Doubles, More Doubles, and Norm Miller
When I first began collecting baseball cards as a kid back in 1974, it quickly became apparent that the Topps Chewing Gum Co. had a bit of a problem with quality control. Not that I understood what that term meant, exactly, but the baseball cards themselves were often off-center, of varying degree of glossiness and / or brightness, and sometimes included print-spots that resembled extra-large zits on player’s faces.
To my young mind, worse than any of the above grievances was the issue of coming across the same faces numerous times, pack after wax pack. Try as I might to come up with a Johnny Bench or a Reggie Jackson, invariably I would pull a Ray Fosse, a Jack Brohamer, or a Tom House.
Or, most frustratingly, for (literally) my money, a Norm Miller.
Norm Miller was a backup outfielder for the Atlanta Braves. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Miller, age 28, was entering his swan-song season in the Majors. He broke in with the Astros in 1965 at age 19, but whatever the Astros first saw in this presumably hustling teenager, the bloom had long since faded from this particular flower.
The less sagacious Atlanta Braves, however, appeared to believe that there was still reason enough to carry Miller’s light bat at the end of a thin bench. From that vantage point, at least Miller got to witness firsthand Henry Aaron’s final assault on Ruth’s home-run record. There are worse ways to earn a living.
Perhaps subconsciously I was also coming to terms with the realization that, an aspiring outfielder myself, and also part of the vast and influential Clan Miller, I might also never amount to anything more than a backup outfielder with underwhelming statistics.
Miller’s citrus-smile mocked me throughout the last half of the ’74 school year, and the entire baseball season. He looked like a man who wasn’t exactly a ball-player, but was happy enough to be wearing one of those uniforms, anyway. His non-threatening, every-man demeanor was as reassuring as it was distressing. Suppose I should strive and aspire to someday be someone — a man of note — only to be revealed to all the vast public as an impostor?
From mid-March, when I began collecting baseball cards, Norm Miller became the one constant in my life. He followed me into my sleep, and into my dreams. I was shagging fly balls in a perfect pasture of an outfield, when a Braves bullpen coach shouted at me to get off the field, grab a broom and start sweeping the dugout. Ralph Garr mocked me as he sauntered over to the batting cage. Johnny Oates flicked dirt from his cleats onto my little corner at the end of the bench.
Doubles, we called them. Whenever you got two or more — it didn’t matter how many — of a certain card, we called them doubles. I think perhaps some people still do.
In school, Miller became the answer to some of my math problems. 12×12? No sweat. That’s the pile of Norm Miller baseball cards on my bedroom floor. If Norm Miller traveled on a train from Atlanta to Cincinnati at 15 miles per hour, and if Rowland Office was traveling from Atlanta to Chicago at 25 miles per hour, and you knew that Miller was going to go 0-4 with two strikeouts in the second game of a double-header, how many times would you play him for the rest of the year?
For my eleventh birthday in May, a Norm Miller birthday cake, not a Billy Miller birthday cake, should have been set on the table for all the children in my neighborhood to enjoy, each little candle a bat splinter from his Louisville Slugger.
Once, I even got two Norm Millers in one pack. I’m ashamed to admit I began littering the ground that summer with unwanted Norm Miller cards on my way home from the A&G Market, my local grocery store of choice. I wanted to ask Ann and Gus why they kept sticking Norm Miller cards in every single pack they sold me, but I was too young and still too intimidated by adults to be so rude.
If you were to dig up any section of asphalt on Bridgeport’s west end, I’m confident that even today, you would turn up a soiled and battered Norm Miller baseball card, his smile forever fixed on whatever it was he was focused on at that particular moment in his life. Had he just finished a nice pancake breakfast? Were his eyebrows clipped just the way he liked them? Was there a cute girl waving at a player behind him, and he mistakenly thought she was a fan of his?
Norman Calvin Miller, I estimate that you owe me at least $12.50 for all the dimes I spent on you back in the summer of ’74, and I won’t even figure in inflation. When you read this, and I know that you are still keeping tabs on my life, please leave the envelope full of dimes on the top of my bureau at my old address in Bridgeport. I’m confident that it’ll find me.
In his final career at bat, on September 16, 1974 at Candlestick Park, Norm Miller, pinch-hitting against Giants pitcher Jim Barr, struck out. I like to think he went down swinging, for all of us.
Best Forgotten Baseball Seasons: Part 25 – The Milwaukee Brewers
Image via Wikipedia
The Milwaukee Brewers: The Team That Selig Built.
Question: How does a used car salesman from Milwaukee get to buy his very own pet Major League baseball team?
Answer: When apparently no one else in North America has the capital to put up front for the purchase.
Some background: When the Kansas City A’s unceremoniously vacated K.C. for Oakland (it seemed like a good idea at the time) in 1968, a U.S. Senator from Missouri (Stuart Symington) decided to hold hostage baseball’s antitrust exemption, unless Kansas City was awarded a brand new expansion team, to begin play immediately in the 1969 baseball season.
Thus baseball brought forth four new expansion teams for the ’69 season: Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, Seattle Pilots, and Kansas City Royals.
The Seattle Pilots were the sorriest team of the lot, finishing their one and only campaign as a major league franchise (in Seattle) last in their division with a 64-98 record. If you’ve read Jim Bouton’s classic book, “Ball Four,” you know what a pathetic excuse for a team the Pilot’s were.
Milwaukee, however, had already established itself as a baseball town. The Braves called Milwaukee home for thirteen seasons (1953-65) during which they never played less than .500 baseball in any single season. In fact, in the Milwaukee Braves inaugural season, they set a then-baseball attendance record of 1.8 million fans.
(On a side note, Selig, a minority Braves stockholder, had sued the Braves to try to force them to stay in Milwaukee, claiming that a baseball team owes it to their city and to their fans to stay put. The Braves finally got their wish and moved to Atlanta where they believed attendance would be better.)
Bud Selig got his team, though, and, after just five seasons without a Major League franchise, Milwaukee would once again host a team of its own, beginning in 1970.
It wasn’t pretty. The 1970 Brewers, née Pilots, finished 65-97, just one game better than their one year in Seattle.
Yet virtually every bad team has at least one bright spot. And the bright spot on the 1970 Milwaukee Brewers burned surprisingly bright, indeed.
His name was Tommy Harper.
Now, I have to confess that when I started researching this blog-post, I thought I would end up profiling someone like Ben Oglivie in 1980: 41 homers, 118 RBI’s, 333 total bases, Silver Slugger winner, .925 OPS.
Or Sixto Lezcano in 1979: 28 homers, 101 RBI’s, .321 batting average, .987 OPS, Gold Glove.
Or Larry Hisle: Excellent overall campaign in ’78. Well over 100 RBI’s. Made the All-Star team. Finished 3rd in A.L. MVP voting.
Or Cecil Cooper: At least four excellent seasons. One hell of an underrated ballplayer. If he had stayed in Boston, he might have been able to have produced Hall of Fame numbers.
But settling on Tommy Harper was a no-brainer. Here’s why.
Most of the fine Brewers hitters that many of us remember played sometime in the late ’70’s or ’80’s. I didn’t expect to be able to go so far back in team history and stumble across a player who had one season that overshadowed all the other players.
1970 was Tommy Harper’s Best Forgotten Season:
The previous year, toiling away with the Pilots at age 28, Harper had led the A.L. with 73 stolen bases. But he had produced a pathetic 21 extra base hits in 537 at bats, including nine homers and just ten doubles! His .235 batting average and 78 runs scored were also unimpressive.
He did, however, draw 95 walks, and his versatility (he could play 2nd, 3rd or OF) along with his base-stealing abilities, provided some value.
Then something strange happened in his first season in Milwaukee. Tommy Harper must have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in some working-class Milwaukee neighborhood, because overnight and without warning, he became an extremely dangerous hitter.
His final numbers for 1970:
Games: 154
At Bats: 604
Hits: 179
Doubles: 35
Home Runs: 31 (!)
RBI’s: 82
Runs Scored: 104
Batting Average: .296
On-Base Percentage: .377
Slugging Percentage: .522 (an increase of .211 points from ’69.)
OPS: .899 (6th best in league)
OPS+: 146 (6th best in league)
Total Bases: 315 (3rd highest)
Extra Base Hits: 70 (First Place!)
Stolen Bases: 38 (2nd place)
WAR: 7.7 (2nd best in team history)
Power-Speed #: 34.1 (First Place)
In short, in one season he had morphed from Omar Moreno to Bobby Bonds.
Tommy Harper finished sixth in the 1970 MVP voting, and he is still the only 30-30-30 man (doubles, homers, steals) in Brewers history. In fact, Tommy Harper was the first 30-30 man in American League history.
The 31 home runs Harper hit in 1970 were more than he had hit in the previous four seasons combined. In fact, they represented 21 percent of all the home runs he would hit in his 15-year career.
But Tommy Harper wasn’t finished playing ball after 1970. After playing just one more year in Milwaukee, Harper enjoyed three productive years with the Red Sox, scoring over 90 runs twice, and leading the league in stolen bases in 1973 (at age 32,) with 54, breaking the 61-year old Red Sox record of 52 stolen bases previously set by Tris Speaker in 1912. (Harper’s record has since been broken by Jacoby Ellsbury.)
Tommy Harper finally retired in 1976 at the age of 35.
Why some players suddenly produce one explosive season in an otherwise solid career has always been something of a mystery. I’m reasonably sure even Tommy Harper didn’t see it coming.
But this is one of the reasons why we love baseball; you can always expect the unexpected.
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