Don Zimmer and Baseball Lifers →

Baseball lost a bit of its history last week when Don Zimmer died. Zimmer was the starting 2nd baseman the day the Dodgers won their only championship in Brooklyn. Twenty-three years later he spent Rosh Hashanah managing the Boston Red Sox to their most famous defeat ever as Bucky Dent's three run home run dashed the Red Sox pennant chances. He was the starting third baseman in the first game the New York Mets ever played; and 27 years after that spent Yom Kippur managing the Chicago Cubs as they got eliminated from the NLCS on a clutch single by Will Clark. Zimmer, however, wasn't Jewish, so probably was not aware of the connection between important defeats and Jewish holidays in his life.

What is a "True Yankee" and Why Should We Care if Jorge Posada is One

Should Posada move on to another team next year, one of the great Yankee careers will have come to an end. Inevitably, the baseball media and blogosphere in New York, will begin questioning Posada’s credentials as a “true Yankee.” Putting aside the legitimacy of questioning the credentials of a player who played a key role in four Yankee World Series winning teams, delivering numerous big seasons and clutch hits along the way, this also draws attention to the absurdity of this term.

Your Team Not Going to the World Series Anytime Soon? Choose a Second Team

This situation, however, has been part of baseball for a long time as for most of the sport’s history there were teams that remained out of contention for decades. For example, the St. Louis Browns won exactly one pennant between during the 20th Century before they moved to Baltimore to become the Orioles in 1954. The Athletics were relatively moribund for the middle of the 20th Century failing to win a pennant between 1931 and 1972. The Senators/Twins franchise, the Phillies and others experienced similar periods of a quarter of a century or more without winning anything.

Lincoln Mitchell