The Chris Moeller Archives

Giving baseball back its bounce

A PROBLEM

Major League Baseball is to self-promotion what OJ Simpson is to self-promotion.

Every public relations move that MLB makes has an unintentional veneer that shows us the people that run it don’t care all that much for it. They think it’s boring. They think the games are too long. They think the fan base is too old. Recent Chinese PR disasters notwithstanding, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred would certainly like nothing better than to be the commissioner of the National Basketball Association.

Fans that follow the game closely have no problem believing that the league is now monkeying with the baseballs. It stands to reason that this bunch would do that. The hints come after multiple unofficial public inquiries from the front office into how the game might be made “exciting,” what changes could blow the stink of death off of it. And fans like offense. Offense adds excitement (though it also adds to the length of games). Major League Baseball purchased the St. Louis-based Rawlings sporting goods company last summer, and since they have taken this control over the manufacture of the baseballs, home run totals have gone to historic heights. The Minnesota Twins broke the all-time single-season team record for homers this season, and they beat the old record by 39 long ones. Take the greatest slugging team ever-- prior to 2019, then add a 39-homer slugger into the middle of that lineup. Or at the end of the lineup. Is 39 still a lot of homers for a player?

The league denies the deceit-- because a perception of historic continuity and consistency is important. And accountability in general is typically shunned in the world of big business. The game is getting tighter and more wonky with the increased focus-- obsession, some say-- with analytics. What the growing number of MBAs in the team front offices see on their spreadsheets is not necessarily what the fans-- or even the players and coaches-- see on the field. The game is more cold and calculating in its business management than it’s ever been, and the statistical revolution has brought about multiple results, but most pronounced among them, to me, are that veteran players are now deemed less valuable than younger, cheaper players, that strikeout totals are off the charts, and that at any one time, about one-third of the league's teams are losing on purpose in an effort to hoard draft picks. We’re left with business leaders, custodians of both the game’s history and future, that don’t have the patience to see the game through the natural peaks and valleys in time of style and strategy on the field, and that-- again-- don’t seem to like their own product all that much.

This was always the case to a certain degree. During the original player salary boom of the 1980s, while a Hollywood movie studio, for example, would actively tout how healthy their industry was exactly because of the size of the contracts being given to its Tom Cruises and Sylvester Stallones, Major League Baseball would instead bemoan its rising labor costs and publicly predict its own financial doom due to the failure of its club owners to control their own spending. By 2019, the full corporatization of the professional sport has come to pass, not unlike we have seen for the country as a whole, and so the only thing at stake here is America and our entire way of life.


THE SOLUTION

Nancy Lee Rose took the stage name “Morganna the Wild One” as an exotic dancer working throughout the Midwest and the South in the 1960’s. She was from Louisville, Kentucky originally, and she became eventually-- more famously-- Morganna the Kissing Bandit, thanks to, but through no effort on its part, Major League Baseball. Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, she managed to frequently find her way-- illegally-- onto major and minor league baseball diamonds across America. Morganna bounded over grandstand barriers, past security guards, and planted kisses on some all-time diamond greats and near-greats, men with names like Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Nolan Ryan, George Brett (twice), Cal Ripken Jr., and Steve Garvey. She always kissed the players chastely, and only on the cheek “because of the chewing tobacco.”

The ample-bosomed Morganna claimed to have physical measurements of 60-23-39, and I’ve seen the video and photos of her so I’m going to just keep going with that. She called her measurements “her baseball stats” and a Sports Illustrated writer once quipped that they amounted to the record of a first place hockey team. She was arrested in Houston in 1985 for her "attack" on Ryan and Astros shortstop Dickie Thon at the Astrodome (and Ryan famously caught sight of her during the approach and dropped to one knee to accept her hug and kiss in front of some grateful cameras). This Houston criminal charge was overturned by a judge when her attorney successfully argued the novel “gravity defense.” If you were asleep that morning during Professor Keating’s class, the “gravity defense” suggests that Morganna’s... um... top-heavy physicality caused her to topple over the side of the railing by the field “and then the rest is history.” The defendant asked reporters after the case’s dismissal, “Who’s gonna argue with Isaac Newton?”

She was actually arrested for trespassing almost twenty times. The night the lights turned on for the first time at Wrigley Field in August of 1988, she tried to kiss and squeeze Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg, but security was heavier than normal that night and off to Cook County lockup she went before she could reach the future Hall-of-Famer. Cincinnati's Rose met her with flowers at her stage show the night following her first-ever stadium performance in 1969, and Kansas City's Brett, to account for at least one other player, also once paid a call to her at a house of exotic dancing.

Her photo has been on display in an exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. She appeared on both the Johnny Carson and David Letterman shows-- providing some star power that the consensus-best-player-today, Mike Trout, refuses to spend, and delivering crossover cultural and comic appeal for the service of the entire game of baseball. Bob Uecker with knockers.

Morganna signed photos of herself, appearing topless or otherwise: “Your breast friend” or “Breast wishes.” She told Carson before a national audience of millions that Dolly Parton was “flat-chested” compared to her, and when asked once where she got her brassieres, she replied, “I always tell (people) the same people who make my bras made the domes for all the stadiums.” She hit professional basketball games on occasion too, and Detroit Pistons forward Kelly Tripucka gave us a line that wouldn’t work badly as the open of her New York Times obituary, "It was like hugging a mattress. When I saw her coming at me, I thought it was like a Mack truck. I had two options-- either get hit or get out of the way. I decided to get hit.”

Baseball’s "golden age," in my humble opinion, precisely overlaps with the Age of Morganna. Things are different now. If she appeared on the field at one of this year’s postseason games, Commissioner Manfred would likely have her tased. (And does he even go to the games?) MLB still fights the War on Terror almost every night with a solemn crowd recitation of "God Bless America." Sometimes the drill even stands in needlessly for the much more cheerful, other Tin Pan Alley song, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” To say that “Take Me Out” is a better song than Irving Berlin’s patriotic strain is akin to saying that Hank Aaron outslugged Dal Maxvill.

Baseball needs Morganna desperately just as she’s pulled a Garbo on her fans. She bailed on the public scene in 1999, lives a quiet life reportedly in Columbus, Ohio, doesn’t grant interviews, and is 65 years old today. (Her birthday? You knew it all along, didn’t you? July 4th.) She gave an interview to ESPN in 2014 that she called the “final” one. “Always leave them wanting more,” she said. That's a popular axiom. It's a hurdle we have to overcome.

Morganna must have always known that baseball needs her more than she needs it. She always made the bosses curiously grumpy, oblivious as they always seem to be about what’s actually good for business. Even when she had the support of the masses in her hey-day, stadium security across the U.S. stayed on high alert for her under league office orders. She got roughed up in Cincinnati one night in 1970 when she was targeting the cheek of Johnny Bench. She came before Judge Thomas Nurre in the Queen City shortly after and suggested to him that perhaps the roughness was due to the security team believing her to be a man. His Honor Nurre responded, “Lady, there is no one that could possibly make that judgment.”

She had to make adjustments to keep getting to her men. She let it be known one night during the summer of 1986 that she planned to sneak into Yankee Stadium and plant a wet one on Don Mattingly. Security went to orange-level alert in the Bronx before that was even a thing. She showed up across the country in Seattle that night instead and put her lipstick on Mariners catcher Steve Yeager. With Morganna, you always had to be aware of where you affixed your gaze. As it were.

That same year of '86, when she was still talking publicly, Morganna told a newspaper that “baseball is my number one love.” At the time, that ranking put the sport above her husband. She and the husband divorced after 25 years. Major League Baseball should come calling. Bring roses, jewelry, I don’t care what. But the game after Morganna has too little color, too little imagination, and worst of all, no discernible sense of humor. You can bring back speedier players. You can shorten swings and trim both the strikeouts and walks, and with that, the length of the games. You can also keep throwing in new baseballs-- tightly or loosely wound, depending on how many home runs you want hit at any given time. But none of it will get to the root of the illness. The illness of having no sense of humor. Bring back Morganna, and I'll take bets that the rest will take care of itself.

posted by CM @ 6:28 PM