To Absent Friends - Robert Duvall

 

Actor Robert Duvall died earlier this week at the age of 95, and no, I would never have guessed that he was that old.  He was the consummate actor, good in everything he ever did.  When I think of Duvall, I think immediately of two roles of his.  The first, of course, is that of Tom Hagen, the Corleone Family consigliere in "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather Part II" (1974). The other is his portrayal of retired Texas Ranger turned cattle driver Augustus McCrea in the 1989 TV mini-series "Lonesome Dove" (that he didn't win an Emmy for that part is a crime).

But that's just me, and if your initial thoughts of Duvall are different than mine it is certainly understandable, because his list of acting credits, and there are 145 of them in IMDB, is astonishing.  You actually learn, or at least I did, that Duvall was in some great movies that you saw and you didn't actually remember that he was in the cast.  His first feature film role was that of Boo Radley in1962's "To Kill A Mockingbird".   He had a bit part as a cab driver in the Steve McQueen classic "Bullitt" (1968), and he was the original Major Frank Burns in the movie "M*A*S*H" (1970).  He was in "True Grit" with John Wayne in 1969, "The Eagle Has Landed" with Michael Caine in 1976,   "True Confessions" with Robert DiNiro in 1981, and "The Natural" with Robert Redford in 1984. He was nominated for seven Oscars during his career and won one for "Tender Mercies" in 1983.   

There were other great roles, and, I have probably left out some of your favorite Robert Duvall movies.  In fact, in looking at his filmography, I noticed a credit for a 2018 movie called "Widows".  It was a heist movie that I recall enjoying, but didn't remember that Duvall was in it.  So I go into The Grandstander archives, and sure enough, on February 19, 2019 my write up on that movie included this:  

"A terrific cast also features Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, and Daniel Kaluuya.  Consummate old pro Duvall pretty much dominates every scene that he is in."

And before all of the movie roles, Duvall made his bones acting in series television.  Name a series that was on the air in the 1960's, and chances are, Duvall made an appearance.  Naked City, Playhouse 90, Twilight Zone, The Fugitive, Route 66, and The Wild, Wild West are just a few of them.

What a Career.  What an Actor.

RIP Robert Duvall.

The consigliere  win his Don

With Tommy Lee Jones in "Lonesome Dove"

As Gus McCrea in "Lonesome Dove"

Hawkeye Pearce (Donald Sutherland) and Major Burns

"M*A*S*H"

A Nazi colonel in 

"The Eagle Has Landed"

To Absent Friends - Roy Face

Elroy Face

1928 - 2026

"The Baron of the Bullpen"

Roy Face, a mainstay of the Pittsburgh Pirates bullpen for fifteen seasons through the 1950's and -60's, died this past week at the age of 97.  He died eight days short of his 98th birthday.

Was Roy Face the first dominant "closer" in major league baseball?  Since the role of the relief pitcher, the idea of a "closer", and the statistic of the Save, has evolved and changed over the years, it is hard to answer that question, but this I know.  I attended my first Pirates game in 1959.  That was the season that Face finished with an astonishing record of 18-1 (more on that later) so Roy Face was certainly the most dominant relief pitcher in the first seven or eight years of MY baseball fandom.  As I said, the role of relief pitchers was different then than it is today.  Face, nicknamed "The Baron of the Bullpen" by announcer Bob Prince, would often be called into a game in mid-inning, and not just in the ninth inning, with men on base.  He would then often finish that game, pitching multiple innings.

About that "Save" statistic.  Let me quote from an essay by John Thorn, MLB's official historian, that he wrote in 2024 about Chicago sportswriter Jerome Holtzman:

Holtzman recognized in 1959, when he was still with the Sun-Times, that something dramatic was happening on the field that was invisible in the box score and, by extension, at the bargaining table when relievers came to negotiate their salaries for the next season. As he told Darrell Horwitz in an interview in 2005: “Elroy Face was 18–1 with Pittsburgh in 1959. I was traveling with the Cubs. The Cubs had two relief pitchers: righthander Don Elston and lefthander Bill Henry. They were constantly protecting leads and no one even knew about it.” It burned him that Face was piling up wins by blowing victories and then having the Pirates rally for him; ten times Face had allowed the tying or lead run.

He came up with The Save. The Sporting News began listing league leaders during the 1960 season; by 1969 it was an official MLB stat. In 1974–1975 its definition came under further modification, but there is no denying the impact of Holtzman’s invention. 

So while that 18-1 record in 1959 jumps out at you, perhaps it wasn't reflective at how good Face actually was that season.  In any event, it did lead to Holtzman inventing this new statistic.  It is a statistic that led to guys like Dennis Eckersley, Rich Gossage, Bruce Sutter, and Billy Wagner getting plaques in Cooperstown.

That aside, my own memories of Face include a feeling of supreme confidence whenever he came into pitch in the late innings with the game on the line.  I was able to be in Face's company over the years at a couple of golf outings and at SABR meetings.  Like many of his generation, he harbored some bitter feelings about "all the money these guys are making today".    I also remember a game that Marilyn and I attended at Three Rivers Stadium once.  While looking for a place to sit and eat some pre-game fare from the concession stand, who do we see sitting at a high top table all by himself but Elroy Face.  I asked if we could join him, he said certainly, and we had a nice conversation with him for fifteen or so minutes.   During the course of that conversation, he mentioned that the most he ever made in a season was $65,000.  I just looked it up and $65,000 in 1963 would be worth about $688,000 in 2026, which is well below what the MLB minimum salary of $780,000 is today.  Maybe he had a right to be bitter.

Roy Face was also, most importantly, a key member of the Pirates 1960 World Series Championship team.  He saved three of the four Bucco victories in that Series.  Now only three members of the team are still with us:  Vernon Law who will turn 96 in March, Bob Skinner who will turn 95 in October, and Bill Mazeroski who will be 90 in September.

RIP Roy Face, The Baron of the Bullpen

A  Sports Illustrated cover in 1963

 

The Seattle Super Bowl and Other Thoughts

 

The Seattle Seahawks 29-13 win over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX has been in our rear view mirror for four days, so there is no point in going into great detail about the game at this point.  It was a game that lacked in drama.  If this same game had taken place at 1:00 on an October Sunday afternoon, it would have been noted in the rundown of scores and written off as a relatively dull and one sided affair.  However, this game took place at the Super Bowl, so it is a game of great consequences, history wise.  

The game was noteworthy for the other worldly performance of the Seahawks' defense.  They completely overwhelmed Pats' QB Drake Maye and the offensive line that was supposed to protect him.  Poor New England left tackle Will Campbell (#66).  I'd hate to be him sitting in the film room when the coaches grade that performance.

I don't know how sustainable that Seattle defense will be over the next five years or so, but this past Sunday they looked "Steelers Steel Curtain" and "1985 Bears" good.

A word about the quarterbacks.

As I watched this game unfold, I said to those watching with me that the blame for New England's performance was going to fall, unfairly, all on Drake Maye, and he has been taking a beating since that game.  No mistake, Maye played a bad game and it appeared that he was in way over his head on Sunday afternoon.  He was playing injured, so there is that, and as mentioned above, his offensive line gave him ZERO chance to succeed in this game, and he is only in his second year in the NFL cut him some slack. He finished second in the voting for league MVP this season and with good reason.  I think the Pats are set at quarterback for the foreseeable future.

The Sam Darnold Redemption Story is one of the better ones in the NFL over the last couple pf seasons.  He was a high first round draft pick, number three overall, I believe, of the Jets (where careers go to die), and he bombed there.  He was discarded by New York and went to San Francisco as a back-up, and then became free agent signee of the Vikings in 2024, where he led the team to 14 wins.  The Vikes bombed out in the playoffs where Darnold didn't play well.  He was released and then signed with Seattle this past season, where he led Seattle to a pretty good season.  Yet all season long, the talking heads kept saying that Darnold would eventually be Seattle's undoing.  Well, it didn't happen, did it?  No, Darnold didn't have a great game either in the Super Bowl (the Patriots have a pretty good defense, too), but he didn't make any mistakes, and his team, you know, WON THE GAME.  

No one is comparing Sam Arnold to Joe Montana, but I think he's earned the right to now tell the doubters to eat it.  And I wonder what the outlook would be like in Steelers Nation right now if instead of signing free agent Aaron Rodgers last year, the team had signed free agent Sam Darnold instead.

BAD BUNNY

Yes, we watched the much discussed Halftime Show featuring Bad Bunny.  Yes we were entertained, and yes, we enjoyed it.  No, we didn't understand the words sung in Spanish, but we loved the music, the dancing, and the overall spectacle of the performance.  As the days passed, and we came to learn the meaning of what was being communicated on stage to the audience, we came to appreciate the show even more. There was an actual wedding that took place during the show.  How could you not like that? And how can you possibly take a stance against  this message that was communicated:

If it wasn't so sad and pathetic, it would actually be funny watching so many of our so-called leaders in Washington twisting themselves into knots in the months leading up to the Super Bowl and in the days since over what they conceive as being "un-American", "unpatriotic", and "disgusting", even threatening deportation and FCC licensing of the TV networks.  Which prompts me to ask, Why was the leader of this rabble watching this show at his Super Bowl party down there in Berchtesgaden-by-the-Sea, aka, Mar-a-Largo?  Why wasn't HE watching his boy Kid Rock performing the All-American Alternative Halftime Show?

There is great irony here.  Super Bowl Halftime entertainment, like much of popular music, has passed me by.  I get it, and if the NFL chooses to go with what is current and popular, fine by me.  I have glanced at halftime shows over last five years or so briefly and have basically said "talented people, but not for me", and have used halftimes to get something to eat and go to the bathroom.  That would have probably been the case this year, but for all of the fuss raised by the so-called patriots who are currently in the process of destroying the America that has been built since the end of World War II. 

So I watched the Bad Bunny show, and I enjoyed it, and I'm guessing that most people did.  The TV ratings numbers show that in excess of 135 million people watched the Super Bowl halftime show.

5 million people tuned into the Kid Rock alternate show (the leader of the anti-Bad Bunny forces, as noted, did not).

12.5 million people tuned into the Puppy Bowl Halftime show on Animal Planet.

Super Bowl Commercials

Four days after the fact, the commercial that sticks with me most was for Dunkin' that featured Ben Affleck and actors in character from '90s sitcoms, although I wish that  Alfonso Ribeiro would have been able to do a few steps of "The Carlton" in there.    The worst commercial was for an electric razor for Manscaping that talked about keeping beards and sideburns trimmed, but was REALLY talking about men shaving....somehwere else.  Didn't need to see that.

That's it, that's the list.

FINAL NOTE:  I went down a road in this post that I usually try to avoid when writing The Grandstander.  I am going to try not to make a habit of these kinds of posts.  If you were offended, I'm not going to apologize.  I have hated seeing what has been happening in this country over the last year, THAT has been truly offensive to me, and sometimes you just have to say something about it.

Two Absent Friends - Mickey Lolich and Sonny Jurgensen

Two rather significant members of the sports world left us this past week and deserve to be remembered.

Mickey Lolich

Mickey Lolich

1940 - 2026

Mickey Lolich was 85 years old when he died this past week.  He was a solid-to-very good Major League pitcher and a genuine World Series hero.  I have a memory of first hearing about Mickey Lolich in an article in SPORT Magazine sometime in the mid-1960's that concentrated on Lolich being (a) a left-hander, (b) a bit of a flake, and (c) his somewhat, ahem, portly build.  (I have been unable to find that article in a cursory search of the inter webs.)  I then mostly forgot about him as he pitched in the American League in the days before interleague play and before every baseball game under the sun was available to watch on some television platform or another.

Then came 1968.

That was the season that has come to be known as "The Year of the Pitcher".  Bob Gibson led all of MLB with a 1.12 ERA, and the Tigers Denny McLain won 31 games. In a wonder of perfect serendipity, Gibson's Cardinals and McLain's Tigers met in the World Series that year.  This was the last season before leagues were split into divisions and the baseball post-season began to feature multiple levels of playoffs.  Because of this, some people, like my buddy Jim Haller, refer to 1968 as the last "pure" season, but that is a discussion for another time.  The Cardinals were defending World Series champs and had won two of the previous four World Series.  The stage was set for a Gibson-McLain Showdown, but then something completely unexpected happened: Mickey Lolich.

While McLain stumbled a bit in the Series, he went 1-2, Lolich picked up the slack.  He started and completed three games in that Series.  He won all three games and had an ERA of 1.67.  Lolich's third win in that Series came in Game 7 on two days rest when the opposing pitcher was none other than BOB F. GIBSON, who had won three World Series games himself in one Series the year before.  And how's this for a cherry atop the sundae?  Lolich also hit a home run in Game 2 of that Series. It was the only home run in his entire career.

History lesson, kids.  Pitchers have won three games in a single World Series only thirteen times in history. It has been done only five times in the so-called Live Ball Era, i.e., after 1920.  After Lolich did it in 1968, it wasn't accomplished again until Randy Johnson of the Diamondbacks did it in 2001, and if memory serves, Johnson's third win in that Series came in a relief role.

Lolich had a solid, but not a spectacular career.  He pitched for 16 seasons, 13 of them with Tigers. He had a career record of 217-191 with a 3.44 ERA.  He won twenty games twice.  He had nine seasons with double digit wins totals.  In 1971 he led the American League with 45 starts and 29 complete games.  He had 195 complete games in his career.  He made three All-Star teams and never won a Cy Young Award, although he finished in the Top Five of the voting twice.

Like I said, a really good pitcher, and a Genuine World Series Hero.  I hope that he never had to pick up a  restaurant check in Detroit right up until the day he died.

Sonny Jurgensen

Sonny Jurgensen

1934-2026

Hall of Fame quarterback Sonny Jorgensen died thais past week at the age of 91.  He had a career that spanned 18 NFL seasons, seven with the Eagles and eleven with Washington.  As I remember Jurgensen, and my first hand memories of him are few, I admit, he was a swaggering figure on the field, a tough guy who could take the hard hits and dish them out as well.  I remember getting his football cards and thinking that "Sonny Jurgensen" was a pretty cool name. I heard a story after his death that Vince Lombardi, who coached Sonny for that one season in Washington in 1969, called Jorgensen "the best".  I'll take Lombardi's word for that.

In his career he threw for 255 touchdowns and for over 32,000 yards.  He led the NFL in passing yards five times and in TD passes twice.  He was a backup QB on the Eagles 1960 NFL Championship team (he threw for 486 yards and five TD's that season), He made the Pro Bowl five tines, made the NFL's All-1960's Team, and he went into the Hall of Fame in 1983.

I know that he did a stint as an analyst on the Networks, but he fashioned a career as an analyst on the Washington Football Team's radio broadcast team for over thirty years.  It was in that role that be became beloved by generations of Redskins/Commanders fans that had never even seen him play.  

You just gotta love guy like that!

RIP Mickey Lolich and Sonny Jurgensen

Oh, and by the way, how many of you know what Sonny Jorgensen's baptismal name was.  I'll bet you a dollar that you don't.  

I'll save you from looking it up: Adolph Christian Jurgensen.  He was born in 1934, and I guess that it was okay to give your kid a name like that that, but I can see why went by "Sonny".

To Absent Friends - Catherine O'Hara and Bob Weir

 

Catherine O'Hara

1954-2026

The deaths of some celebrities make you feel sad for personal reasons that often times cannot be explained, and that was how I felt a few days ago when I heard the news that actress Catherine O'Hara died at the age of 71.

O'Hara first came to the attention of many of us when she was a part of the Canadian SCTV troup.  This was a company that introduced us to other comic masters that included, among others, John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Martin Short.  O'Hara then began making movies and guest appearances on TV shows, a lot of them.  She has 340 acting credits in IMDB.  Her notable featured roles came in films such as "Heartburn" (1986), "Beetlejuice" (1988), and "Home Alone" (1990). She also starred in four absolutely terrific movies that were made by Christopher Guest: "Waiting for Guffman", "Best in Show", "A Mighty Wind", and "For Your Consideration".  Each of these four movies are comic gems, and O'Hara was a big part of all of them.  In "Best In Show" she and Levy played a married couple  traveling from Florida to Philadelphia to show their Norwich Terrier in a dog show. Throughout the trip they kept running into men who had been ex-lovers of hers. It may have been O'Hara and Levy at their best.  I will also throw in a little known mockumentary called "The Last Polka" from 1985.

 "Home Alone"

"Best in Show"

O'Hara went on to win an Emmy for her role in the award winning streaming series "Schitt's Creek", and I most recently saw her in the Emmy winning series "The Studio" where she played a deposed studio head who takes on a producer's position under the new studio head played by Seth Rogan.  She was, as you would expect, wonderful in the role.

She will be missed.

********

Bob Weir

1947-2026

Bob Weir passed away three weeks ago at the age of 78.  In 1965, at the age of 17,  Weir teamed up with San Francisco area musician Jerry Garcia to form a bad that eventually became the Grateful Dead. No, I am not a "Dead Head", and am not even all that familiar with the band's work, but when a founding member of a band that has had the profound cultural influence that the Grateful Dead has had for over sixty years passes away, it deserves to be noted.

I can remember once, somewhere in the 1990's when the Grateful Dead was playing a two or three day gig at Three Rivers Stadium.  I was out and about on business one day and on my way back to the office, I took a detour around Three Rivers Stadium just to get a glimpse of the caravans of fans, Dead Heads, who had followed the Band and camped out in the stadium parking lots in order to follow the Band on their "long strange trip".  It was an interesting experience.  I also know a guy, about my age, who has seen the Dead perform well over 100 times.

Since Weir's death, I have sought out some of the music of the Grateful Dead, and have enjoyed listening to it.  I probably should have started paying attention much sooner, like maybe fifty or sixty years ago.

A Heavenly Reunion

The long strange trip continues

RIP Catherine O'Hara and Bob Weir

"The Gales of November"

 

We are not even one full month into this new year, but I think that I already know what will be the best non-fiction book of the year for me.  It is John U. Bacon's "The Gales of November, The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

This past November marked the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the this remarkable Great Lakes freighter ship, and while there have been other books, articles, and investigations into the events of November 10, 1974, author Bacon offers a different take on it.  In this book, he studies the lives of the 29 crewmen who lost their lives in this tragic event.  He also looks at the families, "the wives and the sons and the daughters", of these men.

Beyond all of that, though, I learned a lot in reading this book.  I learned just how vital the Great Lakes have been and continue to be to the economic engine of the United States.   The shipping of iron, ion ore, and taconite from the mines in the iron range of Minnesota via the Great Lakes to the industrial cities of Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, was vital to the wartime efforts during World War II, creating the "Arsenal of Democracy" that defeated the Axis.  That same industrial complex also contributed to the remarkable post-war economic boom in the United States.  Shipping tens of thousands of tons at a time in these ore carriers was infinitely more efficient than shipping overland via truck or rail. The Great Lakes were the very heart of the American economy.

I also learned of the incredible risks and dangers inherent in shipping along the Lakes.  Did you you know that it is much more dangerous sailing in fresh water than in ocean water when the weather turns bad?  I didn't, and I won't go into detail here as to why that is, but trust me, sailing upon these boats (and the people on the Lakes call them "boats", not "ships") is not for the faint of heart.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was built by the Northwest Mutual Life Insurance Company, and was named for the company's chairman.  It was christened in 1959, and was regarded as the finest boat ever built for service upon the Great Lakes. Throughout it's history, it set records in terms of tonnage of freight carried and delivered and for its speed in doing so.  Great Lakes sailors aspired to sail on it, and its crews were the best on the Lakes.  It was also easily the most luxurious of the ore boats.  It was standard that the Fitzgerald hosted VIP's from the mining, steel, and automotive companies on its various 2-3 day trips - in the summer months, when the weather was calm - along the Lakes in plush staterooms and treating them to gourmet meals along the way.  The food served on the Fitz was the best on the Great Lakes.

And it is those crewmen who are the focus of this book.  What does it take to be a sailor on these boats?  What are the duties of each person on board, from the lowly "wipers" in the engine room right on up to the Captain?  Bacon tells us all of this and also of the specifics of the 29 men who went down in Lake Superior that night.

Of course, there are no live witnesses to what happened during that storm on Lake Superior in 1975, but Bacon gives us a pretty good idea, based on radio exchanges between Captain Ernest McSorley on the Fitzgerald and Captain Bernie Cooper of the Arthur Anderson, a boat that was sailing about ten miles behind the Fitzgerald that night.  McSorley, by the way, was a 44 year veteran sailor on the Great Lakes and was regarded as the best Captain on the Lakes.  The trip that the Edmund Fitzgerald took that November was scheduled to be the last trip of the season and McSorley's last as captain before he was to retire.

It was fascinating to read about how crew members came to be on the Fitzgerald that night, and how some who were supposed to be on it were not.  "Survivor's guilt" was real thing among some of those sailors.  Here are the stories of the families of those men.  Most of them didn't know each other, but in the fifty year aftermath, they became a tight knit community who relied upon each other to get through life after the tragedy.  Bacon interviewed family members of fourteen of the twenty-nine crewmen.  Their stories are remarkable.

Then there is the story of Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot and his ballad, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".  You all know the song.  How Lightfoot came to write and record it, and how it was received by the families of the victims, and how Lightfoot himself became an integral part of the community of the Family of those who were lost on the Fitzgerald.   It is this song that, more than anything, kept the tragedy alive in the minds of the public.  As John Bacon himself has said, "Without the song, there would be no book."

There were, of course, investigations and studies into what exactly happened that November night in 1975.   There were and are no live witnesses, of course, so we'll probably never really know.  As one of the family members put it, "Only thirty people know, God and the twenty-nine men who died that night."

The Edmund Fitzgerald leaves one remarkable legacy.  Its loss led to the institution of new safety measures in both ship construction, and in safety regarding weather reporting, and in the scheduling of the the trips across the Lakes between the iron range and the industrial delivery points.  In one hundred years covering 1875 to 1975, approximately 6,000 boats were lost on the Great Lakes and over 30,000 lives were lost.   Since 1975, there has been not a single ship or life has been lost.  The  Edmund Fitzgerald  was the last of the Great Lakes shipwrecks.

Four Stars from The Gradstander.

"All that remains are the faces and the names

of the wives and the sons and the daughters"

What About Al Oliver?

 

When I made THIS POST last week commenting on the newest members of Baseball's Hall of Fame,  Carlos Beltran, Andrew Jones, and Jeff Kent, it prompted a response from Big Brother Bill Sproule similar to the question posed in the headline above.

Ask and you shall receive.....

	Carlos Beltran	Andruw Jones	Jeff                Kent	Al                     Oliver	Dave    Parker
Seasons	20	17	17	18	19
Games	2,586	2,192	2,298	2,368	2,466
Hits	2,725	1,933	2,461	2,743	2,712
Runs	1,582	1,204	1,320	1,189	1,272
HR	435	434	377	219	339
RBI	1,587	1,289	1,518	1,326	1,493
BA	0.279	0.254	0.290	0.303	0.290
OPS	0.837	0.823	0.855	0.795	0.810
per 162 games
Hits	171	143	173	188	178
Runs	99	95	93	81	84
HR	27	32	27	15	22
RBI	99	95	107	91	98
“Similarity Scores”	7 of 10 Hall of Famers	2 of 10 Hall of Famers	4 of 10 Hall of Famers	5 of 10 Hall of Famers	4 of 10 Hall of Famers

I also threw in the numbers for Pirates HOF'er and Al Oliver Bucco contemporary Dave Parker.  While Scoops had more hits and a better average than these four, he lags behind all of them in terms of home run power and OPS.  A case can certainly be made for putting Al in the Hall of Very, Very Good, and that seems to be what it takes to get into Cooperstown these days.

Interestingly enough, one of the five Hall of Famers that baseball-reference rates as "similar to" Al Oliver is Roberto Clemente.