From "Joe Morgan, Hall of Fame Second Baseman, Is Dead at 77" (NYT). Other great baseball players who have died recently: Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, and Whitey Ford.
October 12, 2020
"At 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, Morgan, who was sometimes called Little Joe, was among the smallest great players in the history of the game."
"He was also among the greatest second basemen, and some, like Bill James, the groundbreaking interpreter of statistics, say he was the greatest of all. He won five consecutive Gold Gloves, led National League second basemen in fielding percentage three times and finished second six others. In an era when sliding base runners routinely tried to take out the second baseman to prevent double plays, Morgan was known as especially tough in the pivot."
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As I child, I was a big Reds fan- from about 1973 (when I watched my first World Series- the Reds got beaten by the Mets in the NL playoffs to my bitter disappointment) until around the time I stopped watching baseball in the mid 1980s (when I stopped playing the game myself). Morgan was my favorite Red. RIP, Joe.
RIP Joe. I enjoyed him also as a color commentator, although there was a lot of griping about him. Like Bill James, Morgan had a very high opinion of Joe Morgan, and a bit of a chip on his shoulder. It's a 2nd baseman thing, maybe. Who wants to be a 2nd baseman when they're growing up?
He lived in my town and we belonged to the same country club.
I coached little league baseball and he would hang around the park and watch.
Everybody was used to seeing him and left him alone.
I spoke to him a few times about baseball and golf...he seemed like a nice guy.
Of course, I don't think he liked the fact that I was an A's fan growing up when he played : )
Certainly in the top three second basemen of all time...
RBI, Joe
This must be Meade's influence. He was a good one, although playing on those "Big Red Machine" teams helped his "greatness" cause. Never cared much for him as a color guy.
Man all these stars from my youth dying.
Joe Morgan was also a fantastic announcer.
The second base position needs a compact player with balance that tall Players lack. Morgan was the best.
I lived in Baltimore during the Cal Ripken consecutive game marathon streak, and got to see a few of his games. Baltimore being a shithole other than the ballparks, this is one of the few positive memories I have of the place. I am glad to have witnessed some baseball history.
Every game is baseball history, of course. And any game on any day can be important baseball history, which makes watching even more fun.
Joe and Tony Gwynn were my all time favorite baseball players, and both were class acts as well. I always considered Joe to be the best color man in baseball broadcasting as well as one of the greatest second basemen. As a broadcaster, he had great insight, a very listenable voice and extensive knowledge of the game. RIP Joe, and when you see him tell Tony his Padre fans still miss him.
Damn I was just wondering about him the other day when I was watching a playoff game. He played for the Phillies late in his career and did excellent TV color for years. What a shame. Phillies lost another 2B this year too, Tony Taylor who was my first favorite player.
All Star team of players who have died in 2020:
c - Hal Smith
1b - Bob Watson
2b - Joe Morgan
3b - Tony Taylor
ss - Tony Fernandez
lf - Lou Brock
cf - Jimmy Wynn
rf - Al Kaline
sp - Tom Seaver
sp - Bob Gibson
sp - Whitey Ford
sp - Johnny Antonelli
sp - Mike McCormick
rp - Ron Perranoski
Mgr. - Jim Frey
We used to play fastpich against the school wall, and you had to mimic both the lefty righty stance of whatever team you were, as well as mimic the mannerisms. Everyone liked Morgan's chicken wing.
As a very smart player who intuitively understood all the angles--from the need to not get caught when stealing to defensive positioning to what the clever pitchers were trying to do to him in the box--he had the benefit of being deeply appreciated by a whole new generation of analytically minded baseball fans who marveled at his OBP, brilliant base running. Such fans fully appreciated the little guy at the top of the lineup was as much a part of his team's dominance and as the more fearsome power hitters who proceeded him. That must have been nice for him.
https://twitter.com/Super70sSports/status/1315674037880868872?s=20
I don't know of a better second baseman than Joe Morgan. None of us saw Eddie Collins or Rogers Hornsby play, but of the modern second basemen -- Carew, Sandberg, Biggio, Alomar, Whitaker -- he is the best of that group. It's been 45 years, but his 1976 season (.320 batting average, 27 homers, 111 RBI, 60 stolen bases, 113 runs scored) has to be one of the greatest seasons of all time. RIP.
Haha Meade, exactly. As Cub fans we also did the Billy William's spit and try to hit it with your bat, and the Ernie Banks Trumpet fingers on the bat. I see the neighbors kid doingt he Ryan Braun hold the bat high in the air with the left hand while calling time out with the right.
As a Giants fan, one of my all-time favorite memories was from the last game of the 1982 season. Three-way battle in the National League West between the Dodgers, Braves, and Giants. Giants were playing the Dodgers at Candlestick for a three-game series the last weekend of the season. Giants were eliminated on Saturday. On Sunday, Morgan hit a three-run homer in the 7th inning to knock the bleeping Dodgers out of the race.
During my short 2-year fascination with baseball a few years ago, he was my favorite of the announcers.
A rock defensively and supremely disruptive offensively. As a Cubs fan, I was no fan of Morgan but would have loved to have him on my side for a change. When I picture him at bat, I see the wing flapping in my mind.
It's been a tough season on baseball heroes.
"He was a good one, although playing on those "Big Red Machine" teams helped his "greatness" cause."
Maybe the Reds were great because of Joe...
"Never cared much for him as a color guy."
Racist! Oh, wait...color guy...
: )
"Maybe the Reds were great because of Joe..."
In part, sure. But Rose, Bench, Griffey, Tony Pérez, Concepción, Gerónimo, and Foster is quite the line up. The could play with the 1927 Yanks.
"The could play with the 1927 Yanks."
Or even with my team then — the 1960 Pirates.
Joe was great. Enjoyed him as a player and as a commentator.
I will always remember that funny elbow twitch he had while batting
"Or even with my team then — the 1960 Pirates."
My 2001 Little League A's would crush them all...Joe watched some of those games : )
Jose Altuve really looked up to Joe Morgan.
Joe will be missed. He and Jimmy Wynn were a bit of Houston baseball royalty from their time with the Colt .45s.
Yea Meade .... the 1960 Buccos!
Morgan was a great player. But Bill James loves on-base percentage, which favors guys who take a lot of walks. Walks are boring. So are strikeouts.
Altuve is a short guy (shorter than Morgan). His on-base percentage is lower than Morgan’s because he doesn’t take many walks. He’s a lot more fun to watch because he’s up there swinging. And his batting average and slugging are better than Morgan’s.
Even as a young Pirates fan, I appreciated Joe Morgan's abilities and loved to watch him twitch that elbow at the plate. Naturally, once the BRM declined the Pirates ascended to baseball greatness..."We Are Famalee". (A loooong time ago)
Meade was a Pirates fan? You have more layers than an onion!
"Jose Altuve really looked up to Joe Morgan."
Altuve looks up to Eddie Arcaro : )
"...the 1960 Pirates."
I know of them, but don't remember them. Bill Mazerowki's walk-off in game 7.
"Altuve....batting average and slugging are better than Morgan’s."
Morgan didn't have someone telling him what pitch was coming.
It's been 45 years, but his 1976 season (.320 batting average, 27 homers, 111 RBI, 60 stolen bases, 113 runs scored) has to be one of the greatest seasons of all time. RIP.
————————-
Along with Ryne Sandberg’s 1990.
Man all these stars from my youth dying.
Who woulda thunk it?!?!
Indeed... for me, not just stars... I grew up in Anaheim, around 3 miles as the crow flies from Angel Stadium... these were the days before big money in baseball and we had several Angels and their families living in our housing tract. Jim Fregosi, Bob Lee, many others...
On the Angels, not a few were in what would be the final years of their active careers (e.g., Hoyt Wilhelm) and I always kept track of the players who were traded. It was such a different world back then.
Always enjoyed watching Joe Morgan play ball. RIP.
It wasn't just the walks and OBP, he wore pitchers out and made them show their entire repertoire, what they had working and what wasn't. This being a baseball thread, it's a bit short on cliches so far: Joe's the consummate leadoff hitter.
"Morgan didn't have someone telling him what pitch was coming."
Brutal but fair. I'll allow it.
The Astros cheating has been overblown. The splits between home and road show that Altuve, Bregman, Springer, and Gurriel were all better on the road. Correa was better at home, though still good on the road.
Altuve is a very good hitter. He hit another homerun on the road last night.
The Astros won Games 2 and 7 on the road in the 2017 World Series. They were just better than the Dodgers that year. As they were better than the Twins and A’s this year.
Morgan was adamant that steroid users not be admitted to the Hall of Fame while being OK with the rampant amphetamine use from the 50s through the 1990s.
According to Joe, it was fine for Hank Aaron (and half the league for 40 years) to take amphetamines. But Joe drew the line at steroids.
The most iconic homerun in MLB history - The Shot Heard Round the World — was a result of electronic signals from a guy with binoculars who worked for The Giants.
Joe Morgan was a great player. But he had a very unusual view on performance-enhancing drugs. The ones he and his teammates used were not cheating because Joe said so.
"the 1960 Pirates."
Casey Stengel committed one of the biggest blunders in baseball history when he saved (just-departed) Whitey Ford until Game 3 of the Series, because Ford was deadly in Yankee Stadium.
On Thursday, October 8, Edward Charles "Whitey" Ford, the Yankees pitching staff mainstay throughout the glory years of their post-war dynasty, died at age 91. Paul Mirengoff at Powerline does a nice job of "Remembering Whitey Ford."
2010 has been a sad year for MLB Hall of Famers Joe Morgan. Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Whitey Ford. May they rest in Peace.
I remember watching him, back in my baseball watching days, when he played against the Phillies. He never looked small to me.
The great ones never do.
Great ballplayer who let his left-wing politics bleed into Sunday Night Baseball.
I listened to a lot of Cubs baseball back in the 1970’s. Lou Boudreau, the famous Cleveland Indian, was part of the Cubs radio broadcast crew. Boudreau was a very big baseball man and did a very folksy pre-game show. Pre-game shows are not for everybody, but really interesting for the real fans. I remember that I enjoyed Boudreau interviewing Joe Morgan. Morgan spoke of the notebook he kept on every at bat - he kept notes and details on how each pitcher pitched him, i.e., type of pitch, tendencies, etc. Back then, I thought that was very smart and very interesting. I was not surprised when he later became a very good broadcaster on the national broadcasts.
About a month ago, I heard Duane Kuiper tell a story about Joe Morgan on the SF Giants broadcast.. Morgan and Kuiper played together on the Giants in the early 80’s. Once when Kuiper was in a slump, he thought that he would try one of Morgan’s bats and he got a hit. So, he started using Morgan’s bats exclusively and he wrote his number 18 on the knobs. In 1983, Morgan moved on to play with the Phillies. That year, when the Phillies came to town, Morgan came to the Giants dugout before a game to renew acquaintances. Later that day, Kuiper could not find any of his bats. Big mystery- they were gone. No one knew where they went. Later in the year, Kuiper was watching the Phillies play in the playoffs and he noticed that Morgan, when he came to the plate, was using a bat with number 18 on the knob. Then Morgan hit a home run.
I loved Morgan as part of the "Big Red Machine". Bench, Rose, Dave Conception, and Geronimo. I don't remember many pictures, but you can't get all those world series appearances without good pictures.
I never understood the whole flapping chicken-wing thing he used, but I suppose it worked for him.
Morgan knew the game as much as any player ever. When he started on TV as an analyst, everyone loved his in-sights. As time went on, his analysis seemed to become tiresome, as happens with most announcers. But I think he would predict what was about to happen with startling accuracy because of his true understanding of the game, and I always appreciated that ability.
Morgan would have made a great leadoff hitter, but when he was part of the Reds, he batted 3rd behind Rose and Griffey (during 75-76) and in front of Bench and Perez.
"Morgan spoke of the notebook he kept on every at bat - he kept notes and details on how each pitcher pitched him, i.e., type of pitch, tendencies, etc."
Unlike Bruce Pearson, until Author put him wise : )
And Dan Driessen. Was a big fan of the Big Red Machine. Went to college near Cincinnati. During the World Series students (male and female) who could not afford to go were listening on radio. Glad to see the Reds win the World Series but still count the game Red Sox won with a Yazstremski home run one of the best ever.
The "Griffey" in the line was Ken Griffey Senior, not Junior. As I recall, the Reds got Griffey Senior and Driessen (pre-free agent) for next to nothing. At one point in the season, as I recall, the entire line-up, except the pitcher, was hitting over 300.
I was an Astro fan when this happened :"At the Winter Meetings in Phoenix on Nov. 29, 1971, the Reds acquired Joe Morgan, Ed Armbrister, Jack Billingham, César Gerónimo and Denis Menke from the Astros for Lee May, Tommy Helms and Jimmy Stewart. Morgan, Billingham and Geronimo would all play major roles in the Reds’ back-to-back World Series titles in 1975 and 1976."
Suffice it to say that this was a massively stupid trade -to a division rival- which set the Reds up to be the best team of the 1970's.
Reportedly, Houston manager Harry Walker considered Joe Morgan a troublemaker.
RIP Joe. You were one of the greats.
gadfly at 4:05 : ("2010 has been a sad year") - I do that too, all the time.
I often mistake something that happened three decades ago for something that happened two decades ago ( I regularly think of 80s bands as having put out their first albums a little more than 20 years ago, instead of more than 30 years ago, and I forget that the 86 Mets were not a team that exists 24 years in the past but 34 years), and I often mix up 2010 and 2000 as being the year with a zero that was 10 years ago.
Anyway, there has never been a year in my lifetime like this year - 2020 - where so many great big league baseball veterans died the same year. Not a year that has even been close. And there are still three months to go.
Back in the late 1970s there were a couple of years that were like that for painters, great writers, Hollywood actors, and famous war veterans. I think 1977 was the worst, but I would have to look it up. And yes, Elvis was a Hollywood actor, nobody watches his movies anymore but he was a Hollywood actor anyway.
"...which set the Reds up to be the best team of the 1970's."
Oakland A's World Champions '72 '73 '74...
Fixed it.
"Meade was a Pirates fan? You have more layers than an onion!"
No not really. But I've lived in a few different places and adopted a few sports heroes along the way. Luis Aparicio. Bob Friend. Billy Williams. Joe Morgan. César Gerónimo. Johnny Bench. Tom Browning. Eric Davis. Lorenzo Cain. Every game any of those guys ever played, whatever team he played for, that was the team I wanted to win. Bob Friend was from my hometown. I learned baseball playing little league on Bob Friend Field in West Lafayette. My niece's current home in WL (family of 6) is Bob Friend's former home while he studied at Purdue. (Pro pitcher, Bob Friend earned his degree in economics by going to college during the baseball offseason over the course of 8 years.) My mom was a huge fan of the Big Red Machine. She called them all by their first name as if each was one of her own sons. Sparky. Johnny. Tony. Davey. Joe. Pete. George. Chief. Griffey. She was born a Morgan too and so Joe just always seemed like one of the family. At 94, it could break her big stoic heart. I might just not tell her for a while. May God bless and keep Little Joe, Mom's favorite.
"Anyway, there has never been a year in my lifetime like this year - 2020 - where so many great big league baseball veterans died the same year. Not a year that has even been close. And there are still three months to go."
I have a theory about this.
Back in the day, sports meant more...fans and players were more loyal. Players stayed with teams (willingly or not) for their entire careers.
They hawked used cars and vacuum cleaners on UHF TV...we thought we knew them.
They lived in regular houses in our cities and towns. Sure, maybe a slightly better side of town, but they went to the bars and restaurants that we did.
They married their high school sweethearts (DiMaggio excepted) and settled down.
They made three or four times the average salary, not five hundred times more.
Hell, I read once that Duke Snyder rode to the ballpark on a trolley car.
And for all of that, they were legendary both on the field and in our minds.
Now they are streamed around the world...they live in penthouses, marry supermodels, own their own jets, and employ more lawyers by themselves than the companies we work for.
So when they die, it's because they were important to us once. We remember them more.
And we're just a bit happy and relieved that we are still here...
Cincinnati's decade record: 953 wins, 657 losses (#1)
Oakland A's record over same period: 838 wins, 752 losses
(not even in the top five)
Your serve, Joe Smith. :)
Sad to hear to Joe Morgan's passing. Great baseball player and character. I know a lot of the statheads hated his color commentary while he worked for ESPN, but I loved his old school, sort of assholely critiques.
My childhood is flashing before my eyes lately: Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Tom Seaver, Gale Sayers, Joe Morgan, Al Kaline, all in just a few weeks. Un-fricking-believable.
Toss another log on the “2020 SUCKS” fire. Brutal.
@Meade thanks for that personal sports history, and especially the Bob Friend story ... never knew that!
Studying for an Economics degree in the offseason is a real outlier in the baseball world. Like 1 out of 1000 or 10,000.
Speaking of brainiacs, who was that legendary player who played for (I think) the Red Sox who could calculate his batting average to like 6 or 10 decimal places on the way to first base?
"Your serve, Joe Smith. :)"
That's kind of like arguing that Hillary got more votes...
'Just win baby.' —Al Davis
It's all about the rings : )
Sometime in the '80s when the A's were terrible, I had a job as a designer at one tech company or another. We were putting an ad in the baseball program and I had to deliver artwork (no digital then).
I went to the coliseum during the day when it was empty, found the main office and went inside.
It was like a dentist waiting room at a strip mall. Old chairs, old magazines, etc.
Sitting in the corner next to the desk of the receptionist was a World Series trophy. It was dusty and sad-looking.
Between all of the flags (remember the flags?) were letters jammed in as a crude, impromptu sorting/storage device.
It was strange...
@Dagwwod
If you are an A's fan or just love baseball, this is a fantastic book: 'Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley's Swingin' A's.'
Please purchase via the AA portal...
You will thank me : )
"Studying for an Economics degree in the offseason is a real outlier in the baseball world."
Friend served two terms as the elected County Controller of Allegheny County, PA (Pittsburgh).
One of my favorite baseball TV announcers, every once in a while, when a starting pitcher had finished a 9 inning game, or left the game after 7 or 8 innings of really good pitching, would say "that was a performance for the ages" --- at least if it was the postseason.
That is how I feel about the Joe Smith comment at 10:57 PM, it perfectly describes what it attempts to describe.
Vin Scully, I think, but it might have been Tim McCarver.
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