That Guy was Good: Mike Hargrove

We’re starting a new feature here at JoeBlogs — new features are, as you know, our specialty — and we’re calling it “That Guy Was Good!” These will be Baseball 100-type features on, you know, players who were good. The key is the word “good.” None of the players to be featured is a Hall of Fame candidate — this won’t be where I write about Dale Murphy or, Dwight Evans, or Lou Whitaker, or even Sal Bando. I’m not sure that any of them will even qualify for the Hall of Very Good. They were regular ol’ good players.

Before we get there…

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Westley Weekly Update

I have any number of bad habits — or so my wife tells me — and one of the most annoying is that I tend to stuff paper towels into my pocket. I don’t even realize I do this. But I do find that it is often useful to have ready access to a paper towel.

Anyway, Westley — our almost 13-year-old poodle — loves paper towels. He loves to eat them. Even more, he loves to tear away at them; it’s quite impressive how he can tear a single paper towel sheet into about 500 itty bitty paper towel scraps that he leaves all over the house. If Westley was Superman’s dog instead of Krypto, his superpower would be tearing up paper towels.

Well, some time ago, Westley figured out that I tend to leave paper towels in my pants pockets. Everybody will tell you that poodles are particularly sharp dogs, and I have questioned the truth of this because we’ve had Westley now for over 12 years and he still can’t do even basic math. But if there was an academic field on finding paper towels in my pants pockets, Westley would be the world’s leading expert. Every day, that dog goes into my closet, pulls pants off the hangers or down from the shelf, and roots through the pockets to get to the paper towels.

There are two consequences because of this.

1. When I go into my closet, pants are always strewn all over the floor.

2. At least 85% of my pants now have holes in at least one of the pockets.

You would think that at some point, I would do something like shut the closet door or stop putting paper towels in my pockets. But you know what? At this point, Westley is 12 (which is, like, 84 in dog years), and I’m 58 (which is, like, 84 in sportswriter years), and this is just kind of where we are in life. The world changes around us in so many dizzying, confusing, and uncomfortable ways, but we’re just locked in our daily paper towel dance, and we hope the world keeps spinning.

A Fun Fountain Pen

I haven’t written much about fountain pens lately — I’m sure you’ve missed that — but I remain as obsessed with them as ever. In fact, not too long ago, I bought the most expensive fountain pen in my collection. I can tell you about that some other time if you want, though I don’t know how many of you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a pen (I did get it on sale if that helps).

Today, I want to tell you about the Kaweco Student Fountain Pen.

Now, look, it’s a $70 pen, so I can’t call it cheap. You pretty much have to be a writing lunatic like me to spend $70 on a pen. But in the hunt for the ultimate writing experience, I picked one up on a lark, and it’s pretty awesome. The ink flows out of it; this thing is so smooth. I have put some of my more expensive pens back in the box because I love writing with the Kaweco Student so much.

I get that this sounds like an ad. It’s not. I just like the pen a lot.

Also, it comes in different colors with cool names like “20s Jazz Brown” and “30s Blues Pink” and “70s Soul Orange.” The above one is the one I got, it’s “50s Rock Blue.” I got it in a fine point which is pretty great, but if you want something that leaves less ink on the page — you don’t like the way fountain pens smear — it does come in Extra Fine And if you want one that absolutely gushes ink, you can find these things in double broad point.

If you are interested, you can find Kaweco Student fountain pens at, Good Postage, my favorite little store in Charlotte.

That Guy was Good: Mike Hargrove

Mike Hargrove’s first name is actually Dudley. I’ve long thought it’s a shame he went by his middle name because (A) There has never been a big league player who went by the name of “Dudley”* and (B) He would, by default, be the greatest Dudley in the history of baseball.

As it stands, he’s pretty far down on the Mike list. Sigh. Missed opportunities.

Mike’s father did go by Dudley — that’s why Mike went by his middle name — and he might have been the first Dudley big leaguer had circumstances been different. He was a hot enough prospect that both the Dodgers and Giants asked him to try out. The first time, he had pneumonia. The second was harvest time, and his father wouldn’t let him go to the tryout.

Dudley Hargrove Sr. spent countless hours playing baseball with the young Mike — “We have films of me when when I was a little, bitty kid, maybe 3 or 4, out there swinging the bat with my dad throwing the ball,” Young Grover said — but Mike wasn’t drawn to baseball at first. He used to say the most fun he had with baseball as a kid was taking his bat and using it to whack the telephone pole behind their house.

“It felt neat to have the bat bounce off it,” he said.

He grew up in Perryton, Texas, near the Texas-Oklahoma border and, as such, football was his first love. He was an all-state defensive back. He was also the best golfer on his team and an all-conference basketball player. He didn’t even play baseball because his high school didn’t have a team.

He was … no, wait a minute, before we go on, let’s get back to that “all-state defensive back” thing. You often see those kinds of facts in these kinds of stories — “Player X averaged 31 points per game as a basketball player in high school” or “Player Y won the 100- and 200-meter competitions at the state high school meet” — but this one doesn’t make any sense at all. How in the heck was Mike Hargrove an all-state defensive back in Texas? I mean, Grover was a lot of things but “fast” was most definitely not one of them.*

So how did Hargrove get to be an all-state defensive back?

“I never could run anyone down,” Hargrove told a reporter, “but I was always around the ball.”

Ah. Ok.

Grover went to Northwestern State College in Oklahoma on a basketball scholarship. He tried out for the baseball team only because his Dad insisted. The baseball coach was impressed by how well he picked up errant throws as a first baseman. He made the team and hit .329 his senior year. He certainly wasn’t expecting to play any more baseball after that. He got a job at a meat-packing plant in Liberal, Kansas, and planned to get a job as a high school baseball coach.

But during the summer, he played for a semi-pro team in Great Bend, and he crushed the ball — he hit .468 and won league MVP honors. The Texas Rangers spotted him and shocked the heck out of everybody, the Hargrove family included, by taking him in the 25th round of the draft. The Rangers must have known they had something here because they offered him the ungodly sum of $2,000 — way more than a 25th-round pick could ever expect. Grover signed immediately.

In his first full season in Gastonia, he was fantastic — he hit .351/.437/.542 with 35 doubles, eight triples, and 12 home runs. Gastonia is a long way from the big leagues, yes, but the big year got him an invitation to Rangers spring training in 1974. And there, he immediately caught the eye of Rangers manager Billy Martin by hitting .500 for most the spring.

“Do you think Hargrove is big-league ready?” a reporter asked Martin.

“He sure looks ready to me,” Martin said.

When Martin told Hargrove that he made the club right out of Class A ball, Mike made him repeat himself a half dozen times. He couldn’t believe it. When a reporter asked him how he planned to prepare for his big league game, Grlover said: “Well, first thing, I don’t want to pinch myself,” he said. “I don’t want to wake up.”

He lived the dream all season. He cracked a single off Rollie Fingers in his first game and kept on doing just that — for the year, he hit .323 and beat out Bucky Dent, Rick Burleson, and a guy named George Brett for the Rookie of the Year award. People compared his hitting aptitude to that of Rod Carew, the highest praise a lefty singles hitter could possibly get.*

Hargrove was named to the All-Star team his second year — the only time that would happen in his career — but when the club fired Billy Martin, he went into a nasty slump, the first of his career. He hit just .239 in his first 50 games under new manager Frank Lucchesi, and his batting average briefly dropped below .300. During that time, the Rangers tried him in the outfield, which was, um, misguided. “I’ll admit,” Grover told The Sporting News, I never counted on being an outfielder.”

He did finish that season above .300, but in 1976, he hit just .287, and the season was viewed as something of a disaster. Funny thing is, it wasn’t a disaster at all in retrospect. Hargrove was simply evolving as a hitter: In 1977, he led the American League with 97 walks.

This was right around the time he started to build his reputation as the world-famous “Human Rain Delay” with his extensive routine between pitches. See back in the minor leagues, he damaged a nerve in his thumb; the base of his thumb would go numb when he connected with the ball. That might be what happens to people who hit telephone poles with bats.

In any case, he fashioned this little ring to go around his thumb. It worked pretty well; the only trouble was that the ring loosened with every swing. So between pitches, he would stop for a few seconds to screw the ring back down toward his thumb.

He found that this little routine did two things. One, it helped his concentration at the plate; he found that just taking time between pitches helped him eliminate negative thoughts and distractions in his mind. Two, it seemed to drive pitchers bonkers. Nolan Ryan shouted at him “For God’s sake, hurry up!” One pitcher threw a pitch over his head. Tom Buskey once threw the ball toward him while he was going through his many adjustments.

The angrier they got, the more he slowed down. He’d step out of the box after every pitch, and he started adding all sorts of new dance steps to the routine — he’d tap the bat on the inside of his shoes, adjust his helmet, pull up his pants from behind, rework his batting glove, tighten the ring on his thumb, pull on his shirt sleeves, adjust his helmet again, back to the shoulders, pull up his pants again, touch his helmet, head and shoulders knees and toes …

“I’m only doing it to get myself ready,” he said innocently. “If it also happens to bother the pitcher, well, maybe he’ll hang a curve.”

It’s unclear how many curves pitchers hung to Hargrove over the year — he only hit 80 home runs in his lengthy career and never more than 18 in a season — but pitchers did throw him a lot of pitches outside the strike zone. He walked 100 times four times. That’s pretty rare stuff; over the last 50 years, only 26 players have walked 100 times in four different seasons, and Hargrove is right there with Wade Boggs, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Edgar Martinez.

Grover’s lifetime .396 on-base percentage ranks him 19th among expansion-era hitters with at least 5,000 plate appearances, squeezed right in between on-base machines John Olerud and Bobby Abreu.

The man knew how to draw walks.

The Rangers dumped him in a trade to San Diego after the 1978 season. Grover was stunned and devastated. He had not exactly loved his time in Texas, but that was still home. “I felt deserted,” he said. “It took me a while to understand that it was a case of the Rangers needing cash.”

While Texas was a bit dysfunctional. the Padres were a flat-out mess. At that point, they’d had losing records every single year of their existence. Hargrove got off to a sluggish start with San Diego and was relieved when Padres manager Roger Craig called him into the office to settle his mind.

“He said, ‘I want you to relax. Play your normal game. You’re my first baseman every day,’” Grover recalled. “I really appreciated that.”

“Two days later,” Hargrove continued, “I was out of the lineup. That’s typical of the way things went in San Diego. As a consequence, I lost confidence in myself.”

I vividly remember when Grover came to Cleveland from San Diego because the Tribe traded Paul Dade to get him … and I loved Paul Dade. I was utterly convinced, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Dade was bound for superstardom. It was probably the name — Paul Dade is a very cool name. Also, he had a cool story. He grew up in Seattle and said his family was so poor that he had to use loaf-of-bread cellophane wrappers stuffed with paper as baseballs. He hit enough bread wrappers to become the 10th overall pick in the draft.

Oh, also, Paul Dade wore No. 00. Why? Before the 1977 season, he was a lonely free agent. “Nobody really wanted me,” he said. “So I figured nothing for nothing equals two zeros.”

Anyway, I was sad to see Dade go, and I knew nothing at all about Hargrove except that he had hit .192 in San Diego. But, man did he turn it around. In 74 games from Independence Day until September 18, Grover hit .378/.487/.577. It was glorious. During that stretch, the team fired gruff Jeff Torborg and brought in kindly Dave Garcia, and the Tribe played some of the best baseball of my childhood. For the first time as a fan, I felt real hope.

There was another thing: Hargrove LIKED being in Cleveland. That was a rarity in those days. This was when ballplayers used to make the dark joke that if the team plane was ever going down, they’d prefer it go down on the way into Cleveland. But Hargrove was proudly a Cleveland guy. He talked often about how it was his favorite place to play.

Grover hit .318 with a .418 on-base percentage over the next two seasons in Cleveland. He was named to The Sporting News’ All-Hustle Team in 1980. He led the league in on-base percentage during the 1981 strike year. Getting on base wasn’t just his superpower, by then it was pretty much his only power — his defense was, um, not the best (over his career, he led first basemen in errors in four different seasons), and he hit a grand total of 12 home runs in more than 2,400 plate appearances from 1981 to 1985. He hadn’t gotten any faster either. In 1983 and 1984 he was caught all eight times he tried to steal.

But the man could put bat to ball, and he had a fantastic eye, and he drove pitchers crazy. In so many ways, he was simply ahead of his time. As Bill James wrote about Grover more than 20 years ago:

Obviously, the pitch clock has changed some of this … but I believe that’s exactly right. Hargrove was on to something when he reset his mind after each and every pitch.

He didn’t want to retire after the 1985 season, but nobody wanted him. It was odd. Even though his power was sapped, he did hit .285 with a .370 on-base percentage in his final year. As it turned out, he was a victim of owner collusion and was awarded $476,000 in the settlement … but he would have preferred another year in the sun. “Mike Hargrove doesn’t play for money,” one teammate said. “He plays for hits. He plays for wins. He’d do it for free.”

Everybody knew that Grover would go into coaching sooner or later — heck, he always thought he’d be a coach — and in 1990, he became first base coach for Cleveland. The next year, when the team got off to an absolutely horrendous start, the team fired John McNamara and gave the job to Grover. He finished off Cleveland’s first 100-loss season in 20 years.

Then, the team started getting better. In 1992, Kenny Lofton came up and should have won Rookie of the Year*. Albert Belle hit 30 homers for the first time. Carlos Baega cracked 200 hits. In 1993, Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez started to get into the lineup. In 1994, they added Omar Vizquel, Eddie Murray, and Dennis Martinez.

By 1995, Hargrove’s team was a powerhouse. They won five straight division titles and two American League pennants and were a break or two away from winning the first Cleveland World Series since 1948. It was always hard for me to get my arms around Grover as a manager; I never thought he was an especially imaginative tactician — he kind of gave the opposite vibe — but not everybody can be Earl Weaver. The players seemed to love him or, at the very least, like him. That was a tough club to manage, lots of egos, lots of griping, lots of surliness. He somehow kept them together.

Then, after Cleveland lost to Boston in the 1999 American League Division series — getting outscored 44-18 in the final three games — the team fired Hargrove. “I think most of the guys on our team really like Hargrove,” Cleveland reliever Paul Shuey said. “But I think it’s a healthy change. … I think we needed changes. When you’re in one place for a while, you can get set in your ways. But who knows? We might find out in a big hurry that we want him back, that sometimes the grass is greener on the other side.”

I don’t know if the grass was greener with Hargrove, but the team did slowly fade away. They made the playoffs just once in the next seven years. Meanwhile, Grover went to Baltimore and could never get anything going there, and then he went to Seattle and in his third year, with the team playing pretty good baseball, he retired at age 57, perhaps because he was clashing with Ichiro. Hargrove was 130 games over .500 in Cleveland. He was 115 games under .500 the rest of his managerial career.

Some years ago, I managed to score a one-on-one interview with Grover — it felt like a very big deal to me — and at one point, he said: “Hey, you grew up in Cleveland right?”

I told him that I did … and that he was one of my favorite players.

He smiled. “You had a lot better choices,” he quickly said. But the smile is what I remember better.