BASEBALL’S AGELESS PLAYERS
Satchel Paige: The legendary pitcher was an All Star at the ages of 46 and 47. In 1965, the Kansas City A's started the 59-year-old Paige against Boston. Paige played up the gimmick, sitting in a rocking chair in the bullpen before the game, as a nurse rubbed liniment on his pitching arm. Then he went out and gave up only one hit over three innings to the Red Sox.
Charley O'Leary: Twenty-one years after playing his last game with the 1913 St. Louis Cardinals, the infielder returned to play one game with the St. Louis Browns at the age of 58. He singled to become both the oldest player to get a hit and score a run in a major league game. He spent three more seasons as a Browns coach before returning home to Chicago and a job as a sanitation worker.
Minnie Minoso: The Cuban comet was a nine-time All Star, who three times led the American League in triples and stolen bases. In the hands of showman/owner Bill Veeck, Minoso also became the eternal player. Veeck had Minoso come back for cameo appearances with the White Sox in 1976 (age 50, one hit in eight at-bats) and 1980 (age 54, hitless in two at-bats). Having begun his career in 1949 with Cleveland, Minoso had the distinction of being a five-decade major leaguer. Made a single plate appearance with the independent St. Paul Saints in 1993 (age 67) and 2003 (at age 77 he drew a walk) to become a seven-decade pro.
Jim O'Rourke: "Orator" O'Rourke had a baseball career that stretched from 1872-93, and that wasn't enough. He returned to his native Connecticut to practice law and oversee his real estate investments. He continued to play semi-pro, even founding a league. As the New York Giants were bearing down on the 1904 pennant, manager John McGraw had the idea to bring back O'Rourke, a survivor of the Giants' previous pennant in 1889, for one game. At the age of 54, O'Rourke caught nine innings in the Giants pennant-clinching victory, going 1-for-4.
Phil Niekro: The Hall of Fame knuckleballer, a longtime Braves pitcher, won 318 games over 24 seasons. His last, at the age of 48, was spent mostly in the American League (going 7-13 with Cleveland and Toronto). The Braves brought him back for a farewell game at the end of the '87 season, in which he gave up five runs in three innings and took a no decision. Even spending two seasons with the New York Yankees wasn't enough to rescue him from the distinction of being the longest serving player to never make it to a World Series.
Seek Julio Franco, the man who would play baseball forever, and you discover more about a game’s magnetic hold than you’d ever suspect.
That Franco, at 55, would uproot himself from the comforts a 23-season major league career can provide just to take a few more cuts against pitchers less than half his age is a wonder.
That he would believe himself still capable of putting good wood on real big league pitching if the opportunity arose is amusing. “Why not? If you throw it in my zone, I’ll hit it,” Franco said. “That’s my confidence. It’s only inside the individual that matters. The only thing that matters to me is inside my head when it comes to playing.”
That Franco thought he could almost literally roll off his couch back home in the Dominican Republic and pop up a couple of thousand miles away and play like it was 1990 was, as it turned out, a little overconfident. After playing for six consecutive days with the independent minor league team in Fort Worth, the Cats, his troublesome right knee began screaming at him last week. He planned to limp back to his island home, where he would weigh the option of surgery.
It looks, alas, as if he can be of no service to the Braves’ struggling offense.
With the Braves, where Franco spent five of his last seven major league years as a first baseman and pinch hitter — with a little piece of the seventh thrown in at the end — he became very popular among those who wanted to ignore their birth dates. He was the guy to point to in order to defend the indefensible position that you really could be every bit as good as you used to be.
Before Franco was done, he became the oldest major leaguer to hit a home run, a pinch-hit home run, a grand slam. He was 49 when he got the last of his major league hits, in his final Braves at-bat, Sept. 17, 2007 off Lee Gardner of the Marlins. Right to the end, Franco preached the irrelevance of age and the power of eating right and working out as if every day were an audition for a Calvin Klein ad.
There is a price to be paid for believing your own hype.
“He probably went too hard,” said the Cats manager, Mike Marshall. “I tried to talk him out of it. I was going to give me a night off and have him manage. But he wanted to play. He was having fun and stroking the ball. Then his knee started hurting.”
Seek Franco and stumble into supporting evidence that baseball is harder to quit than a crazy girlfriend.
Meet the man who managed him this last time.
Yes, he’s that Mike Marshall, most notably a former Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman, who logged 11 major league seasons before retiring in 1991. What ever happened to him, anyway? He lounged around for a while, then spent 15 years managing independent teams from Illinois to California to New York to Arizona to Texas.
“The game usually calls you back,” Marshall said.
The amenities at this subterranean level of minor league ball aren’t quite what former major leaguers such as Marshall and Franco grew accustomed to. The clubhouse carpet is dirty, there’s a slip-cover on the couch in the center of the room and open jars of peanut butter in the reclaimed restaurant-style refrigerator by the door.
But there’s always baseball, in one form or another, on the other side of that door.
“I’m kind of the Michael Corleone of independent-league baseball — every time I try to leave, it brings me back,” Marshall laughed. “I’m kind of thinking, though, about the next chapter out of baseball. I think I’m going to write another chapter, maybe back to the golf course.”
As one 50-something former player ponders his exit strategy, another is beating at the door to get back in. Although Franco couldn’t pound on it with the Bunyanesque bat he waved over his head when with the Braves. They don’t make telephone poles like that much anymore, not on short notice. He had to settle for something a little lighter and shorter, more fitting a man his age.
Franco’s considerable belief in his talents may have been massaged by the idea of becoming a five-decade professional player (he began in the minors in 1978).
He no doubt loved the idea of eliciting the kind of disbelief that met Cats infielder Chris Martinez when he called home to the Dominican to tell his people: Guess who I’m playing next to now?
“They didn’t believe me. They kept asking, ‘Are you serious? Are you serious?’” Martinez said.
But really, Franco said, this pass through lovely LaGrave Field, where the Trinity River bends just past the hand-turned scoreboard in center field, wasn’t about resurrecting himself as a player. Oh, he still looked as fit as ever, even if the stubble atop his closely mowed head had gone snowy. There were motives at play over and above ego.
Playing for the Fort Worth Cats, putting up a five-game hitting streak before the knee started weighing him down, hitting .222 in 27 at-bats, with a double and an RBI at the age of 55 was Franco’s idea of a gentle reminder.
Hello world, I’m still here, and I’d like to manage one of your baseball teams one day.
“If you stay away, people forget about you,” Franco said. In the six years since his last at-bat with the Braves, Franco put in a managerial season with the Mets’ rookie league team in Florida and one with a team in Venezuela. But mostly he stayed back in the Dominican working with his son Joshua, who is now a 20-year-old third baseman in the Seattle Mariners’ system.
“I lost too much time working with my kid; he needed me,” Franco said. “I would do it all over again.”
The Cats were a natural re-entry point, since their vice president is the brother of Franco’s former agent.
“To me, he exudes the love for the game,” that VP, Scott Berry, said.
“He has such a passion for the game. Immediately he was connecting with the players, helping them with hitting. He fit in from Day 1.”
Of course, the young players got an earful from Franco about improving their workout regimen and cleaning up their diet. Martinez offered only a shy smile when asked if the aged first baseman convinced him to put down the fast food.
“It’s something they have to decide for themselves. They need to decide for themselves if they’re going to play this game for a long time. You only have one life to live; decide if you want to live it well or not,” Franco said.
Franco proclaimed himself ready for any duty, at any level, if it would put him on a track to being a major league manager.
You try telling him he’s a little old to be just starting out on this managerial quest — that argument has never worked on him in the past.
“Nothing is easy. I’m not counting on myself to make the big leagues, I’m counting on God to get me to the big leagues,” he said. “I know it’s hard to get there, but everybody who got there went the same road. It hasn’t been easy for anybody.”
“I think I can bring a lot to a club. I’ve been there, I’ve played a lot all over the world,” Franco said. Besides the majors, he’s played in Japan and Korea and Mexico. The Braves originally signed him from the Mexico City Tigers.
“I’ll keep learning, and eventually one day I’ll get there and again I’ll be a rookie, a rookie manager.”
That is the promise that baseball always uses to keep you hooked, that it will make you young again.
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