 1912. Bill Bergen, a poor hitter,

was an excellent defensive catcher for Brooklyn from 1904 to 1911.

By Lynn Zinser, New York Times

August 3, 2011

Today’s lesson, gleaned from baseball history, is that if you are going to be bad at something, be spectacularly bad. And if you are spectacularly bad enough, people might be talking about you 100 years after you retire.

                  Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Craig Counsell has gone hitless

in his last 45 at-bats, threatening

Bill Bergen's major league

record for futility.

This lesson comes courtesy of Bill Bergen, a catcher for the Brooklyn Superbas in the early 1900s. The record books will tell you that Bergen is the worst hitter in Major League Baseball history, holding records for the lowest season batting average for a regular position player (.139, a mark making news as Adam Dunn of the Chicago White Sox threatens it) and lowest career batting average (.170), as well as the longest streak of at-bats without a hit (46, a mark making news because Milwaukee’s Craig Counsell is threatening it at 0 for 45).

Bergen’s career lasted 11 seasons, from 1901-11, although he couldn’t hit the side of a barn. He did not have one slump year surrounded by many productive ones (like Dunn) or one epic bad streak (like Counsell). He was consistently and dependably, well, subpar.

In 3,028 career at-bats, he hit two home runs. In only one season did his average top .200. His career .194 on-base percentage means he didn’t walk much. His career .201 slugging percentage means he rarely hit for extra bases. Perhaps his quirkiest statistic: he was never hit by a pitch.

“He is about as bad a hitter as you can possibly imagine,” said David Jones, a baseball historian who edited two books on baseball’s dead-ball era. “But if he’d been a little bit better hitter, no one would ever talk about him.”

Instead, his name crops up whenever a baseline of offensive futility is needed. He does not have a line named after him like Mario Mendoza, whose paltry batting average made him synonymous with hitting .200. But Bergen is firmly installed in the history of futility.

                              Library of Congress

Bill Bergen, a poor hitter, was an

excellent defensive catcher for

Brooklyn from 1904 to 1911.

Bergen’s secret was playing at a time — that dreaded dead-ball era — when good defensive catchers were worth their weight in Teddy Roosevelt autographs. Bergen was a great defensive catcher. By some statistical measures, he is considered among the top five defensive catchers in National League history.

“It was an era when catchers were even more important than they are today because bunting and stealing bases were the main way teams would score runs,” said Tom Simon, who along with Jones edited the books on the stars of the dead-ball era. “So teams would carry a guy hitting .139 if he could keep the other team from scoring.”

Bergen caught a relatively modest 941 games but ranks in the top 20 in career assists by a catcher with 1,444. He threw out 47.3 percent of runners attempting to steal. He once threw out six in one game, against St. Louis in 1909.

An article in The Sporting News in 1908 described Bergen: “He is one of the few backstops who can throw on a line to second while standing flat-footed and he gets a ball away from him so quickly and with so little apparent exertion that the runner on first, second or third does not dare to take liberties when Billie is on the job.”

An article in The Bridgeport Evening Post in 1904 read: “His long suit is his wonderful throwing. While playing in the interstate league with Fort Wayne, Ind., Bergen saved the game for his team one day when the bases were full and no one out by catching three men napping, one after the other, allowing his team to win.”

Bergen began his career on a rather ignominious note with the Cincinnati Reds in 1901. A year earlier, his older brother Marty, a talented catcher for the Boston Beaneaters from 1896-99, had murdered his wife and two children with an ax and killed himself with a razor blade. Marty Bergen was considered far more talented than Bill, but his mental instability had been apparent his entire career. He often walked out on his team, berated his teammates and described paranoid visions of plots to kill him.

“We don’t know enough about Bill Bergen’s life to know how he dealt with that,” Jones said. “But it must have been something.”

Bill Bergen, by all accounts, had none of his brother’s demons and was a pleasant teammate. His ignominy was strictly of the baseball variety.

Boston Public Library Print Department

Marty Bergen, who killed his

wife, children and himself.

He entered the league just as the American League became a major league, so teams were scrambling for players to fill rosters. Offensive numbers were down across the board. All of that worked to Bergen’s advantage.

After he played three seasons with the Reds, Bergen’s contract was sold to Brooklyn, one of the National League’s truly dreadful teams. Team nicknames back then were coined by sportswriters, who dubbed the team the Superbas because Manager Ned Hanlon shared a moniker with a popular circus troupe at the time, the Hanlon Superba. (They didn’t officially become the Dodgers until 1932.) Despite the high-flying name, the team never finished above fifth in the league during Bergen’s career. Perhaps that led to even decreased expectations for Bergen, who, as Bill James wrote in his “New Historical Baseball Abstract,” was the only catcher in history whose value came 100 percent on defense.

In that era, catcher was not considered an offensive position at all. The job was grueling, with little in the way of today’s protective equipment. According to Jones, catchers did not wear shin guards, and their mitts were small, requiring two hands to catch most pitches. They were injured often and installed deep in a team’s batting order. But they were called on to field a lot of bunts and to prevent stolen bases.

“With Bill Bergen, you had someone who could shut down the other team’s running game,” Jones said. “He had a cannon for an arm. The way to think of him was as a second pitcher.”

Simon wonders whether Bergen was ever put ninth in the batting order, “because pitchers were probably better hitters than him.”

Joe Dittmar, who was vice chairman of the records committee for the Society for American Baseball Research for 18 years, researched Bergen’s career in the 1990s and wrote an article for the society’s Web site. During that research, he stumbled on Bergen’s 46-at-bat hitless streak. Until then, Luis Aparicio and Tony Bernazard were considered to have the record at 44. Dittmar thoroughly scoured the dead-ball era records and determined that Bergen’s was the longest.

That streak came to an end in 1909 during the second game of a doubleheader against the Cubs, when Bergen beat out an infield hit ahead of a throw by Johnny Evers of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame.

Bergen’s career ended in 1911 when Brooklyn found its young catcher of the future in Otto Miller. Bergen was released. He died in 1943 of heart disease at age 65, according to his death certificate.

But Bergen’s career was just bad enough that, in a way, he lives forever.