#I have a lot of Feelings about cei and how he evolves as a character across authors of arthuriana and I don't think I have managed to reall

[chiropteracupola]

And you would not believe me if I tried / To tell you all the things I've seen / And all the places that I've been / So pour the hall another cup of wine...

[a cei for @mortiscausa’s ’march to camelot,’ for the prompt ‘kinship’]

[newssplashy]

LEADVILLE, Colo. — As Goose Gossage, a coffee cup in hand, stepped onto the deck outside his cabin on a recent morning, he considered the view.

Beyond the small lake in front of him, a broad grass valley gave way to an escarpment of spruce and pine that climbed until it ran out of oxygen, leaving exposed the tops of a snowcapped, snaggletooth row of 14,000-foot peaks.

Gossage, who turns 67 next month, first came to the edge of this former mining town one summer in the late 1950s, singing, “America the Beautiful,” while riding in the back of his Uncle Bert’s Jeep on what was then a day trip from his home in Colorado Springs.

Gossage bought one cabin here in 1974, just as his Hall of Fame pitching career took root. He bought the cabin next door, one that belonged to a Maytag heir, in 1978, after the New York Yankees bestowed on him what was then an eye-popping, free-agent contract for a reliever: six years, $2.85 million. Ever since, the cabins have served as retreats — to hunt elk, fish for trout and revel in the solitude.

“I was put on Earth to be a baseball player and to throw a baseball; I’m convinced,” Gossage said. “But my whole life isn’t that. I’ve got another life. I love my life. I love being up here. The mountains — if you’ve ever grown up around an ocean or the mountains, the power of those are incredible. They’re in your DNA.”

If Gossage sees this place as a sanctuary, as the ideal counterweight for the 23 years he spent bouncing from city to city, including a season in Japan, it is not hard to see it now as an island — a place where he is living in exile.

Few sports franchises embrace their history as firmly as the Yankees, and few former ballplayers relish reliving it more than Gossage. But that was not enough to prevent the Yankees from banishing Gossage from two of his most cherished rituals: working as a spring training instructor and participating in Old-Timers’ Day, which is Sunday, when the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays.

The culprit, not surprisingly, was his mouth.

In recent years, Gossage had become a headache to the Yankees, railing about what was wrong with today’s game to any reporter who would ask. His short, expletive-laced answer was: just about everything — analytics “nerds,” bat flips, drug cheats and how Mariano Rivera (and other modern-day closers) had it easy throwing just one inning.

Then, when word got out before spring training that Gossage had not been invited to return as an instructor, he incinerated any bridge that might have led to reconciliation, laying into general manager Brian Cashman as “a disgrace” and “an embarrassment.”

Gossage’s pique toward Cashman stems from the general manager’s not returning his call more than a decade ago when Gossage was hoping to garner an invitation to minor league camp for his youngest son, Todd, who had recovered from a detached retina at the end of his college career.

Gossage does not blame the Yankees for casting him out. “I didn’t leave them any choice,” he said.

He understands that these episodes have painted him as a cartoonish character — the foul-mouthed crank whom the game has passed by. “Grumpy old man; get off my lawn; another pie in the face,” he said with a laugh. He particularly likes “get off my lawn.”

Yet a fuller portrait might be of a man who is as vulnerable and bighearted as he can be vicious and boorish, who feels a great debt to the game but can’t find an open avenue to give back.

Or maybe he just can’t let go.

“He’s not very good about accepting the changes because he loves baseball so much,” said his wife, Corna, with whom he has three grown sons. “Everything is always going through change, so you can’t expect it to be the same as when you played. He wants to keep it as pure as it used to be and he can’t, so it’s a source of frustration to him.”

Few have seen as many sides of Gossage as Bucky Dent, who roomed with him in Class A ball in Appleton, Wisconsin, teamed with him to win a World Series, and managed him with the Yankees in 1989.

“There’s a lot of things that people don’t understand because they only see the gruff side of him,” Dent said. “He’s all baseball. His life has been baseball, but he’s got a heart of gold. He’s a lovable guy. I love him to death.”

Asked if he was saddened that Gossage could not restrain himself, Dent said, “That’s just Goose.”

A Fierce Facade

Gossage, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Colorado Springs, realized early that he had a gift for throwing things — first rocks, then footballs and baseballs. He had never been out of the state until he boarded a plane for Sarasota, Florida, after the Chicago White Sox drafted him in 1970 and gave him an $8,000 signing bonus.

Shortly before he left, he borrowed his brother’s car and drove to his favorite spot, near the Wilson Ranch, where his father, who had died the year before from emphysema, used to take him to hunt rabbit and deer,.

Gossage sat under a pine tree and cried.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “I thought Hank Aaron and all the greats put their pants on different, that they were fictitious characters that didn’t really exist. But through those tears I had a talk with myself, that there aren’t going to be any woulda, shoulda, couldas. When I made that commitment to myself, I felt this weight off my shoulders.”

The White Sox, the first of nine teams for whom he would play, had the foresight to stick Gossage — with his tempestuous demeanor and blazing fastball — in the bullpen, where he could let his adrenaline ride.

Even now, nearly 50 years later and with a left ankle that had to be fused after decades of landing on it, Gossage ambles in his familiar slump-shouldered, pigeon-toed gait. His hair is white and mostly gone, although his Fu Manchu mustache — the one that somehow evaded George Steinbrenner’s grooming police — remains.

Gossage can still reach back for that intimidating glare, the one that radiates an uncomfortable intensity — particularly when the subject is Cashman. But he admits that it was largely a facade, that the cocksure confidence he projected on the mound was fragile.

So it was that Gossage broke down when he described how Steinbrenner consoled him in private after Gossage gave up a three-run homer to George Brett that sealed Kansas City’s sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 American League Championship Series.

As Gossage wiped away tears, he moved on to another story: how Catfish Hunter extended a hand and then a dinner invitation with several teammates after Gossage had collapsed amid a pile of clothes in his locker after throwing away two bunts in the bottom of the ninth inning in Toronto shortly after he came to the Yankees in 1978.

This brought more tears. “You have no idea what that meant to me,” Gossage said, wiping his eyes.

This is the 40th anniversary of the Yankees’ 1978 championship season. It was the only time Gossage won a title, and he treasures the season because of how it unfolded. The Yankees, after trailing Boston by 14 games in mid-July, caught and passed the Red Sox by mid-September, but could not shake them. The Yankees won six in a row in the final week but lost on the final day of the season to force a one-game playoff at Fenway Park.

While Dent is remembered as the unlikely hero that day for his three-run homer over the Green Monster, Gossage helped the Yankees hang on for a 5-4 victory, stranding the tying run at third base when he retired an old nemesis, Carl Yastrzemski, on a pop-up for the final out.

Two weeks later, he was on the mound at Dodger Stadium, retiring Ron Cey on a pop-up for the final out as the Yankees, after losing the first two games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, clinched the title.

“To go through the absolute lowest, to experience everything in one year, was completely overwhelming,” Gossage said. “After the game that we clinched, after the World Series was over, there was no celebration. We were all sitting at our lockers — I think we were all kind of in disbelief.”

No Olive Branches

Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium had always been a chance to rekindle memories like those, even if the event has evolved over the years. The former players no longer change into their pinstripes alongside current players in the home clubhouse but in an auxiliary room where stories are not so easily swapped and bonds between generations not so easily forged.

The Yankees have invited eight members of the 1978 team to Sunday’s festivities.

If today’s Yankees are largely petrified of saying something provocative, the Bronx Zoo teams of the late 1970s just needed to be asked.

Manager Billy Martin, perpetually hired and fired, had a drinking problem that was nobody’s secret. Star player Reggie Jackson and captain Thurman Munson openly feuded. Gossage missed two months with a thumb injury in 1979 after he brawled in the showers with burly designated hitter Cliff Johnson. And lording over it all was the bombastic Steinbrenner.

“If those guys didn’t like you, it was honesty,” Gossage said. “Now, nobody says anything no matter how bad it is.”

As he sat in a vintage wooden chair in his wood-paneled cabin, surrounded by his hunting trophies — deer, owls, rams and fowl — the only remnant of his playing days was a Yankees travel bag stuffed with clothes from his home in Colorado Springs. Gossage said he did not watch much baseball these days, maybe an inning here, an inning there. The game, with more strikeouts, more home runs and fewer balls in play than ever, bores him.

The irony, of course, is that many millennials, the ones who might cast him as a dinosaur, feel the same way.

“The strategy is gone,” Gossage said. “Moving guys, cat and mouse, pitchouts — you don’t see that. You don’t see pitchouts because you don’t see steals. You can’t pitch inside, you can’t take out the shortstop, you can’t take out the catcher. Hitters are so offended when they get knocked down because they aren’t expecting it.”

As Gossage got more animated, he turned to replay, which has ensured that most umpiring mistakes are rectified, but at the cost of disrupting the game and largely robbing it of a favorite sight — managers kicking dirt on umpires.

“Wow, that was awesome,” Gossage said. “It woke me up.”

By now, he was worked up — and headed toward his favorite punching bag: the Ivy League-educated numbers wonks who never played the game. They have, he said, turned managers and coaches into baby sitters.

“Here are people trying to control this game that really, really don’t have a clue about the game, period,” he said. “Whatever that computer spits out, that’s it. There are volumes and volumes of knowledge that go into playing baseball — that computer has no idea — and it’s called the human element and it’s everywhere. They think they’ve got it figured out because they won their rotisserie leagues at Harvard.”

Gossage, inflammatory rhetoric aside, has a rather unlikely ally: Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner. He recently acknowledged that data’s influence had not necessarily been good for the game.

“There is a growing recognition that analytics have produced certain trends in the game that we may need to be more proactive about reversing,” Manfred said last month in an interview with The Athletic. “There are owners that feel that way. There are fans that feel that way.”

But in March 2016, when Gossage criticized Jose Bautista, then with the Toronto Blue Jays, and Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets for their exuberant bat flips and decried how analytics nerds were ruining the game, Cashman summoned him.

Cashman asked Gossage to be more considerate, in part because the Yankees have one of baseball’s largest analytics staffs. Before the 2017 season, Cashman called Gossage’s agent, Andrew Levy, extending an offer to return for spring training, but only if Gossage promised not to be disruptive. Levy checked with Gossage, who told the Yankees he was in.

Then, several days into spring training, Gossage, in an interview with NJ.com, decried being compared to Rivera and current Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who, unlike Gossage, were rarely asked to get more than three outs.

Another meeting with Cashman ensued, which included Joe Girardi, the manager at the time, and Jason Zillo, the team’s director of media.

Gossage was not invited back this spring.

“We run our organization in a certain way,” Zillo wrote in a statement after Cashman declined to comment. “Goose Gossage believes it should be run in a different way. It is fine to disagree with us and constructive dialogue is a healthy thing, but being disruptive, disrespectful and detrimental to the organization is something different.

“We respect him as a great Yankee and a member of the Hall of Fame,” the statement continued. “But we disagree with his positions and the manner in which he continuously presents them.”

In preparing the statement, Zillo asked if there was any sign of contrition from Gossage, something resembling an olive branch.

It was hard to find one. Peppering his words with expletives, Gossage described having the urge last year to stuff Cashman into a trash can.

“My mom must have been watching over,” he said, “because somebody was telling me: ‘Don’t! Don’t do it.'”

Gossage, who played in a charity golf tournament for the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on Monday with several of his former Yankees teammates, said he was sorry he would not be able to experience Old-Timers’ Day, which he has not missed since he was first invited about 20 years ago.

But he was not sorry about anything he had said. “I am absolutely at peace with it,” he said. “I said my say and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got it off my chest.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

BILLY WITZ © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online,World Newspaper

[newssplashy]

LEADVILLE, Colo. — As Goose Gossage, a coffee cup in hand, stepped onto the deck outside his cabin on a recent morning, he considered the view.

Beyond the small lake in front of him, a broad grass valley gave way to an escarpment of spruce and pine that climbed until it ran out of oxygen, leaving exposed the tops of a snowcapped, snaggletooth row of 14,000-foot peaks.

Gossage, who turns 67 next month, first came to the edge of this former mining town one summer in the late 1950s, singing, “America the Beautiful,” while riding in the back of his Uncle Bert’s Jeep on what was then a day trip from his home in Colorado Springs.

Gossage bought one cabin here in 1974, just as his Hall of Fame pitching career took root. He bought the cabin next door, one that belonged to a Maytag heir, in 1978, after the New York Yankees bestowed on him what was then an eye-popping, free-agent contract for a reliever: six years, $2.85 million. Ever since, the cabins have served as retreats — to hunt elk, fish for trout and revel in the solitude.

“I was put on Earth to be a baseball player and to throw a baseball; I’m convinced,” Gossage said. “But my whole life isn’t that. I’ve got another life. I love my life. I love being up here. The mountains — if you’ve ever grown up around an ocean or the mountains, the power of those are incredible. They’re in your DNA.”

If Gossage sees this place as a sanctuary, as the ideal counterweight for the 23 years he spent bouncing from city to city, including a season in Japan, it is not hard to see it now as an island — a place where he is living in exile.

Few sports franchises embrace their history as firmly as the Yankees, and few former ballplayers relish reliving it more than Gossage. But that was not enough to prevent the Yankees from banishing Gossage from two of his most cherished rituals: working as a spring training instructor and participating in Old-Timers’ Day, which is Sunday, when the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays.

The culprit, not surprisingly, was his mouth.

In recent years, Gossage had become a headache to the Yankees, railing about what was wrong with today’s game to any reporter who would ask. His short, expletive-laced answer was: just about everything — analytics “nerds,” bat flips, drug cheats and how Mariano Rivera (and other modern-day closers) had it easy throwing just one inning.

Then, when word got out before spring training that Gossage had not been invited to return as an instructor, he incinerated any bridge that might have led to reconciliation, laying into general manager Brian Cashman as “a disgrace” and “an embarrassment.”

Gossage’s pique toward Cashman stems from the general manager’s not returning his call more than a decade ago when Gossage was hoping to garner an invitation to minor league camp for his youngest son, Todd, who had recovered from a detached retina at the end of his college career.

Gossage does not blame the Yankees for casting him out. “I didn’t leave them any choice,” he said.

He understands that these episodes have painted him as a cartoonish character — the foul-mouthed crank whom the game has passed by. “Grumpy old man; get off my lawn; another pie in the face,” he said with a laugh. He particularly likes “get off my lawn.”

Yet a fuller portrait might be of a man who is as vulnerable and bighearted as he can be vicious and boorish, who feels a great debt to the game but can’t find an open avenue to give back.

Or maybe he just can’t let go.

“He’s not very good about accepting the changes because he loves baseball so much,” said his wife, Corna, with whom he has three grown sons. “Everything is always going through change, so you can’t expect it to be the same as when you played. He wants to keep it as pure as it used to be and he can’t, so it’s a source of frustration to him.”

Few have seen as many sides of Gossage as Bucky Dent, who roomed with him in Class A ball in Appleton, Wisconsin, teamed with him to win a World Series, and managed him with the Yankees in 1989.

“There’s a lot of things that people don’t understand because they only see the gruff side of him,” Dent said. “He’s all baseball. His life has been baseball, but he’s got a heart of gold. He’s a lovable guy. I love him to death.”

Asked if he was saddened that Gossage could not restrain himself, Dent said, “That’s just Goose.”

A Fierce Facade

Gossage, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Colorado Springs, realized early that he had a gift for throwing things — first rocks, then footballs and baseballs. He had never been out of the state until he boarded a plane for Sarasota, Florida, after the Chicago White Sox drafted him in 1970 and gave him an $8,000 signing bonus.

Shortly before he left, he borrowed his brother’s car and drove to his favorite spot, near the Wilson Ranch, where his father, who had died the year before from emphysema, used to take him to hunt rabbit and deer,.

Gossage sat under a pine tree and cried.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “I thought Hank Aaron and all the greats put their pants on different, that they were fictitious characters that didn’t really exist. But through those tears I had a talk with myself, that there aren’t going to be any woulda, shoulda, couldas. When I made that commitment to myself, I felt this weight off my shoulders.”

The White Sox, the first of nine teams for whom he would play, had the foresight to stick Gossage — with his tempestuous demeanor and blazing fastball — in the bullpen, where he could let his adrenaline ride.

Even now, nearly 50 years later and with a left ankle that had to be fused after decades of landing on it, Gossage ambles in his familiar slump-shouldered, pigeon-toed gait. His hair is white and mostly gone, although his Fu Manchu mustache — the one that somehow evaded George Steinbrenner’s grooming police — remains.

Gossage can still reach back for that intimidating glare, the one that radiates an uncomfortable intensity — particularly when the subject is Cashman. But he admits that it was largely a facade, that the cocksure confidence he projected on the mound was fragile.

So it was that Gossage broke down when he described how Steinbrenner consoled him in private after Gossage gave up a three-run homer to George Brett that sealed Kansas City’s sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 American League Championship Series.

As Gossage wiped away tears, he moved on to another story: how Catfish Hunter extended a hand and then a dinner invitation with several teammates after Gossage had collapsed amid a pile of clothes in his locker after throwing away two bunts in the bottom of the ninth inning in Toronto shortly after he came to the Yankees in 1978.

This brought more tears. “You have no idea what that meant to me,” Gossage said, wiping his eyes.

This is the 40th anniversary of the Yankees’ 1978 championship season. It was the only time Gossage won a title, and he treasures the season because of how it unfolded. The Yankees, after trailing Boston by 14 games in mid-July, caught and passed the Red Sox by mid-September, but could not shake them. The Yankees won six in a row in the final week but lost on the final day of the season to force a one-game playoff at Fenway Park.

While Dent is remembered as the unlikely hero that day for his three-run homer over the Green Monster, Gossage helped the Yankees hang on for a 5-4 victory, stranding the tying run at third base when he retired an old nemesis, Carl Yastrzemski, on a pop-up for the final out.

Two weeks later, he was on the mound at Dodger Stadium, retiring Ron Cey on a pop-up for the final out as the Yankees, after losing the first two games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, clinched the title.

“To go through the absolute lowest, to experience everything in one year, was completely overwhelming,” Gossage said. “After the game that we clinched, after the World Series was over, there was no celebration. We were all sitting at our lockers — I think we were all kind of in disbelief.”

No Olive Branches

Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium had always been a chance to rekindle memories like those, even if the event has evolved over the years. The former players no longer change into their pinstripes alongside current players in the home clubhouse but in an auxiliary room where stories are not so easily swapped and bonds between generations not so easily forged.

The Yankees have invited eight members of the 1978 team to Sunday’s festivities.

If today’s Yankees are largely petrified of saying something provocative, the Bronx Zoo teams of the late 1970s just needed to be asked.

Manager Billy Martin, perpetually hired and fired, had a drinking problem that was nobody’s secret. Star player Reggie Jackson and captain Thurman Munson openly feuded. Gossage missed two months with a thumb injury in 1979 after he brawled in the showers with burly designated hitter Cliff Johnson. And lording over it all was the bombastic Steinbrenner.

“If those guys didn’t like you, it was honesty,” Gossage said. “Now, nobody says anything no matter how bad it is.”

As he sat in a vintage wooden chair in his wood-paneled cabin, surrounded by his hunting trophies — deer, owls, rams and fowl — the only remnant of his playing days was a Yankees travel bag stuffed with clothes from his home in Colorado Springs. Gossage said he did not watch much baseball these days, maybe an inning here, an inning there. The game, with more strikeouts, more home runs and fewer balls in play than ever, bores him.

The irony, of course, is that many millennials, the ones who might cast him as a dinosaur, feel the same way.

“The strategy is gone,” Gossage said. “Moving guys, cat and mouse, pitchouts — you don’t see that. You don’t see pitchouts because you don’t see steals. You can’t pitch inside, you can’t take out the shortstop, you can’t take out the catcher. Hitters are so offended when they get knocked down because they aren’t expecting it.”

As Gossage got more animated, he turned to replay, which has ensured that most umpiring mistakes are rectified, but at the cost of disrupting the game and largely robbing it of a favorite sight — managers kicking dirt on umpires.

“Wow, that was awesome,” Gossage said. “It woke me up.”

By now, he was worked up — and headed toward his favorite punching bag: the Ivy League-educated numbers wonks who never played the game. They have, he said, turned managers and coaches into baby sitters.

“Here are people trying to control this game that really, really don’t have a clue about the game, period,” he said. “Whatever that computer spits out, that’s it. There are volumes and volumes of knowledge that go into playing baseball — that computer has no idea — and it’s called the human element and it’s everywhere. They think they’ve got it figured out because they won their rotisserie leagues at Harvard.”

Gossage, inflammatory rhetoric aside, has a rather unlikely ally: Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner. He recently acknowledged that data’s influence had not necessarily been good for the game.

“There is a growing recognition that analytics have produced certain trends in the game that we may need to be more proactive about reversing,” Manfred said last month in an interview with The Athletic. “There are owners that feel that way. There are fans that feel that way.”

But in March 2016, when Gossage criticized Jose Bautista, then with the Toronto Blue Jays, and Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets for their exuberant bat flips and decried how analytics nerds were ruining the game, Cashman summoned him.

Cashman asked Gossage to be more considerate, in part because the Yankees have one of baseball’s largest analytics staffs. Before the 2017 season, Cashman called Gossage’s agent, Andrew Levy, extending an offer to return for spring training, but only if Gossage promised not to be disruptive. Levy checked with Gossage, who told the Yankees he was in.

Then, several days into spring training, Gossage, in an interview with NJ.com, decried being compared to Rivera and current Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who, unlike Gossage, were rarely asked to get more than three outs.

Another meeting with Cashman ensued, which included Joe Girardi, the manager at the time, and Jason Zillo, the team’s director of media.

Gossage was not invited back this spring.

“We run our organization in a certain way,” Zillo wrote in a statement after Cashman declined to comment. “Goose Gossage believes it should be run in a different way. It is fine to disagree with us and constructive dialogue is a healthy thing, but being disruptive, disrespectful and detrimental to the organization is something different.

“We respect him as a great Yankee and a member of the Hall of Fame,” the statement continued. “But we disagree with his positions and the manner in which he continuously presents them.”

In preparing the statement, Zillo asked if there was any sign of contrition from Gossage, something resembling an olive branch.

It was hard to find one. Peppering his words with expletives, Gossage described having the urge last year to stuff Cashman into a trash can.

“My mom must have been watching over,” he said, “because somebody was telling me: ‘Don’t! Don’t do it.'”

Gossage, who played in a charity golf tournament for the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on Monday with several of his former Yankees teammates, said he was sorry he would not be able to experience Old-Timers’ Day, which he has not missed since he was first invited about 20 years ago.

But he was not sorry about anything he had said. “I am absolutely at peace with it,” he said. “I said my say and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got it off my chest.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

BILLY WITZ © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online,World Newspaper

[newssplashy]

Opinion: Grumpy gossage napalms his bridges

LEADVILLE, Colo. — As Goose Gossage, a coffee cup in hand, stepped onto the deck outside his cabin on a recent morning, he considered the view.

Beyond the small lake in front of him, a broad grass valley gave way to an escarpment of spruce and pine that climbed until it ran out of oxygen, leaving exposed the tops of a snowcapped, snaggletooth row of 14,000-foot peaks.

Gossage, who turns 67 next month, first came to the edge of this former mining town one summer in the late 1950s, singing, “America the Beautiful,” while riding in the back of his Uncle Bert’s Jeep on what was then a day trip from his home in Colorado Springs.

Gossage bought one cabin here in 1974, just as his Hall of Fame pitching career took root. He bought the cabin next door, one that belonged to a Maytag heir, in 1978, after the New York Yankees bestowed on him what was then an eye-popping, free-agent contract for a reliever: six years, $2.85 million. Ever since, the cabins have served as retreats — to hunt elk, fish for trout and revel in the solitude.

“I was put on Earth to be a baseball player and to throw a baseball; I’m convinced,” Gossage said. “But my whole life isn’t that. I’ve got another life. I love my life. I love being up here. The mountains — if you’ve ever grown up around an ocean or the mountains, the power of those are incredible. They’re in your DNA.”

If Gossage sees this place as a sanctuary, as the ideal counterweight for the 23 years he spent bouncing from city to city, including a season in Japan, it is not hard to see it now as an island — a place where he is living in exile.

Few sports franchises embrace their history as firmly as the Yankees, and few former ballplayers relish reliving it more than Gossage. But that was not enough to prevent the Yankees from banishing Gossage from two of his most cherished rituals: working as a spring training instructor and participating in Old-Timers’ Day, which is Sunday, when the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays.

The culprit, not surprisingly, was his mouth.

In recent years, Gossage had become a headache to the Yankees, railing about what was wrong with today’s game to any reporter who would ask. His short, expletive-laced answer was: just about everything — analytics “nerds,” bat flips, drug cheats and how Mariano Rivera (and other modern-day closers) had it easy throwing just one inning.

Then, when word got out before spring training that Gossage had not been invited to return as an instructor, he incinerated any bridge that might have led to reconciliation, laying into general manager Brian Cashman as “a disgrace” and “an embarrassment.”

Gossage’s pique toward Cashman stems from the general manager’s not returning his call more than a decade ago when Gossage was hoping to garner an invitation to minor league camp for his youngest son, Todd, who had recovered from a detached retina at the end of his college career.

Gossage does not blame the Yankees for casting him out. “I didn’t leave them any choice,” he said.

He understands that these episodes have painted him as a cartoonish character — the foul-mouthed crank whom the game has passed by. “Grumpy old man; get off my lawn; another pie in the face,” he said with a laugh. He particularly likes “get off my lawn.”

Yet a fuller portrait might be of a man who is as vulnerable and bighearted as he can be vicious and boorish, who feels a great debt to the game but can’t find an open avenue to give back.

Or maybe he just can’t let go.

“He’s not very good about accepting the changes because he loves baseball so much,” said his wife, Corna, with whom he has three grown sons. “Everything is always going through change, so you can’t expect it to be the same as when you played. He wants to keep it as pure as it used to be and he can’t, so it’s a source of frustration to him.”

Few have seen as many sides of Gossage as Bucky Dent, who roomed with him in Class A ball in Appleton, Wisconsin, teamed with him to win a World Series, and managed him with the Yankees in 1989.

“There’s a lot of things that people don’t understand because they only see the gruff side of him,” Dent said. “He’s all baseball. His life has been baseball, but he’s got a heart of gold. He’s a lovable guy. I love him to death.”

Asked if he was saddened that Gossage could not restrain himself, Dent said, “That’s just Goose.”

A Fierce Facade

Gossage, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Colorado Springs, realized early that he had a gift for throwing things — first rocks, then footballs and baseballs. He had never been out of the state until he boarded a plane for Sarasota, Florida, after the Chicago White Sox drafted him in 1970 and gave him an $8,000 signing bonus.

Shortly before he left, he borrowed his brother’s car and drove to his favorite spot, near the Wilson Ranch, where his father, who had died the year before from emphysema, used to take him to hunt rabbit and deer,.

Gossage sat under a pine tree and cried.

“I was scared to death,” he said. “I thought Hank Aaron and all the greats put their pants on different, that they were fictitious characters that didn’t really exist. But through those tears I had a talk with myself, that there aren’t going to be any woulda, shoulda, couldas. When I made that commitment to myself, I felt this weight off my shoulders.”

The White Sox, the first of nine teams for whom he would play, had the foresight to stick Gossage — with his tempestuous demeanor and blazing fastball — in the bullpen, where he could let his adrenaline ride.

Even now, nearly 50 years later and with a left ankle that had to be fused after decades of landing on it, Gossage ambles in his familiar slump-shouldered, pigeon-toed gait. His hair is white and mostly gone, although his Fu Manchu mustache — the one that somehow evaded George Steinbrenner’s grooming police — remains.

Gossage can still reach back for that intimidating glare, the one that radiates an uncomfortable intensity — particularly when the subject is Cashman. But he admits that it was largely a facade, that the cocksure confidence he projected on the mound was fragile.

So it was that Gossage broke down when he described how Steinbrenner consoled him in private after Gossage gave up a three-run homer to George Brett that sealed Kansas City’s sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 American League Championship Series.

As Gossage wiped away tears, he moved on to another story: how Catfish Hunter extended a hand and then a dinner invitation with several teammates after Gossage had collapsed amid a pile of clothes in his locker after throwing away two bunts in the bottom of the ninth inning in Toronto shortly after he came to the Yankees in 1978.

This brought more tears. “You have no idea what that meant to me,” Gossage said, wiping his eyes.

This is the 40th anniversary of the Yankees’ 1978 championship season. It was the only time Gossage won a title, and he treasures the season because of how it unfolded. The Yankees, after trailing Boston by 14 games in mid-July, caught and passed the Red Sox by mid-September, but could not shake them. The Yankees won six in a row in the final week but lost on the final day of the season to force a one-game playoff at Fenway Park.

While Dent is remembered as the unlikely hero that day for his three-run homer over the Green Monster, Gossage helped the Yankees hang on for a 5-4 victory, stranding the tying run at third base when he retired an old nemesis, Carl Yastrzemski, on a pop-up for the final out.

Two weeks later, he was on the mound at Dodger Stadium, retiring Ron Cey on a pop-up for the final out as the Yankees, after losing the first two games to the Los Angeles Dodgers, clinched the title.

“To go through the absolute lowest, to experience everything in one year, was completely overwhelming,” Gossage said. “After the game that we clinched, after the World Series was over, there was no celebration. We were all sitting at our lockers — I think we were all kind of in disbelief.”

No Olive Branches

Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium had always been a chance to rekindle memories like those, even if the event has evolved over the years. The former players no longer change into their pinstripes alongside current players in the home clubhouse but in an auxiliary room where stories are not so easily swapped and bonds between generations not so easily forged.

The Yankees have invited eight members of the 1978 team to Sunday’s festivities.

If today’s Yankees are largely petrified of saying something provocative, the Bronx Zoo teams of the late 1970s just needed to be asked.

Manager Billy Martin, perpetually hired and fired, had a drinking problem that was nobody’s secret. Star player Reggie Jackson and captain Thurman Munson openly feuded. Gossage missed two months with a thumb injury in 1979 after he brawled in the showers with burly designated hitter Cliff Johnson. And lording over it all was the bombastic Steinbrenner.

“If those guys didn’t like you, it was honesty,” Gossage said. “Now, nobody says anything no matter how bad it is.”

As he sat in a vintage wooden chair in his wood-paneled cabin, surrounded by his hunting trophies — deer, owls, rams and fowl — the only remnant of his playing days was a Yankees travel bag stuffed with clothes from his home in Colorado Springs. Gossage said he did not watch much baseball these days, maybe an inning here, an inning there. The game, with more strikeouts, more home runs and fewer balls in play than ever, bores him.

The irony, of course, is that many millennials, the ones who might cast him as a dinosaur, feel the same way.

“The strategy is gone,” Gossage said. “Moving guys, cat and mouse, pitchouts — you don’t see that. You don’t see pitchouts because you don’t see steals. You can’t pitch inside, you can’t take out the shortstop, you can’t take out the catcher. Hitters are so offended when they get knocked down because they aren’t expecting it.”

As Gossage got more animated, he turned to replay, which has ensured that most umpiring mistakes are rectified, but at the cost of disrupting the game and largely robbing it of a favorite sight — managers kicking dirt on umpires.

“Wow, that was awesome,” Gossage said. “It woke me up.”

By now, he was worked up — and headed toward his favorite punching bag: the Ivy League-educated numbers wonks who never played the game. They have, he said, turned managers and coaches into baby sitters.

“Here are people trying to control this game that really, really don’t have a clue about the game, period,” he said. “Whatever that computer spits out, that’s it. There are volumes and volumes of knowledge that go into playing baseball — that computer has no idea — and it’s called the human element and it’s everywhere. They think they’ve got it figured out because they won their rotisserie leagues at Harvard.”

Gossage, inflammatory rhetoric aside, has a rather unlikely ally: Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner. He recently acknowledged that data’s influence had not necessarily been good for the game.

“There is a growing recognition that analytics have produced certain trends in the game that we may need to be more proactive about reversing,” Manfred said last month in an interview with The Athletic. “There are owners that feel that way. There are fans that feel that way.”

But in March 2016, when Gossage criticized Jose Bautista, then with the Toronto Blue Jays, and Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets for their exuberant bat flips and decried how analytics nerds were ruining the game, Cashman summoned him.

Cashman asked Gossage to be more considerate, in part because the Yankees have one of baseball’s largest analytics staffs. Before the 2017 season, Cashman called Gossage’s agent, Andrew Levy, extending an offer to return for spring training, but only if Gossage promised not to be disruptive. Levy checked with Gossage, who told the Yankees he was in.

Then, several days into spring training, Gossage, in an interview with NJ.com, decried being compared to Rivera and current Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who, unlike Gossage, were rarely asked to get more than three outs.

Another meeting with Cashman ensued, which included Joe Girardi, the manager at the time, and Jason Zillo, the team’s director of media.

Gossage was not invited back this spring.

“We run our organization in a certain way,” Zillo wrote in a statement after Cashman declined to comment. “Goose Gossage believes it should be run in a different way. It is fine to disagree with us and constructive dialogue is a healthy thing, but being disruptive, disrespectful and detrimental to the organization is something different.

“We respect him as a great Yankee and a member of the Hall of Fame,” the statement continued. “But we disagree with his positions and the manner in which he continuously presents them.”

In preparing the statement, Zillo asked if there was any sign of contrition from Gossage, something resembling an olive branch.

It was hard to find one. Peppering his words with expletives, Gossage described having the urge last year to stuff Cashman into a trash can.

“My mom must have been watching over,” he said, “because somebody was telling me: ‘Don’t! Don’t do it.'”

Gossage, who played in a charity golf tournament for the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on Monday with several of his former Yankees teammates, said he was sorry he would not be able to experience Old-Timers’ Day, which he has not missed since he was first invited about 20 years ago.

But he was not sorry about anything he had said. “I am absolutely at peace with it,” he said. “I said my say and I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got it off my chest.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

BILLY WITZ © 2018 The New York Times

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/06/opinion-grumpy-gossage-napalms-his.html