HOVG Heroes: Dave Parker

DAN EPSTEIN on DAVE PARKER

In my mind, Dave Parker has always been a badass.

I became aware of his existence in April 1976, when I opened my first-ever Topps wax pack, which I received as a party favor at a friend’s 10^th birthday sleepover.

My friend’s parents took us all to see “The Bad News Bears” that night. In retrospect, you could pinpoint this as one of the most momentous evenings of my life: I was just about to turn 10 myself, and knew almost nothing about baseball at the time; but thanks to the cosmic forces set in motion by that birthday sleepover, I would soon trade in my obsession with military history (the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II being my particular “jams”) for an even more consuming obsession with baseball history.

By the time I turned 11, I could wax even more eloquently on the subject of Johnny Bench versus Thurman Munson than I could on the subject of Robert E. Lee versus Ulysses S. Grant.

But back to that original wax pack.

It contained a few cards of players that I’d actually heard of, like home run king Hank Aaron and burgeoning star Ron LeFlore — the latter of whom I knew about, because he played for the nearby Detroit Tigers. Most of the players in the pack meant nothing to me, however; and as I hadn’t learned yet how to read the numbers on the back of their cards, I had no way of knowing if these guys were any good.

All I could tell was if they looked cool or not — and this Dave Parker cat looked the coolest of them all. Eyes locked confidently on the flight of the ball, right foot cocked arrogantly at the sky, right hand casually poised to discard a piece of lumber that looked as long as his leg, handsome face thick with fuzz and a muscled neck ornamented by a string of beads (pooka shells, maybe?)… this was clearly one baaaad dude.

A few days later, once my father had taught me how to read baseball stats, I realized that my initial impressions were correct: During his first full season in the Pirates’ lineup, Parker had hit .308 with 35 doubles, 10 triples, 25 home runs and 101 RBI. This was some solid production, to say the least — good enough to place Dave third in the NL MVP voting, albeit far behind Joe Morgan, who quite deservedly ran away with it that year.

But Dave’s time to really shine would soon be at hand.

I’ve never loved baseball more intensely than I did from 1976 through 1979; I still love the game now, obviously, but back then I was completely consumed with it. I read every baseball book and magazine I could get my hands on, memorized every box score and statistic that appeared in the papers, and spent countless hours working my way through the imagined lineups of various teams on the automatic pitch back in my backyard.

When it came time to face Dave Parker, I would rear back and throw as hard as I could, just to see how far the ball would fly.  After all, “The Cobra” (as he was known) was the most feared hitter in the National League in those days — even on my fantasy diamond, I figured I had no hope of ever striking him out.

Generally listed at somewhere around six-foot-five and 230 pounds, the dude was like a massive tree trunk come to life as a five-tool player. Posing with Jim Rice on the April 9, 1979 cover of Sports Illustrated, Parker — who’d won the 1978 NL MVP award — practically dwarfed his AL MVP counterpart. “Who’s Best?” asked the headline, and quite a few people in those days believed Parker was the better of the two; sure, Rice put up some undeniably fearsome offensive numbers from ’77 through ’79, but Parker was the complete package, bringing speed on the base paths (he averaged 19 swipes a season from 1976 through 1979), range in the outfield, and an absolute cannon of an arm into the equation.

In 1977, Parker led the NL in batting (.338), hits (215) and doubles (44) while scoring 107 runs, knocking 21 round-trippers, and racking up a .397 OBP… and he cut down a whopping 26 runners with throws from the outfield. Nobody in either league came within 10 of that total.

Though he’d never notch that many assists again in a season — NL base runners having generally taken the hint — “The Cobra” got a chance to uncoil two extremely memorable throws in the 1979 All-Star Game, nailing the aforementioned Mr. Rice at third base in the 7^th as he tried to stretch a double into a triple, and throwing Brian Downing out at the plate as he tried to score from second on a Graig Nettles single in the 8^th. The Downing throw in particular was a thing of frightening beauty, a no-bounce laser beam that almost took Gary Carter’s hand off.

Don’t fuck with “The Cobra”, man.

Even scarier than that All-Star Game bullet were the images of Parker in the various protective masks he wore during the 1978 and early '79 seasons, following the seismic collision with Mets catcher John Stearns that shattered his cheekbone.

Imagine how intimidating it would have been to be playing third base or catcher, and suddenly see all six and a half feet of Dave Parker barreling towards you, wearing a batting helmet outfitted with a football face guard? Or how about that hockey mask he briefly wore before the Pirates’ trainers came up with the football/baseball combo helmet, which foreshadowed Jason Voorhees’ murderous look by several months?

Ozzie Smith, who was playing shortstop for the Padres the day Parker first pinch-ran in the hockey mask, probably still has nightmares about it.

Just as Voorhees was a pitiless, unstoppable killing machine, Parker was equally relentless with the bat during the last two months of the 1978 season.

Hitting .316 when his June 30 collision with Stearns put him out of action for two weeks, he struggled after returning to the lineup in mid-July, his average eventually dwindling to .288. But then, during a three-day series against the Cubs in early August, he went 10-for-14 with a homer, three doubles and four RBI… and pretty much didn’t stop hitting from there until the end of the season, finishing with a league-leading .334 batting average, a .394 OBP, 32 doubles, 12 triples, 30 homers, 117 RBI and 102 runs scored, and very nearly leading the Pirates to the NL East title in the process.

His numbers slipped slightly in 1979 — he “only” batted .310 with a .380 OBP, 25 homers and 94 RBI — but he once again turned on the jets down the stretch, going 21-for-39 over the last nine games of the season as the “We Are Family” Pirates wrestled the NL East flag away from the Montreal Expos.

He then hit .333 against the Reds in the NLCS, and .345 against the Orioles with three doubles and four RBI in the World Series, including an RBI double that helped break Game 5 open. Jim Rice got a reputation for not producing when the game or the season was on the line; nobody could ever say that about “The Cobra”.

1979 also saw Parker sign what was then the biggest contract in Major League history; though Nolan Ryan is often credited with being MLB’s first “million dollar man,” Parker signed a million-a-year contract nearly a year before “The Ryan Express” did — though the Pirates (not wanting to be seen as the first team to break the million-dollar mark) structured the deal with various incentives and deferred payments in order to downplay the fact.

While Parker certainly deserved to be in the upper echelon of baseball salaries at the time, that contract also effectively served to put a target on his back. The idea of a supremely confident, intelligent, outspoken black man who wore jewelry on the field (including a gold Star of David, “because my name is David, and I’m a star”) having the highest salary in baseball didn’t sit too well with some baseball “traditionalists,” as it was — and when his weight, injuries and cocaine usage got the better of Parker in the early 80s, the high salary became a talking point for disgruntled Pittsburgh fans, who were only too happy to let him know that they weren’t getting their money’s worth.

There’s a famous photo of Parker from April 1976, where he’s wearing a custom-made t-shirt emblazoned with, “If you hear any noise it’s just me and the boys boppin’,” a slight paraphrasing of a lyric from Parliament’s late ’75 jam “Mothership Connection”.

While Parker wasn’t exactly the baseball version of P-Funk leader George Clinton, their career arcs do have some similarities. Both burned extremely hot early on, and their brilliant output fostered what were perhaps unreasonable expectations among their respective fans. Both men succumbed to a combination of overwork and cocaine abuse; and when both staged impressive comebacks — Clinton with “Atomic Dog,” Parker with the mid-80s Reds — the general reaction wasn’t so much of a celebratory “Welcome back!” as a shrugged, “Hey, you were supposed to be doing this all along!”

Having abandoned baseball for punk rock by then, I wasn’t paying much attention in 1985, the year Parker’s gifts (at least in the hitting department) suddenly seemed to return to him at the age of 34. I didn’t watch him play for the Reds, or see him win his second World Series ring in 1989 as a member of the Oakland A’s.

I know he had some unhappy times in Pittsburgh, but he’ll always be a Pirate to me, part of the Bucs’ two-decade run of brilliant and proud dark-skinned players that included Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Dock Ellis.

Frankly, seeing him in any uniform other than one of the Pirates’ 36 combinations of black, gold and white seems somehow wrong and off-putting to me, like Curtis Mayfield wearing a Spuds McKenzie t-shirt.

Dave Parker’s one of my all-time favorite players, and he posted some very good numbers indeed over the course of his 19-year career — finishing with a .290 batting average, 339 homers and1493 RBI — but I’m probably not the most reliable or convincing advocate for his Hall of Fame induction, since I only really saw him play in the 1970s, back when he oozed greatness from every pore.

And I know that there are many folks out there who’ve crunched his numbers and declared him to be less than Cooperstown material, as well as those who think his drug use and defiant attitude rendered him unworthy of inclusion in such an august institution. All I can say to them, and to you, is this: If there was a way to measure sheer swaggering badassery, and the backing up thereof, Dave Parker would be up there on the all-time leader board… and that alone qualifies him for enshrinement in my personal Hall of Fame.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dan Epstein is an award-winning journalist, writer, editor, raconteur and renaissance man, whose acclaimed book Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70s, is now out in paperback, and whose rock n’ roll baseball column “High and Tight” appears weekly on RollingStone.com.

You can find him on the web at http://www.bighairplasticgrass.com/ and http://www.lavieenrobe.com/, follow him on Twitter at @BigHairPlasGras, and join in the swingin’ 70s fun over on Facebook. He lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend Katie and his cat Oscar Claudell.

And the Winner Is...

Long before the weeklong celebration of Ross Grimsley’s Major League debut hit the site, I made a promise.

I promised all of you that I would be giving away a copy of Dan Epstein’s fantastic book Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s.

Plenty of you had great suggestions for who your favorite player of the decade was and kudos to Bill Jacobs who brought Grimsley’s name into the fold.

But, after a random draw, the winner of the book is…Kerry Devine (hence the picture of Chet Lemon above and the video below).

Congrats!

And if you haven’t yet…please check out the interview I did with Epstein. It’s afro-tastic!

Video: Dan Epstein Talks Ross Grimsley, Mustaches and Afros

"Rows. Fros. Anything Goes." is more than just ad copy for the hair and scalp conditioner Sulfur-8...it is also one of the chapters in good friend of The Hall Dan Epstein's book Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s.

The video clip that follows...Epstein extolls the wondrousness that is Ross Grimsley.

And when you're done...why not listen to Epstein talking mustaches and afros. You can thank me later.

Talkin' Baseball with Dan Epstein

Typically, this is where I try and think of something clever that is going on in the world, type it out as quick as I can and hope that I can tie it in with whoever I'm talking with.

Unfortunately, I have nothing witty to say about my friend Dan Epstein…author of the FANTASTIC book Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s. The book is a must read for any baseball fan and he has been VERY supportive of this site.

What's not to love?  Here goes!

HOVG: There are a lot of guys out there writing baseball books and, honestly, they look like guys who should be writing baseball books. At first glance, you don’t fit in the same mold as a Jonah Keri, Rob Neyer or Matt Silverman. That said…you’re probably the perfect guy to take people on a Dock Ellis-style trip through the decade of the ‘70s. What was the inspiration behind Big Hair and Plastic Grass? What was the process behind writing the book?

EPSTEIN: Well, you’re right in the sense that I don’t come from a sportswriting background. I’ve been writing about music and pop culture for nearly thirty years, going back to when I was penning record reviews for my high school newspaper. But to me, the 70s were the most rock n’ roll decade in baseball history, and I felt that no one had written a book that really looked at the period through that particular lens. The process mostly involved getting my hands on every baseball book and sports periodical from the era, and finding ways to connect the dots between all the info I gleaned from those sources and the pop cultural and political happenings of the era.

HOVG: I know you’ve spent a majority of your life living either in New York or Los Angeles, but I’ve gotta wonder…who do you root for? Is there a team that you claim as your own or do you follow particular players?

EPSTEIN: I also spent a lot of my life in Chicago, and Ann Arbor Michigan…and much of my 1970s summers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I could watch the unbelievably shitty Atlanta Braves teams every night on TBS. The teams I still feel the biggest emotional attachment to are the Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs, but my overall attachment to either isn’t what it used to be. I could take the usual line about being disillusioned by the economics of the game, etc, but truthfully I’m still pissed about the Tigers and Cubs curling up in pathetic fetal positions in the 2006 World Series and 2008 NLDS, respectively.

HOVG: Is there a clubhouse that you would have liked to have been a fly on the wall?

EPSTEIN: Man, so many of ‘em! The “Mustache Gang” A’s, the “Bronx Zoo” Yankees, the “We Are Family” Pirates are all obvious choices because there were so many interesting characters on those teams…but you know the late 70s Phillies and Royals teams must have been pretty interesting to eavesdrop upon, as well. But if I had to pick one “fly on the wall” moment, it would be for the Steve Garvey-Don Sutton clubhouse brawl in ’78…both because I would like to have heard what precipitated the fight, and because I would have really enjoyed watching Sutton kick the shit out of Garvey. There was also a very brief period in ’77 where Dick Allen and Dock Ellis were on the A’s at the same time; I would have definitely loved to eavesdrop on a couple of their conversations.

HOVG: Your book is full of stories that conjure up iconic imagery of the 1970a. I’d like to throw some at you and get your thoughts on some of the decade’s best/worst memories. Since it is immortalized on the cover of your book…Oscar Gamble’s afro.

EPSTEIN: A thing of supremely funky beauty, which confused a lot of older white folks in the sport. Oscar was simply lookin’ as superfly as he could manage, but some of the more conservative writers and management types tagged him as a troublemaker, because they didn’t understand the distinction between black pride and black militancy.

HOVG: Charlie Finley’s “Mustache Gang”.

EPSTEIN: The one true dynasty of the 70s, the “Mustache Gang”, proved that you could play winning baseball with long hair and facial growth…a novel concept to many people at the time. But they were also a testament to both Charlie Finley’s savvy (he pretty much hand-built the team himself) and his hubris (he also single-handedly destroyed them). If Finley hadn’t pissed off Catfish Hunter and given him reason to file for free agency, the A’s might have won four straight world championships, and possibly even five.

HOVG: The San Diego Chicken.

EPSTEIN: The classic mascot of the era, and a relic of a time when a man could simply show up to a ballgame in a chicken outfit and convince the home team to let him cavort on the field. Those days are long gone, my friend.

HOVG: Those God awful 1976 Chicago White Sox shorts uniforms.

EPSTEIN: You know, I love Bill Veeck; if I could pick five baseball men, living or dead, to have a steak dinner with, he would unquestionably be on the guest list. But those White Sox shorts uniforms were truly ridiculous and embarrassing; they win the “worst unis of the decade” award, even if the team only wore them three times during 1976.

HOVG: And since I mentioned the Sox…Disco Demolition Night.

EPSTEIN: Like Bill Veeck said, it was his greatest promotion and his worst, all rolled into one. There has been a lot of ink spilled by cultural commentators who claimed that Disco Demolition Night was a celebration of racism and homophobia, but I think it was really mostly just a celebration of being young, drunk, stupid and into Led Zeppelin. As a thirteen year-old boy, I was totally thrilled by the mayhem, even though I owned quite a few disco records at the time.

HOVG: I’d love to get your thoughts on a bunch of the decades most influential players, but we can save that for (shameless tease) a future “Friday 5”. But, until then, what player (or players) had the best hair? This could be Pete Rose’s bowl cut or Luis Tiant’s Fu Manchu. Simply put…whose “look” sums up the decade?

EPSTEIN: Well, there’s a reason that Oscar Gamble is on the cover of Big Hair and Plastic Grass…you see a picture of Oscar in his afro-tastic prime, and you know exactly what era we’re dealing with. But my vote for best mustache would have to go to Al Hrabosky, Sparky Lyle, or Rollie Fingers; but then again, Mike Marshall sported a pretty interesting chops and Fu Manchu combo. So much great hair to choose from, really.

Dan Epstein is an award-winning journalist, pop-culture historian and, obviously, an avid baseball fan. His work can be found everywhere from the USA Today to Guitar World. He currently lives in Southern California. You can check out his website HERE and pick up his book HERE.

If you’d like a copy of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s sent to your doorstep for FREE…fill up the comments with your favorite player of the ‘70s.  And no, no extra points for saying Ross Grimsley.

It’s that easy!