Bo Schembechler's Role in Helping to Save Baseball in 2020
The Major League Baseball Players Association has agreed to report to training camp on July 1, and it looks like we're going to have a 60-game season this year. And playing a small role in that deal is Bo Schembechler, who has been dead for 14 years.
Back in 1990, you see, during his short stint as the Detroit Tigers' president, Bo insisted that they take a 19-year-old kid named Tony Clark with the No. 2 pick in that year's draft. Clark, though, wanted to play college basketball at Arizona instead. Bo REALLY wanted Tony to give baseball a shot, so he visited with the Clark family before the draft and convinced them that if they drafted Tony, they'd let him play both sports. See the story here.
That convinced Tony Clark to not give up on baseball. He ended up giving up basketball instead, became a pretty decent MLB player, and now he's the director of the MLBPA. Tony and the union agreed today to start training camp on July 1.
Had it not been for Bo Schembechler, Tony Clark likely wouldn't have played Major League Baseball, and certainly wouldn't be the director of the MLBPA, and maybe with someone else in that spot, we wouldn't have a deal to play baseball this season. So when you're watching the MLB this year, give at least a little of the credit to Glenn E. Schembechler.
He also fired Ernie Harwell. So screw his time with the Tigers.
And, no, I don’t believe this revisionist “Bo really wasn’t responsible for Harwell’s dismissal” BS that John U Bacon and others have tried to push.
How about the former GM at WJR that admitted that it was his decision?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-01-07-9101020862-story,amp.html
Yeah, Bo got a bad rap as regards Harwell.
Bo had some screw-ups when he was with the Tigers, most notably as regards an incident where Jack Morris was acting like a jackass in interacting with a female sports reporter. But he gets too much blame as regards for Harwell (who ALSO had some mis-steps through the process.
Honestly, the whole "Bo with the Tigers" era was a bad fit. He wasn't really a baseball guy, and though Bo and Monaghan were friends prior to 1990 they didn't mesh as business partners.
Speaking of which, when Monaghan fired Bo in 1992, he (1) did it by fax, on (2) a personal day that Bo was taking to celebrate his wedding anniversary. Who the hell does that???
The Tigers were a mess for much of the 1990s.
Bo’s time with the Tigers was not good, but by the time he got there the damage was already done.
Monaghan fucked that franchise up 7 ways to Sunday. Everything went to hell right after the 1984 season. Jim Campbell, the man who built the ‘68 and ‘84 teams, got old, the farm system stopped producing, and TM’s management accelerated the decline.
Old Man Fetzer knew he made a mistake selling the team to Monaghan.
Generally agree with that - to clarify, Bo's "screw-ups" as I called them were more PR than baseball.
In retrospect, I can't believe the Tigers only made the one World Series in the 1980s. They were the best team in baseball in 1987, but the clock struck midnight for Doyle Alexander in the ALCS and nobody else pitched well either. That Twins team wasn't particularly good.
I blame the goddamn Metrodome for that series. That and the fact that the farm system produced next to nothing after Petry and Gibson arrived, 1980 or so. That’s the reason this team fell off the face of the earth after 1988.
But seriously, the reason the Tigers were so bad for so long was the fact that they went ~ 17 years without a competent GM. Monaghan got his championship in 1984, and after that the Tigers were a toy that he really didn’t want to play with anymore. Then Ilitch fucked around for 10 years before he hired DD.
It didn't help that W-L record didn't determine home field advantage. They had the best record in baseball and would've started the ALCS (and WS) at home. St. Louis got screwed in similar fashion since they had a better record than Minnesota.
The Minnesota Twins have been around since 1961 (I'm not counting their Washington Senators days for this exercise).
They have been to 3 separate World Series and have won 2 World Series titles.
But they have never won even one single World Series road game.
Conversely, they've only lost one World Series home game.
1965: lost 4-3, lost game 7 at home.
1987 and 1991: won both 4-3, won both game 7s at home.
That alternating homefield advantage rule (East one year, West the next) was unbelievably dumb. I could sort of understand it for the World Series when the two leagues never played, but why would you do it within the same league?
Funny though, the early 90’s Tigers teams were well ahead of their time in regards to offense. They actually pioneered the use of multiple Three True Outcome hitters such as Cecil Fielder, Mickey Tettleton and Rob Deer.
1993 is a great example of the Tigers’ woes. They went 85-77, which is extremely respectable. Behind the hitters above, Gibson back for a 2nd tour of duty and Lou and Trammel (of course) the Tigers led the entire AL in runs with 899. However, because of the awful farm system producing a lack of good arms, they were next to last in the AL in runs allowed with 837. In 93, they finished tied for 3rd with Baltimore with NY and Toronto ahead of them. Toronto repeated as World Series champs despite scoring 52 less runs in the regular season than Detroit. Here’s (in order) the ERA’s of the Tigers’ 4 main starting pitchers that season, which was Mike Moore, David Wells, John Doherty and Bill Gullickson: 5.22, 4.19, 4.44 and 5.37. All 4 of those pitchers got at least 28 starts! Ouch.
Here’s a great YouTube video on the Tigers from that era: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Skq3E8wg9zk
no team dared to brawl with those early 90s tiger teams
The Cecil Fielder era was definitely a lot of fun, even if they didn't win that much. If they could have gotten any kind of pitching at all...
I went to a lot of games during the Mike Moore/Rob Deer/Mickey Tettleton era.
I also saw a lot of 9-6 baseball games during the Mike Moore era.
Crickets since you replied with this.
This is a nice sentiment; however, it completely masks what a total disaster the "negotiations" were with baseball. Both sides really never came to an agreement, and Manfred basically said this is the last option.
I'm sure Tony is a nice guy, but you could have put Kramer in charge of the MLBPA and they would have had the same, if not better results than the outcome that occurred.
These past few months of negotiations will go down as some of the worst in professional sporting history, so I wouldn't be going around giving dabs to Tony Clark, or the owners.
Right, but the point is that there IS going to be baseball, and our former football coach, who's been dead for 14 years, played a tiny role in that. So it's just interesting, nothing else.
But he really didn't.
Insert name of someone else running MLBPA. Followed up with months of useless arguments = same result.
I could actually go ahead and take the opposite argument that if someone ELSE was there instead of Tony Clark, there may have been more baseball sooner. I'm not gonna, but I definitely could.
Fine. Then you can make the argument that had it not been for Bo Schembechler, we might have had baseball sooner. He still played a tiny role in this, whether that role was good, bad or useless.
Lol that’s a bit of a stretch