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from Standing Small
Retiring Ray Knoblauch
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Cheryl JohnsonChuck hit on by maleJim SouhanKnoblauch Anchors Twins InfiedKnob Stays Cool About StrikePatrick ReusseCrunch Time Is Time To ShineSean HorganKnoblauch Shines At Bat|
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| From Standing Tall |
| By Sports Illustrated |
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| April 6, 1992 The midautumn night is deep, the Twins' dream is glimmering, and up rises Puck. Not Shakespeare's Puck, the irritating comic sprite, but Minnesota's: Kirby Puckett, a genie self-summoned from a half-pint jar. His teammates call him Puck for short, and 5' 8" iswhat he is, but he is also 226 pounds of all-rounder,including no more than an ounce of fat, hair or egotism. Now, with the Minnesota Twins behind three games to two and the score tied 3-3 in the sixth game of the World Series, Puckett leadsoff an 11th inning that is packed as tightly with tension as he is with usable mass. In the American League playoffs he was the MVP, and so far this night he has driven in or scored all of his team's runs and stolen at least one run from the Atlanta Braves with a leaping catch against the left centerfield fence. Now at the plate he stands chockablock. When you're made of springy sacks of cement, as Puckett appears to be, you look a little taller because you don't slump or tilt--there's no slack in you, you just get thick wrinkles in the back of your neck (Puckett's is 18 inches around) from your torso's bulking upward against the limit of your height. Incidentally, Rabbit Maranville, the 5' 5" shortstop of the '10s and '20s and '30s who scuffled his way into the Hall of Fame, had a big wrinkle in the back of his neck, too, but according to a contemporary of Maranville's, "People would say, 'That's from drinking out of a bottle.' " Little guys have had some of the greatest names in baseball history for instance Davy (Tom Thumb) Force, Charles Augustus (Bunt) Frisbee, Arlie(the Freshest Man on Earth) Latham.... Little guys are spark plugs who wear their emotions on their sleeves and can't sit still on the bench, but they also keep their wits about them. Of course, you can't generalize too much about little guys. For instance.... Boom! Puckett homers to left. Wins the game to force a seventh, in which the Twins spirit away the crown. But you know that already. What you may have overlooked is what a great advance in little-manhood Kirby Puckett represents and also what a great hook last year's Series provides for an appreciation of baseball's storied little people. Few fans know what it is like to be as big as most NFL and NBA players. But everyone at some stage in life has felt little. "You know the real advantage of being short?" says American League Rookie of the Year Chuck Knoblauch, who's 5' 9". "When a big crowd of kids comes after us for autographs, I can blend in with the kids." Baseball is the game in which you can make up an all-star team of little guys with immortals at every spot but one. Not many guys 5' 9" or under have played major roles in the Super Bowl or the NBA championship. You know how many appeared in the '91 maybe-greatest-of-all-time World Series? Eight. For the Twins: Puckett, Knoblauch, Al Newman and Jarvis Brown. For the Braves: National League MVP Terry Pendleton, Mark Lemke, Rafael (PacMan)Belliard and Lonnie Smith. And do you know what their combined batting average was in the Series? It was .320. And do you know what their slugging percentage was? It was .573. If the Braves had won, Lemke, 5' 9", who hit .417 with three triples, drove in one game-winner and scored another, would probably have been the Series MVP. Key play of the final game? Pendleton, 5' 9", hitting a long double into left center, Puckett chasing it down and Knoblauch (here is your quintessential little-guy move) deking Smith, 5' 9", into slowing up at second base and failing to score what would have been the go-ahead run. "I usually try that when someone's stealing and a fly ball is hit," says Knoblauch. "Pretend to be fielding it on the ground and fake throwing to second so the runner will slide into the base, and if the fly ball's caught, we double him off first." If Greg Gagne, at short, had put more into his end of the fake, Knoblauch says, "I think Lonnie would have slid into second."But Gagne is 5' 11. Tricks are a little-guy tradition. "It's almost an inborn instinct to scrap and scrape and be a little pest out there," says Lemke."Sometimes other players on the team don't appreciate that. You have to do these things day in, day out,be Johnny-on-the-spot. I'm always looking for somebody to play catch." Little guys--worriers, overachievers, students of the game--make effective if annoying managers: Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, Miller Huggins and the prototype, John (Little Napoleon) McGraw. Ask Tom Lasorda, skipper of the Los Angeles Dodgers, about little guys and he seems to take it personally: "What do you mean, little guy?" Lasorda in his playing days was listed at 5' 10". Of course he may have misrepresented his stature upward just a tad. They'll do that, little guys, figuring they deserve another inch or so for heart. John Cangelosi, a Pirate outfielder in the late '80s, confided to a reporter that he was really 5' 7". So why did he have Pittsburgh list him as 5' 8"? "It looks taller," he said. But we can't go back and remeasure everybody in baseball history. For the purposes of this story, we define a little guy as a man who is or was officially listed as 5' 9" or shorter and who therefore can fit inside the average American adult male, who is unofficially 5' 10". Maybe all the guys who admit to being 5' 9" are actually 5' 8", and so on down. They can't be blamed for adding inches, because little guys tend to be discriminated against purely on the basis of height. New York Mets assistant vice-president Gerry Hunsicker says, "As a scout, it takes you longer to believe what you see if the player is short. If you see a kid 5' 8" throwing 90, you're not as impressed as if he were 6' 2". Maybe, when you're a scout, it's ingrained in you. You know it would be easier to sell the organization on a kid you're raving about if he's 6'4". You hear people say, 'Baseball is the game wheresize doesn't count.' That's not true." In 1991 only 45 of 1,018 major leaguers were 5' 9" or under. "With a smaller guy," says Dick Bogard, the Oakland A's director of scouting, "you are looking for things like first-step quickness, and you can watch several games and if he doesn't get something hit near him, you never get a chance to judge." "The main thing with size is getting signed," says Chicago White Sox second baseman Joey Cora, 5' 7". "After that, you have a manager who wants to win, and if a small guy is better than a big guy, he'll put the small guy out there." Lasorda, at any rate, has some little guy in him, "When I was playing," he says, "somebody asked me, 'How do you feel, a little guy pitching to big guys?' 'How do I feel?' I said, 'I feel like a dime next to a bunch of pennies. Who's worth more?' "Little guys--they kill you in the World Series." Lasorda continues. They'll do that, all right. Actually, the New York Yankees' Brian Doyle, who helped kill Lasorda's Dodgers in the '78 Series, was 5' 10" (his brother Denny, who made a big throwing error for the Boston Red Sox in the '75 Series, was 5'9"), but Bucky Dent, who did the Dodgers even more damage in '78, was 5' 9". Oh, let us sing of big-game little guys, scrappy, can't-do-anything-but-beat-you Eddie (the Brat)Stanky, 5' 8", kicking the ball out of 5'6" Phil (Scooter)Rizzulo's glove in '51; 5'6" where-the-hell-did-he-come-from Al Gionfriddo robbing big guy Joe DiMaggio of deep-center extra bases in '47; brainy Johnny (the Crab) Evers, 5' 9", hollering for the ball when Fred Merkle failed to touch second base in 1908; 5' 7-1/2" Sandy Amoros saving the '55 Series for the Dodgers with a spectacular running catch: 5' 9", Bobby Richardson going little-guy-Series wild in '64. And let's hear it for Wee Willie Keeler and Jigger Statz and Bitsy Mott and Dom (the Little Professor) DiMaggio and Claude (Little All Right)Ritchey and not only Rabbit Maranville but also Rabbit Warstler and Rabbit Glaviano and Rabbit Garriott and Rabbit Robinson--and, more recently, the White Sox Smurfs. (Last year the White Sox had seven players at 5' 9"; or thereabouts. Tim Raines admitted to 5' 8"; Craig Grebeck, Warren Newson and Cora to 5' 7". Ozzie Guillen, Lance Johnson and Scott Fletcher were listed at 5'11", but they didn't look appreciably bigger than the others. When Raines arrived in the clubhouse last spring after 10 lonesome-little-guy years in Montreal, he looked around and said, "They're all like me, a bunch of Smurfs.") "It's difficult for a little man to be humble" is how Pearson put it. Also, "I don't mind having a bad day, but I hate to look bad. Then I look like a little boy. I hate to look like a little boy." Freddie Patek, whom several active little guys cite as an inspirationwas listed at 5' 5" but now says he was really 5' 4". He put in 14 years as a quality shortstop with Pittsburgh, Kansas City and California, and he never let being called Cricket, the Flea and Moochie get him down. Patek is now a roving minor league instructor for theBrewers. "I don't consider 5' 9" short," he says. "I would have killed to be 5' 9". "Freddie Patek and Joe Morgan and Pete Rose were my heroes," says Yankee infielder Mike Gallego, who is listed at 5' 8", but that may be pushing it. "Rose may be a taller man, but he was very aggressive in the way he played, Joe Morgan, the Little Big Man. He had pop. And when I finally met Freddie Patek, the strength of his hand was unbelievable. But I did tower over him. ""My teammates are always kidding me about my size," says 5' 7" Bip Roberts of the Cincinnati Reds. "Saying things like, they would eat peanuts off my head. When I was a kid, I was always the last guy picked, then after we finished the game, I was always the first guy picked the next game. When you're on the playground and get in squabbles, they always tend to fight the little guys first. So I really had to learn to fight at an early age." "When you're at home plate and you have more size, you feel you have a little more leverage, a little more strength, a little more mass," Lemke says, perhaps speculatively. In fact, upper-body strength sometimes determines whether you're regarded as a little guy. Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle played at the same height, 5' 11-1/2", but Mantle weighed 30 pounds more and hit the ball distinctly farther, so Martin was a little-man type and Mantle a big stick. Switch-hitter Pendleton of the Braves is a little guy from one side of the plate but not the other. "Lefthanded I try to hit the ball into the upper deck," he says."Righthanded I'll take you to right in a minute." Which is not to say little guys can't go long-ball. Mel Ott, 5' 9", hit 511 homers, the little-guy record. Of course, he hit 63% of them in the Polo Grounds, with its short rightfield fence. Hack Wilson, 5' 6", hit 56 in 1930 and holds the alltime season RBI record with 190 in 1930, but he was basically a big guy with little legs. Yogi Berra hit 358 homers. A 5' 7-1/2" mystic, Yogi. May have been the greatest little-guy player of all time, unless it was Morgan or Eddie Collins, both of whom played second base, which is thequintessential little-guy position. And you talk to most any little guy today, and he'll say, "I could hit 10, 15 homers a year, but...." But, as Grebeck says, "little guys do the little things. Bunt, hit behind the runner, hit-and-run. I'm capable of hitting homers, but that won't keep me in the big leagues." Greg (Pee Wee) Briley, the 5' 9" Seattle Mariners outfielder, says, "I kind of like being small. When I do card shows, parents talk to their kids and say, 'See, he's not big and he made it.' That makes you feel good. Some say I look bigger in person." |
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