Joe Morgan was one answer to a trivia question Larry King once asked years ago on late-night radio that had more parts than King had wives.
Who were the nine consecutive MLB MVP winners, he quizzed, with the caveat they could form a starting lineup, with a slight license for creativity in the outfield.
Then Barry Bonds came along and became the 10th player to win consecutive MVPs and ruined the question, much as critics said he did baseball a decade later when, propelled by steroids, he won four consecutive MVPs.
The trivia question has faded like King’s career, as Frank Thomas, Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera all have since won consecutive MVPs. There’s no shortage of first baseman-DH types for that lineup now. (If you want to try to answer the first nine consecutive MVP winners, one at each position, the answer is below. Morgan at second base is a gimme.).
It’s not a reach to suggest that Morgan, who died this week at age 77, was better than most, if not all, of his non-performatively-enhanced colleagues in their best seasons. At his best, Morgan was about as good as almost anyone else at their best.
His MVP seasons were 1975-76, which not coincidentally, were the Big Red Machine’s consecutive World Series-winning seasons. It is hard to imagine a player who could beat an opponent as many ways as Morgan. He idolized Jackie Robinson and grew up to play like him — he could best opponents with his power, with his legs, with his Gold Glove, with his mind or with a bloop hit, as he did the Red Sox in Game 7 of the 1975 World Series. He could demoralize them and intimidate them, often without swinging the bat.
As a young player with the Astros, Morgan once said he could hit .300 or he could hit 20 homers but he couldn’t do both. In 1976, he proved himself wrong — Morgan being wrong became more frequent when he transitioned into the broadcast booth — and he not only hit 20 points over .300, he homered seven more times than 20. He also drove in 111 runs and scored 113, walked nearly three times for every strikeout (114-41), stole 60 bases, slugged .576, had a 1.020 OPS, a 187 OPS+ and won a Gold Glove.
And WAR said that was the lesser of his two MVP seasons.
For the five-year period from 1972-1976, beginning when Morgan joined the Reds, he hit .303 and averaged per season 113 runs, 85 RBIs, 21.8 homers, 29.2 doubles, 62 steals in 74.8 attempts, 118.4 walks and 53.4 strikeouts per season. And won four Gold Gloves. He won two MVPs, was fourth twice and eighth once, and his WARs were 9.3, 9.3, 8.6, 11.0 and 9.6.
(The trade of Morgan from Houston to Cincinnati, like Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio and Steve Carlton for Rick Wise, was panned by the home team’s fans, proving once again, as anyone who has spent any time listening to sports talk radio knows, they’re not the best judges of talent. Reds fans wailed that the team had given up Lee May, who had homered twice in the 1970 World Series defeat and 39 times in the just-completed 1971 season, for a miniature second baseman. May, it turned out, was replaceable. Morgan soon proved invaluable.)
Bill James, in his 2001 New Historical Abstract, ranked Morgan’s 1972-76 performance ninth, regardless of position, among the best five-year spans by any player in baseball history. Of those ranked ahead of Morgan, only Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were ever contemporaries, and retired by 1975-76. The others all preceded Morgan.
But beyond the measurable, Morgan affected games in immeasurable ways, never more so than in Game 5 of the 1975 World Series.
From Roger Angell’s November 17, 1975 New Yorker article:
“With the Reds leading, 2-1, in the sixth inning of the fifth game, Morgan led off and drew a walk. (He had singled in the first inning and instantly stolen second.) The Boston pitcher, Reggie Cleveland, now threw over to first base seven times before delivering his first pitch to the next Cincinnati hitter, Johnny Bench — a strike. Apparently determining to fight it out along these lines if it took all winter, Cleveland went to first four more times, pitched a foul, threw to first five more times, and delivered a ball. Only one of those throws came close to picking off Morgan, who got up each time and quickly resumed his lead about eleven feet down the line. Each time Cleveland made a pitch, Morgan made a flurrying little bluff toward second. Now Cleveland pitched again and Bench hit a grounder to right — a single, it turned out, because second baseman Denny Doyle was in motion toward the base and the ball skipped through, behind him. Morgan flew around to third, and an instant later Tony Perez hit a three-run homer — his second homer of the day — and the game was gone, 6-2. Doyle said later that he had somehow lost sight of Bench’s hit for an instant, and the box score said later that Perez had won the game with his hitting and that Don Gullett, who allowed only two Boston batters to reach first base between the first and ninth innings, had won it with his pitching, but I think we all knew better. Morgan had made the difference.”
Angell’s essay, as wonderful to read as it was to watch Morgan play, is incomplete. In the days before the Internet, when space in the New Yorker seemed as limitless as center field at the old Polo Grounds, there still wasn’t enough room to recount all the ways in that sixth inning Morgan “made the difference,” and all the anxiety he created.
Morgan walked, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Pitches one, two and six sure looked like strikes. There was no technology of the strike zone box as there is today, but it sure seems as if three pitches called balls were within the box, if not at least on the edge (on ball two catcher Carlton Fisk has to reach back inside to catch the pitch, which might account for the ball call). Watch the video below, which begins with the at-bat in question, and judge for yourself.
The Red Sox are clearly unnerved, if understandably so. Cleveland complains about ball one, which wasn’t, and then again after ball four. Morgan turns around as he jogs to first, apparently to yap at Fisk, who turns around, apparently to complain to home plate umpire George Maloney.
Maloney was an American League umpire, so his previous interactions with Morgan were limited. But Morgan’s reputation, like Ted Williams’, preceded him. Maloney’s defense might have been that if Morgan didn’t swing, it wasn’t a strike. Like Williams.
(From the website criticalflame.org: “Virgil Trucks tells a perhaps apocryphal tale about a game between Detroit and the Red Sox in Boston: ‘Joe Ginsberg was catching and Williams came up and walked on four straight pitches, and Joe’s questioning the umpire about it. On the last one, he said, ‘Bill’—Bill Summers was the umpire. He said, ‘Bill, don’t you think that ball was a strike?’ And Bill said to Joe, ‘Mr. Ginsberg, Mr. Williams will let you know when it is a strike.’”)
That was apparently how Maloney handled it. He deferred to Morgan, and Morgan didn’t swing, so it wasn’t a strike. That’s an unbearable burden for any pitcher. And therein was the dilemma of pitching to Morgan: his strike zone was small to begin with because he was 5-foot-7, and it shrunk with his reputation. There weren’t many strikes to be had on the corners, but you couldn’t walk him because then he’d steal. Then again, the strikes couldn’t be too good, either, because he had too much power.
So how exactly are you supposed to pitch to him? Besides carefully?
You can understand Cleveland’s persistence at throwing over to first to keep a runner who shouldn’t be there close. It didn’t work. But not only, when Bench singled, did Morgan go first to third — on Dwight Evans, who had a plus arm — he drew a wild throw over the cutoff man, allowing Bench to advance to second.
That was all made moot by Perez’s home run, but Morgan’s appropriated base on balls and base running had put the Reds in position — second and third with none out — to score two runs in the inning even had Perez not homered, or any Red hit safely.
In his Historical Abstract, James said he set out to find the most intelligent player in baseball history, and it was Joe Morgan. James called it “percentage player”, and he defined it by four categories: fielding percentage, stolen base percentage, strikeout to walk ratio and walk ratio. “The best percentage player in baseball history,” wrote James, “I concluded, was Joe Morgan.”
Joe Morgan wouldn’t argue, nor should he. But Morgan the broadcaster didn’t understand the rarity of Morgan the player. You couldn’t play like Joe Morgan just because you wanted to.
And Morgan detested the critics who appreciated him the most. Eighty-one writers didn’t vote for Morgan in his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility. In retrospect they look a lot like George Maloney on Cleveland’s 3-2 pitch in the inning Angell described. Eighty-one Hall of Fame voters stared at a first-ballot Hall of Fame resume just as Maloney did strike three, and their pencils froze just as Maloney’s right arm did.
What possible reason was there not to vote for Joe Morgan for the Hall of Fame? If Joe Morgan is not a Hall of Famer then the Hall would be as empty as the musuem in Seattle celebrating Mariners’ World Series championships.
And yet Morgan, apparently, held more of a grudge to the sabermetricans who celebrated him than the voters who spurned him. Joe Morgan was exactly the kind of player who the baseball people he belittled valued the most.
It was a fascinating, and often sad contradiction that inspired an irreverent website called firejoemorgan.com. Morgan never saw the humor in that, either.
There’s an anecdote on Morgan’s Wikipedia page that perfectly captures it. The link to a conversation with Joe Posnanski is disabled so it’s impossible to verify, but if it’s not true, it ought to be.
Posnanski: “The disconnect between Morgan the player and Morgan the announcer is one that I’m just not sure anyone has figured. Bill James tells a great story about how one time Jon Miller showed Morgan Bill’s New Historical Baseball Abstract, which has Morgan ranked as the best second baseman of all time, ahead of Rogers Hornsby. Well, Morgan starts griping that this was ridiculous, that Hornsby hit .358 in his career, and Morgan never hit .358, and so on. And there it was, perfectly aligned — Joe Morgan the announcer arguing against Joe Morgan the player.”
And there it was indeed. Joe Morgan, who had a deservedly high opinion of himself as a baseball player, was even better than he thought he was.
Trivia answer: The first nine consecutive MVP winners could have been a team. Around the diamond, with the years they won the MVP: First base-Jimmie Foxx, 1932-33; second base-Morgan, 1975-76; shortstop-Ernie Banks, 1958-59; third base-Mike Schmidt, 1980-81; catcher-Yogi Berra, 1954-55; center field-Mickey Mantle, 1956-57; left field-Dale Murphy, 1982-83; pitcher-Hal Newhouser, 1944-45. (Murphy played primarily center field, but was in left for 66 games in 1982 and 28 in 1983.) Since 1990, Barry Bonds won consecutive MVPs in 1992-93 and 2001-04; Frank Thomas in 1993-94; Albert Pujols in 2008-09 and Miguel Cabrera in 2012-13.
once upon a .406 