When the Colorado Rockies won 11 games in a row and 13 of 14 in 2007, the streak came in September and catapulted them into a tie for the National League wild-card spot in the playoffs. When they won a playoff game and their next seven games for a 21-of-22 stretch, the streak came in October and propelled them into the World Series.

Now, less than two years later, the Rockies have reeled off another 11-game winning streak and won 17 of 18 games. However, no playoff spot is immediately at stake, only the Rockies’ self-respect.

“When you’re that many games under .500 you don’t worry about where you are in the standings,” Dan O’Dowd, the Colorado general manager, said of the team that went from 10 games under .500 to 4 games over but was still about 10 games from first place. “Just try to play as well as we can and if at the end of the year we’re not good enough, we dug ourselves too deep a hole.”

The Rockies dug an 18-28 hole under Clint Hurdle, which is why O’Dowd fired him May 28 and replaced him with the bench coach, Jim Tracy (at right).

“Clint’s a dear friend of mine,” O’Dowd said. “It’s the most difficult decision I’ve had to make here in 10 years. He’s such a quality person. I think Jim’s had an effect because he’s a different type personality. He has had a settling effect on the club.”

Tracy managed the Los Angeles Dodgers for five seasons and the Pittsburgh Pirates for two. He was serving on Hurdle’s coaching staff with another former manager, Don Baylor, the hitting coach.

Why did O’Dowd choose Tracy as the new manager? “We thought it was the right thing to do for the club,” he said. “As bench coach, Jimmy worked with Clint and we felt he had a better feel for the over-all picture of the club.”

Tracy evidently knew enough about the players to induce them to play at a higher level than they achieved under Hurdle.

	The Rockies under Hurdle	Under Tracy (before Saturday)
W-L Record	18-28	20-7
B.A.	.249	.279
Runs / Game	4.89	5.48
E.R.A.	4.93	3.71

“We’re different in that we’ve become a much more aggressive team,” Tracy said. “Early in the season we were doing things that weren’t conducive to winning. Offensively we were far too passive, taking third strikes. We weren’t putting ourselves in position to test the defense and force the opposition to make plays.”

Now, the manager said, the team is playing with “patient aggression,” explaining, “We’re not expanding our strike zone and getting ourselves out. We’re patient early in the count, fight off pitches when we have two strikes and get pitch counts up.”

The change in style of play has resulted not only in more wins but also in a different clubhouse environment.

“There’s an awareness that I didn’t see earlier in the season,” Tracy said. The awareness isn’t about winning games; it’s about how to go about winning games.

“We’re not thinking in this clubhouse about what we’ve done,” Tracy said, meaning the rush of victories. “It’s become an expectation. We come to the park every day expecting to win. These guys show up every day and their only business is do we have more runs than the other team at the end of the night.” And, he added, “We think about winning series. If you’re in a hole, that’s how you get out of it.”

Since Tracy replaced Hurdle the Rockies have won six of eight series, sweeping four of them, including a four-game series in St. Louis and the ensuing three-game series in Milwaukee, whose Brewers were in first place in the N.L. Central at the time.

“We were the third team in the last 60 years to go into St. Louis and win four games,” Tracy said.

In their first week under Tracy, the Rockies lost four in a row, then didn’t lose two in a row again until last week when the Angels beat them, once in a 4-3 game the Rockies felt they should have won.

“Our clubhouse was like a church,” Tracy said, describing the players’ reaction to the loss. “The game left a very sour taste in our mouth. We felt we should have won the ball game. To me, that was good.”

Tracy has not inspired the Rockies with his good looks. He did make some moves when he became the manager. He installed Clint Barmes (at left) as the regular second baseman and made him the No. 2 hitter in the lineup, and he committed to Ian Stewart at third. Before Tracy, Barmes was hitting .234 and Stewart .187. Under Tracy Barmes is hitting .330, Stewart .247.

“We increased our athleticism,” O’Dowd said, “and improved our over-all team speed and our over-all defense. Every aspect of the game we’ve played better. We’re throwing more strikes and running the bases not only aggressively but intelligently.”

Even the pitchers’ defense has improved, Tracy said. “We were making mistakes from the mound,” he said, “whether it’s throwing or fielding. We weren’t doing what pitchers should do to help the team win.”

I asked O’Dowd if he saw any similarities between this team and the 2007 team. “I would say there’s a similarity in team chemistry,” he said. “The core of our players have a good chemistry and we had good chemistry in ‘07.”

The Rockies would like to finish the season in a similar way to their 2007 counterparts. Their 17-of-18 stretch slashed six and a half games from their Dodgers’ deficit but still left them nine games behind the division leaders. However, it catapulted the Rockies into the thick of the wild-card chase, which is what the 2007 streak did for them.

KEVIN, MEET ALBERT

Kevin Slowey is a good young pitcher for the Minnesota Twins. For his most recent start, Slowey faced St. Louis Saturday with a 10-2 record, tied for the major league lead in victories. The 25-year-old right-hander had never faced Albert Pujols, the Cardinals’ bruising slugger.

Their first confrontation came in the first inning. Skip Schumaker led off with a double and one out later Pujols fouled Slowey’s first pitch, took a ball, fouled another pitch, took the next two pitches for balls, fouled two more pitches, then drove Slowey’s eighth pitch over the left-center field fence.

Before Pujols batted again, in the third inning, the Twins scored three runs and took a 3-2 lead. But with one out in the third, Schumaker singled and after another out Pujols swung at Slowey’s first pitch and whacked it over the left field fence, giving him major league-leading figures of 28 home runs and 74 runs batted in.

Slowey was finished after that inning. Pujols went to bat two more times and walked both times.

WHY IS MANNY IN THE MINORS?

Time flies when Manny is having fun, and so it is that Manny Ramirez is eligible, barring a rainout or an earthquake in Los Angeles this week, to return from his 50-game suspension Friday in San Diego.

In advance of his return, Ramirez has been working out with Dodgers minor league teams, raising eyebrows and questions, mainly why he has he been allowed to work out with teams affiliated with the major league team from which he was suspended after testing positive for performance-enhancing substances.

“Because it’s in the joint drug agreement that he is,” Rob Manfred, management’s chief labor executive, said. “It was a union proposal that depending on the length of the suspension the player wouldn’t be able to ready himself to return to work.”

The rational behind the reason for the workouts makes sense. If a player were not permitted to work out, he would have to work out when his suspension ended and would not be ready to play. The club would then be penalized because it would be paying the player again and not have his services.

Baseball is being criticized for permitting the Ramirez workouts, but as Manfred said, it’s in the agreement. A suspended player, on the other hand, could work out elsewhere on his own, but his club wouldn’t be satisfied with that. Teams like to supervise their players’ workouts, especially after they have been idle for 50 days.

Baseball’s minor league drug agreement allows players to work out with their teams before their suspensions are over.

The Dodgers incidentally have increased their division lead without Ramirez, from six and a half games to eight before Saturday’s game.

SMOLTZ PLAYS SPOILER

John Smoltz last week ruined the chance for the Hall of Fame to have its first pitching trifecta in 2014. By making his first start for Boston, Smoltz delayed his eligibility for the Hall by a year and will not be able to join Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine as players elected on their first time on the ballot in 2014.

The Hall has inducted three players at the same time, most recently in 1999 when Nolan Ryan, George Brett and Robin Yount were elected, but it has never had three pitchers at the same time.

Maddux is retired, and Glavine has said he will not play this season after Atlanta released him. However, the 305-game winner has not ruled out attempting a comeback next season. All three pitchers are expected to be elected in their first year of eligibility.

Unlike Glavine and Maddux, Smoltz is not a 300-gamer winner, but he has achieved the rare combination of 210 victories plus 154 saves in a span of less than four seasons as a closer.

NO NEW GUIDELINES FOR STEROIDS VOTERS

Contrary to what some people think, baseball writers can make intelligent decisions. The Chicago chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America met Friday to discuss, at a member’s request, guidelines for voting for the Hall of Fame in the steroids era.

When I first heard about the meeting, I was concerned that the chapter would, in some misguided way, adopt guidelines, and they could spread to other chapters and writers. But fear not.

“We debated it for about half an hour,” Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune, the chapter chairman, said. “Everyone had a different opinion.”

There was no consensus to develop guidelines, Sullivan said. Everyone agreed, he added, that the existing Hall of Fame rule governing voting mentioning character, integrity and sportsmanship was appropriate for steroids users.

Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall of Fame, said nobody has asked Hall officials to do anything about the voting or guidelines for the voting.

“We’re comfortable with the rules as they are,” he said despite calls from some voters to issue special guidelines. “We have great confidence that the writers, as we always have had, that they’ll continue to exercise good judgment and use their own instincts. I don’t think you can argue that the writers have elected someone they shouldn’t have.”

Idelson’s view is refreshing. A previous administration changed the rules to make sure Pete Rose would not be elected after being suspended for violating baseball’s cardinal sin of gambling on baseball. Officials did not trust the voters to reject Rose.

Chapters and individuals, in my opinion, should be free to discuss the subject as much as they want, but guidelines for writers to follow? I suggest they keep those to themselves. I think it would be a bad precedent for any chapter to create so-called guidelines.

Furthermore, if writers need someone to tell them how they should vote, they shouldn’t be voting. It is a difficult task with which voters are faced, but we can each decide for ourselves what our guidelines should be.

 

 

This is a baseball fantasy. No, not fantasy baseball, that silly game that people play, gorging themselves on players’ statistics, the foolish game about which I have been interviewed for two different documentaries, the game I sometimes feel is played by everyone but me, but that makes me the rational one.

No, this is a baseball fantasy, something that never happened but about which I can fantasize and wish it had. It’s about Ted Sorensen, a man who could’ve been baseball commissioner, like Marlon Brando “coulda been a contenduh.”

Given his political views, the liberal Sorensen probably had as much chance of becoming commissioner as Terry Malloy (Brando) had of becoming a boxing champion in the great film “On the Waterfront.” But I can fantasize, can’t I? That’s what is nice about fantasies. They are your own, and no one can take them from you.

My fantasy began last week when I had lunch with Sorensen, and he told me he had been interviewed in 1964 for the upcoming vacancy in the job of commissioner. Ford Frick, who became best known for constantly declaring “it’s a league matter” so he would have fewer decisions to make, planned to retire after the 1965 season, and the owners began their search for a successor more than a year in advance.

The timing was interesting because until Nov. 22, 1963, Sorensen had been special (very special) counsel to President John F. Kennedy. Sorensen, a Nebraska native, was very close to Kennedy and almost certainly would have stayed with him as long as he was in the White House and most likely longer.  

But less than three months after Kennedy was killed, Sorensen resigned as an advisor to President Lyndon Johnson and left the White House. It was during his time with Johnson that Sorensen, then 35, was approached for an interview for the baseball job.

“They did it carefully,” Sorensen recalled. “I got this call from Fetzer asking if I was willing to be interviewed. That was a discreet way of determining my state of mind.”

John Fetzer, owner of the Detroit Tigers, was head of the search committee that was directed to find a successor to Frick.

Sorensen didn’t recall many details of his interview, but one thing stood out. He remembered making “a wiseass remark” about something he had read that morning or the day before.

“The story said they were considering Curtis LeMay,” Sorensen related. “I said to them ‘if what you want is a retired Air Force general I’m not your man.’ As I left the meeting I reflected on that and thought I might be stepping on the toes of the person who was promoting LeMay.”

LeMay, Sorensen said, favored nuclear war and was not held in high regard in the White House. “Later,” Sorensen added, “he showed his true colors by being on George Wallace’s ticket.”

Sorenson referred to Wallace’s independent run for the presidency in 1968 with LeMay as his vice presidential candidate. Ironically, Wallace nearly picked A.B. (Happy) Chandler as his running mate. But Chandler, a former baseball commissioner, lost out because he had let Jackie Robinson break baseball’s color barrier by playing for the Dodgers.   

In that context, LeMay had a much better chance of becoming commissioner than the liberal Sorensen did. But it was another retired Air Force general, William Eckert, who became commissioner in November 1965.

Sorensen said he didn’t recall hearing from the search committee. “I don’t think I did,” he said. “It wasn’t too long after that that I moved up to Cape Cod to start writing my book on Kennedy.”

But what if the owners had hired Sorensen to be commissioner?

To begin with, he would undoubtedly have been a far more competent commissioner than Spike Eckert, who served only three years before the owners realized they had made a mistake and invited him to abandon the post.

With the office vacant – some would say it had been vacant with Eckert in it and would be again when his successor sat at the commissioner’s desk – the owners had difficulty reaching a consensus on a new man and finally compromised on a one-year term for the National League attorney, Bowie Kuhn, who in the next 15 years would prove the assertion that not all lawyers are bright.

With Sorensen as commissioner, Major League Baseball would have avoided the embarrassment of Eckert and had no need for Kuhn, who lacked vision, foresight, fairness and just about anything else a capable commissioner should have in his makeup.

Kuhn, it should be remembered, said free agency would be the death of baseball and was all in favor of going to court to fight the Messersmith-McNally arbitration decision that created it. Baseball has flourished in the era of free agency with club revenues reaching record numbers.

Kuhn, it should be remembered, attempted to portray himself as the commissioner of the players as well as the owners, only to be caught sneaking around the office of management’s chief labor negotiator so union officials wouldn’t see him when they arrived for a negotiating session.

Kuhn, it should be remembered, was commissioner for five work stoppages, including the 50-day strike of 1981. After that debacle, Kuhn crowed that the owners had demonstrated a resolve the players had not expected and declared that the owners had prevailed. He forgot to mention that the strike ended only when the owners’ strike insurance ran out.

Obviously no one knows how baseball would have fared with Sorensen as commissioner. But if I had been an owner, I would have been willing to take my chances with the Kennedy counselor, if for no other reason that he went on in his life to be a wiser and better lawyer than Kuhn was.

“Considering my career since then,” Sorensen, who at 81 is still an active lawyer, said when I asked him if he regretted not being asked to be commissioner, “I had a very interesting international law practice and as much fun as baseball might have been, my law practice made a better contribution to society.”

Kuhn’s legal legacy was a failed law firm that he started and a flight to Florida to avoid paying the firm’s outstanding bills.

 

 

The most negative thing I can say about Donald Fehr is he made it easy for people who didn’t like him to criticize him. Take, for example, his very innocent interlude during a long day of negotiations in the middle of the 1994 baseball strike.

Hours after the day game of a bargaining session turned into a night game, Fehr appeared in the lobby of the Arrowwood conference center in Rye Brook, N.Y. , sat down at the house piano and began playing “Take Me out to the Ball Game.” He would later be criticized for doing something so trivial as playing the piano instead of remaining in the room and continuing to negotiate.

The criticism, of course, was leveled by people – primarily reporters – who didn’t know the first thing about the rhythm and flow of negotiations. It was, some critics said, like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

I’d like to be able to say that Fehr’s musical interlude led to an agreement, but the strike continued for another three and a half months, and the players and the owners didn’t reach an agreement on a new contract for nearly two years.

But that night, Dec. 13, 1994, preceded by only about a week, the owners’ decision to implement unilaterally new work rules, and their implementation led to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s injunction that barred the owners from doing what they wanted and enabled the players to end their strike and return to work.

The piano timeout came to mind Monday when Fehr, who will be 61 next month, announced he was stepping down as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, a position he has held for nearly 26 years.

“I have been the boss for 25 years, which is a pretty long time to do anything, especially to hold a position like this,” Fehr told reporters on a conference call. “I have advised the executive board that it is my intention to step down no later than March 31 next year.”

Fehr, who said he was required to give nine months notice, said he could leave sooner if his successor is named before then. His successor will be Michael Weiner, the union’s general counsel, whose presence will give the baseball union a far more constructive transition than the football players union had earlier this year and the baseball union had when Marvin Miller, its legendary leader, retired in 1982.

Ken Moffett lasted less than a year as Miller’s successor, deposed by the players after he demonstrated less than complete attention to union affairs. Fehr, who had been general counsel, replaced Moffett.

When former commissioner Bowie Kuhn died last year, some of his obituaries noted how the average player salary had risen during his 15 years as commissioner, as if he had anything to do with the increase. If it had been left to Kuhn, the average salary would have decreased.

During Fehr’s tenure, on the other hand, the average salary rose from $289,000 to more than $3.3 million. He had something to do with that increase.

It is almost a given that every other column written about Fehr will criticize him for his allegedly tardy reaction to steroids in baseball. You won’t find that criticism here.

Asked about that charge Monday, Fehr said, “I’ve previously indicated if I had known or understood what the circumstances were, we would have acted differently, but what we’ve put in in the last several years is good for everybody.”

Miller has said he would not have agreed to testing for performance-enhancing drugs, and given my views of testing for anything (except for cause), I would agree more readily with Miller than with Fehr, but Fehr was in a difficult position. Not only was baseball concerned about public reaction to steroids use, but Congress jumped into the fray and made threats that the union found difficult to ignore.

“We were often criticized because we seemed to pay attention to privacy and other issues that run through this kind of a matter,” Fehr said. “I’m confident that taking these things into account was the right thing to do. Other people will say what they say. I didn’t represent anyone but the players.”

Fehr’s willingness to agree to a drug-testing program in 2002 and then amend it mid-agreement countered the frequent criticism that he let Miller pull his strings.

“I never thought I was in Marvin’s shadow,” Fehr said Monday. “I did think I had an extraordinary example to look up to and follow. Marvin told me it was my decisions to make, my responsibility.”

Fehr will leave Weiner with more than a decade of labor peace, a condition he didn’t inherit when he became executive director. Fehr and the owners have negotiated two consecutive labor agreements without a work stoppage. Fehr presided over a brief strike, a lockout and the monstrous strike during which he played the piano.

He attributed the change in the labor environment to the necessity of the two sides to “find a way to work together to do some things that would provide economic incentives.” Even with the economic problems every industry has these days, baseball is flourishing economically. Both players and owners have benefited, and with few short-sighted exceptions neither side wants to derail the smooth, calm relationship.

“I certainly hope the next negotiation will be like the last two,” Fehr said.

If it isn’t, the new union leadership may have trouble inducing a strong stand in the players, very few of whom will have experienced a labor battle. Peace is good as long as it continues.

“Major league players clearly understand what their world used to be like,” Fehr said. “They talk to coaches and managers and former players who lived through it. I have relied on children of former major leaguers who reach the majors. “I wasn’t bashful about asking them for help.”

If strike-threatening circumstances arise, Fehr added, “and a compelling case is made for it, the players will do it.”

Education is still the key ingredient, and baseball’s union leaders, starting with Miller and his general counsel, Richard Moss, have been the best at it.

“One of the jobs of the staff,” Fehr said, “is to say here’s what the owners want; here’s what we think, you guys choose. If circumstances are such that you have to think about a stoppage, the players will do that.”

After he answered my question about the players’ willingness to strike, Fehr said, “You sound wistful for a work stoppage.”

Actually, I wouldn’t mind one more work stoppage. I always found strikes and lockouts challenging and fun to cover, unlike most sports writers. Those circumstances also brought out the best and the worst in the people involved.

I learned early on that union people never lied and owners and their representatives often did lie. With more recent owners’ negotiators, Randy Levine and Rob Manfred, for example, that distinction has faded.

Labor peace and no labor lies – what a novel dual concept.