The Duke of Flatbush

This is the best column I have read on the life of The Duke, and I wanted to share it with others before I post my own. NK

The Duke of Flatbush, Revered and Remembered

by Tim Dahlberg

He was one of the greats of one of baseball's greatest eras, when the game was America's only real pastime and a trio of players who would later be memorialized in song patrolled center field in New York's iconic ballparks.

Duke Snider died on Sunday, a day before baseball's newest whiz kid got his first official at bat in an exhibition game in Florida. Bryce Harper will probably never have a song written about him, but the 18-year-old's debut for the Washington Nationals was a reminder that even as baseball looks to its past there's always a prospect for the future.

The Duke of Flatbush never really got his due, largely because at the same time he slugged home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie Mays was in center field for the New York Giants and Mickey Mantle played for the Yankees. He always seemed to end up third in his own town, and that didn't change when the 1980s song "Talkin' Baseball" paid homage to "Willie, Mickey, and the Duke."

Snider hit at least 40 home runs in five straight seasons, played in six World Series and was an eight-time All-Star. But he never won an MVP, and it took 11 years after he was eligible before he was finally elected into the Hall of Fame.

But it wasn't his stats that endeared him so much to the people of Brooklyn. It was that he was a part of his adopted community in a way that ballplayers of today can never be.

In all the tributes that came pouring in on the news of Snider's death, one from White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf stood out.

"Along with hundreds of thousands of other kids growing up in Brooklyn, Duke Snider was one of my idols. He really was one of us," Reinsdorf said. "As a 21-year-old rookie, he lived on my block and often would join us in games of stickball on his way home from his day job as the Dodgers center fielder."

To understand how big that was is to understand the 1950s, a time before the NFL hit its stride and baseball was everything to a nation. New York was the epicenter of it all with three teams that always seemed to be battling each other either for a pennant or the World Series.

It was a time when winning the MVP award got you a new suit at the local tailor instead of a $500,000 bonus, a time when players worked other jobs in the offseason and Mays and Giants teammate Monte Irvin owned a liquor store to bring in some extra money. Players lived near where they worked, often sharing apartments in the same working-class buildings as their fans.

"I was born in Los Angeles," Snider once said. "Baseball-wise, I was born in Brooklyn. We lived with Brooklyn. We died with Brooklyn."

When Snider hit four home runs in the 1955 World Series to help the Dodgers finally beat the hated Yankees and win their first title, the borough of Brooklyn celebrated like there was no tomorrow - not knowing that just in a few years there wouldn't be when the Dodgers left town.

The year before, the Giants and Dodgers were battling for the pennant in the dog days of summer and both Snider and Mays hit home runs in a Sunday afternoon game at Ebbets Field the Dodgers won 9-4 to complete a three-game sweep and move to within a half game of first. A New York Daily News photo from that game shows Mays leaping high in the air in front of the exit gate in right center field to grab a Snider blast, as the fans behind him stand in excitement.

Look closely and you'll see people dressed in their Sunday best for the game. Look even closer and you'll see that many of them were black, a demographic of fans that baseball has somehow lost over the years as many top athletes gravitate toward football and basketball.

Snider was the last living member of the Dodger starting lineup that day, the last survivor of a box score that included future Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella. For the people of Brooklyn, they were their Boys of Summer long before Roger Kahn immortalized them as that in his book.

Baseball can never recapture those times, much as Bud Selig and company try to sell the nostalgia of the game. Fans today are more cynical, and it's hard to blame them after having being exposed to the money grabbing, amphetamine taking, steroid ingesting players of today's era.

But spring is just around the corner once again and, as always, there's a new awakening in every fan's inner soul. The problems of the game are put aside, at least temporarily, as players take to pristine fields of green grass in Florida and Arizona.

Soon Vin Scully will get back behind the microphone, just like he was 60 years ago when Snider was just beginning to make a name for himself in Brooklyn. And young players like Harper - who struck out twice on seven pitches in his debut - will take their first steps toward becoming the legends of the future.

It's an annual rite that is ingrained in the fabric of our society.

As one era passes, another spring of hope starts anew.

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Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg(at)ap.org

The Associated Press

Forever a Boy of Summer

By RALPH BRANCA

I’ll never forget the winter of 1947. Because of the Dodgers’ plan to sign Jackie Robinson as the first African-American in the majors, we avoided Florida and spent training camp in Havana. This was the great postwar Brooklyn team of Pee Wee Reese, Dixie Walker, Pete Reiser and Hugh Casey. Our manager was the indomitable Leo Durocher.

Gil Hodges was back from a long stint in the Marines. He was our second-string catcher. (We were a year away from recruiting Roy Campanella.) It was Gil who introduced me to a rookie from Compton, Calif.

“Ralphie,” Gil said, “meet Duke Snider.”

His handshake was firm and his eyes were clear. He had a smile and an irresistibly upbeat spirit. We were both 21 and eager to make it in the big leagues.

We began talking baseball, but, typical of Duke, he didn’t discuss himself. He wanted to tell me how, back in Los Angeles, he had seen Jackie excel at football, baseball, basketball and track. He trumpeted Jackie’s athleticism and was thrilled at the prospect of playing with him. Duke never even hinted at his own skills.

That winter, we played exhibition games in the Caribbean against the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers farm club to whom Jackie was signed. As it became clear that Branch Rickey, our general manager, was going to make Jackie a Dodger come opening day, a few veterans circulated a petition arguing that an African-American had no place on our team. Duke was outraged and perplexed.

“Are they crazy?” he said to me. “Besides being a great guy, he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to this team.”

Like most of us, Durocher supported Jackie and the petition wound up in the garbage, where it belonged.

In 1948, Duke’s sophomore year, Campy came on board with pitchers Carl Erskine and Preacher Roe. In 1949, when Don Newcombe became a Dodger, Duke came into his own. He hit .292 and had 23 home runs. He commanded center field and was crowned the Duke of Flatbush, a title he will hold forever.

Along with Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, Duke formed New York’s golden center-field threesome. I’m prejudiced, but of the three, Duke was the most nimble fielder and possessed the most accurate arm.

From 1947 to 1957, the Dodgers won six pennants and one World Series, finally besting the Yankees in 1955 as Duke hit four homers and drove in seven runs. Without Duke, who holds the franchise career records of 1,271 runs batted in and 389 homers, the Brooklyn Dodgers would not be the Brooklyn Dodgers.

On a team of extraordinary individuals, Duke stood out. He had intelligence, integrity and wit. He played hard, and superbly, day in and day out. His long career is a model of athletic excellence.

In 1980 at his Hall of Fame induction, I was there with many of his teammates to cheer him on. We weren’t surprised when he talked about how great we were and failed to mention his own remarkable accomplishments.

The Brooklyn brotherhood never died. We kept up over the years. We would have dinner when, as the broadcaster for the Montreal Expos, Duke came to New York. His knowledge of the game grew over the years. I loved talking baseball with Duke. He had his opinions without being opinionated. He genuinely wanted to hear what you had to say.

In the end, when he was living in a nursing home, we continued to talk. In the last weeks, when I learned he was failing, I contacted his beloved wife, Bev, who was by his side. I wanted to tell Duke just how much I admired him. I wanted him to know what a privilege it was to call him my friend. At that point, all Bev could do was put the phone to his ear. He died last Sunday at 84.

I still see Duke as a young man. I see him out there in center field, racing past the ads for Van Heusen shirts and Gem razors, while executing a brilliant running catch. I see him at the plate, crushing Robin Roberts’s fastball and sending it soaring high over that crazy right-field wall at Ebbets Field. I see him rounding the bases. I see him smiling. I feel the joy of his sweet, happy soul.

Ralph Branca, a right-hander, pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1944 to 1953, and in 1956.

Fantasy For Farmer

Modest Farmer, Managing Mogul

By DAN FOST

The National Fantasy Baseball Championship, a contest paying a top prize of $100,000, draws an elite collection of contestants: computer geniuses, deep-pocketed stockbrokers and money managers, maybe a young man or woman looking to be the next Billy Beane or Theo Epstein.

But the contest over the years has produced only one two-time champion, Lindy Hinkelman, a 59-year-old pig farmer from Greencreek, Idaho.

Hinkelman, who has won two of the last three titles in one of the country’s most highly regarded contests, does not have a perfect answer for how he has been able to do it, but he is happy to offer his gut take on it all.

“Raising pigs and this baseball thing really go together,” he said. “There are certain things in farming: keeping track of productivity, indexes for your sows, the genetic lines there. To do well, you’ve got to be pretty proficient in numbers. Math has always been my strong suit. I can see things with the numbers.”

He cautioned with modesty: “That’s just my theory. I have no proof.”

What he does have is in excess of $300,000 in prize money earned over the last three years.

Some fantasy football leagues offer bigger prizes, but the National Fantasy Baseball Championship says its payout is tops in fantasy baseball, and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, which represents more than 100 member companies in the fantasy sports industry, said it was unlikely that anyone had won more prize money than Hinkelman.

Hinkelman, however, is not looking to, oh, get involved in fixing the Baltimore Orioles.

“These guys working in front offices know so much more about this than I would ever dream of,” he said. “These guys grew up in the game. I have no ambitions of doing that.”

Fantasy baseball got its start around 1980 with the development of Rotisserie League Baseball, named for a New York restaurant where a group of people, led by the longtime journalist Daniel Okrent, first played it. In the game, participants draft actual players and follow them throughout a season, earning points based on how those players perform in major league games.

The games exploded in popularity with the rise of the Internet. And although fantasy football has eclipsed baseball in popularity, the fantasy sports association said, roughly 13 million people play fantasy baseball.

Hinkelman looks for undervalued players, as does Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager, who was played by Brad Pitt in the movie “Moneyball.” Hinkelman volunteered to draft 14th in his 15-team league this year, and he focused on three players who ended up doing significantly better in 2011 than in 2010: Matt Kemp of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Justin Verlander of the Detroit Tigers andCurtis Granderson of the Yankees.

His faith was rewarded; Kemp and Granderson turned in seasons worthy of the Most Valuable Player award and Verlander should be a lock for the American League Cy Young Award.

“Those three guys really made up my team there,” Hinkelman said. He had Kemp and Verlander on his 2009 prizewinner, giving him a personal connection of sorts, even though he has never met any of the players. “These guys are like personal friends to you, even though you don’t know them.”

He also got top performances from late-round picks like Cleveland shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera and Tampa Bay relief pitcher Kyle Farnsworth.

But the 2011 season still came down to the final game for Hinkelman, who battled K. J. Duke, a San Diego investment portfolio manager, for most of the season. Duke, who played in a different league, also had Kemp and Verlander, along with Clayton Kershaw of the Dodgers, a contender for the Cy Young Award in the National League. But an off-year by his first-round pick, the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, held him back.

As in “Moneyball,” in which little-known Scott Hatteberg hits a dramatic game-winning home run, a relative unknown cinched Hinkelman’s victory.

Hinkelman plucked the St. Louis Cardinals’ Allen Craig off the waiver wire late in the season, and when outfielder Matt Holliday went down with an injury, Craig stepped in and went on an offensive tear. In the final game of the season, an 8-0 Cardinals victory over the Houston Astros, Craig hit a ninth-inning solo home run.

“For that baseball game, it was a meaningless hit,” Duke said, “but it cost me $80,000.”

The National Fantasy Baseball Championship attracted 390 players last year, each paying a $1,400 entry fee. Players can enter more than one team. Players have included the film director Nick Cassavetes, the television actor James Roday and the entertainer Meat Loaf.

There were 26 leagues of 15 teams each, and in March, drafts were held in Las Vegas, St. Louis, New York and Atlantic City and online. Each league had a prize of $5,600, and the leaders in each league compete against one another for the overall prize.

In 2009, Hinkelman raked in an astonishing $241,300 in prize money. He won the $100,000 contest, and another for $40,000. The N.F.B.C. had said anyone who could win both would get a $75,000 bonus, which it had insured — and he took that home as well.

In 2011, he paid $8,750 in entry fees for his various teams and took home $116,750 in prizes, according to Greg Ambrosius, who runs the N.F.B.C. as the general manager of consumer fantasy games for Stats LLC.

“You can’t do this twice in three years and have it be luck,” said Paul Charchian, the president of the trade association. “This is somebody who is extremely skilled at what he’s doing.”

Hinkelman’s business suits his fantasy baseball hobby, even though the hobby has eclipsed farming in earnings the past three years. He typically has about 500 pigs on his farm, and he now sells most of them to youths participating in 4-H programs. The pigs are typically born in February and March, and he sells them in April and May so the youngsters can raise them for fairs in August and September.

That means that for most of the summer — baseball season — Hinkelman does not have many pigs on his farm, and he can spend four to six hours a day watching baseball via his package of major league games on DirecTV. He has no employees and only a 300-yard walk to work.

He has four grown children and a wife who does not know much about baseball, although she has learned who Justin Verlander is.

Hinkelman grew up on the farm in Greencreek, population 211, three hours southeast of Spokane, Wash., by car. His father raised cattle and pigs, and his brother still grows wheat on the farm. His youngest son, Gabe, 29, helps him with the team.

He played high school basketball, helping to lead his team to the Idaho state tournament, and sat on the bench at the University of Idaho as a 6-foot guard. He played some slow-pitch softball after that, and now bowls two or three times a week.

He did not play baseball growing up. “There was a Little League in a bigger town,” he said. “None of the farm kids played baseball. I never did.”

At night, he could hear the broadcasts of Vin Scully calling Dodgers games, carrying tales of Maury Wills and Sandy Koufax across the wide-open West. He remains a Dodgers fan to this day, and said he thought the addition of Davey Lopes as a base-running coach would help Kemp realize his potential in 2011.

Hinkelman got on the Internet in the 1990s to feed his fantasy baseball habit, but says he is not too obsessed with technology. At the annual draft in Las Vegas, he said, half the participants have laptops.

“I go down with three pieces of paper, is all I go with,” he added. “I’ve got everything ranked.

“I’m not proficient at computers. I don’t have a smartphone where you can look up stats or anything like that. I just have a cellphone for calls. A lot of people have smartphones so they can look up box scores instantaneously. I’m not at that stage yet. I don’t know if I want to be. You can get married to that stuff.”

Two years ago, he bought a tractor and a livestock trailer with his winnings, and put new windows on the house, paid off a lot of debt and gave some money to his children. “This year, we’ll probably do some remodeling on our house,” he said.

He joked to the N.F.B.C. that he might buy “a boar for my sows,” and the organization put it online, which surprised him. “It makes me sound like a hick, which is O.K.,” he said. It keeps his competitors from taking him too seriously, he said.

“They say: ‘How’s this guy win? All he is is a pig farmer,’ ” Hinkelman said. “I don’t mind that at all.”