Mushnick to Morgan: Do you know what you are talking about?

Saw this on the Big Lead this morning and found it interesting.
I'd be curious to hear Morgan's response.


July 20, 2007 -- IT ain't so, Joe! The self- mutilation of ESPN, the systemic destruction of what once promised to be the best thing that ever happened to sports fans, continues, on all fronts.

Sunday night on ESPN the Cardinals were beating the Phillies, 10-0, in the eighth inning.

That was before ESPN's pathetic ESPY Awards, but after ESPN's pathetic "Who's Now?" segment, and before and after ESPN's pathetic sudden enthusiasm for the Arena Football League, which until this year, when it became an ESPN property, ESPN ignored.

Cardinals-Phillies was part of ESPN's pathetic "Sunday Night Baseball" coverage. The Phillies were about to become the first Major League Baseball team to 10,000 losses. And Joe Morgan, ESPN's No. 1 baseball analyst, a fellow whose wisdom is often laced with convoluted, confounding and contradictory nonsense, was moved to tell a national audience about the significant role he played in Phillies history.

The year, Morgan told us, was 1964, that calamitous season when the Phillies blew a 61/2-game lead with 12 games left by losing 10 straight. Morgan said he made his major-league debut late in '64, against the Phillies. And it was in that game that his RBI single beat the Phillies, extending their infamous losing streak to eight or nine.

Morgan added that Phillies manager Gene Mauch was so upset he threw over the buffet table in the clubhouse, hollering that his club had just been beaten by "a Little Leaguer!"

Great story. But unless Morgan was confusing himself with Reds rookie infielder Chico Ruiz, it never happened. As several readers were moved to write, the Phillies played the Reds, Braves and Cardinals during that losing streak; Houston wasn't in the mix.

Furthermore, Morgan, though called up in 1964, did not have an RBI that season for Houston.

And he did not make his big-league debut in '64, either. That came Sept. 21, 1963, when he went 0-for-1, pinch-hitting against the Phillies. The next day, Morgan did have an RBI single to beat the Phillies, but those Phillies were well out of the race and not in the throes of a historic collapse; they'd actually won four of their previous five games.

Can you confuse such significant and presumably memorable facts about your career? It hardly seems possible, but I suppose you can.

 

To use Mushnick's favorite word in that column: pathetic.

 

That's just par for the course for Joe Morgan.

 

Memory is not as reliable as we'd like to think. Apparently Morgan recalls that he made his debut late in the season against the Phillies and had a game-winning RBI in that series, after which the Phils manager lamented that they'd been beaten by a little kid. And apparently he's connected this memory to Philadelphia's famous losing streak, which actually took place the following season. These mistakes can happen, especially after more than 40 years. I guess broadcasters should research their own careers to double-check the facts before telling their stories on the air.

 

Sorry, I don't buy that. That Chico Ruiz story is fairly well-known. For Morgan to insert himself into it is almost inexplicable. And you mean to tell me that he doesn't remember what year he broke into the big leagues? I've never met a ballplayer who didn't have that burned into his memory. I can understand getting the details wrong in a story about someone else, but when it's about yourself? That's stunning.

 

Is it true that Joe Morgan's first hit came off a "cut fastball"?

 

I've had memory hiccups like that. Scary stuff

Because it is inarguable.

 

Apparently the pitcher hung it in his wheelhouse.

 

This is a pretty common phenomenon: the great first-person baseball history books by Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig, while full of tremendous accounts of what it was like to play baseball all the way back to the turn of the century, are shot through with factual errors -- game scores, who pitched for whom on which day, who was traded for whom in 1907, etc etc.

Ditto for "Summer of '49" and a few other of Halberstam's books. Anytime you're leaving things up to the memory of old men on the subject of things that happened decades ago, you're taking your chances.

 

Yeah, I remember when I broke the Watergate story back in '86, Nixon called me a cocksucker.

 

Fuck Phil.